If you're a parent (like me) or even a pet owner (again, like me), you know
that a name can mean everything.
My daughter Maggie is a case in point. Named after her energetic maternal great-grandmother,
young Maggie is a credit to the name. A real pistol, she earned the nickname
"Beast of the East" for her ability to just wear people down. And
yet, at 4 years old, she's completely enamored of ponies, unicorns and rainbows.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/06/20070 comments
This year's spring Microsoft Tech-Ed event in steamy Orlando, Fla. may not
have been as product- and news-packed as previous iterations of the show. But
representatives for Redmond were able to hit a few high notes over the week.
Certainly, Bob
Muglia's opening keynote on service-enabled environments and what Microsoft
is calling "Dynamic IT" offers a concrete sense of the direction Microsoft
is going -- even if we're still not sure of the final destination.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/06/20070 comments
A few weeks back, Microsoft security expert (and co-author of the book
Writing
Secure Code
) Michael Howard
lamented
about the quality of young coders
coming out of university computer science
programs.
In Howard's case, the concern was over the utter lack of security awareness
and training among newly minted post-graduate programmers. In fact, the situation
is so bad that Howard says Microsoft pulls every new programmer aside for several
weeks of security-specific training before they can even begin working on live
code.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/30/20070 comments
Late last week, Microsoft let slip via MSDN that the 2007 Professional Developer's
Conference, scheduled for Oct. 2 to 5 in Los Angeles,
would
not be taking place
. Microsoft called it a case of bad timing, with testable
versions of upcoming products like Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio "Orcas"
and the "Katmai" update of SQL Server all due in programmers' hands
ahead of the forward-looking event.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/30/20070 comments
When SQL Server 2005 hit the pavement a couple of years ago, it was a major
-- and majorly overdue -- upgrade to Microsoft's flagship database management
system. Now, the
next
version of SQL Server, code-named "Katmai,"
is gathering steam
as it approaches its first Community Technology Preview (CTP). And where SQL
Server 2005 focused heavily on scalability and business intelligence, Katmai
is attacking the proliferation of data types and structures, offering ways to
move unstructured and spatial data from warehouse to devices.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/23/20070 comments
Microsoft is getting busy trying to make its Silverlight rich Internet application
platform more attractive for developers and users alike. Last week the company
announced an
alpha
release of Popfly
, a vehicle for developing mashups, Web sites and Silverlight-driven
rich content through drag-and-drop chunks of code called "blocks."
The alpha will be open to about 2,000 testers.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/23/20070 comments
Microsoft's war with Linux and open source software has run hot and cold for
years. The company has see-sawed between outright hostility and warm-minded
cooperation. Whether it's Steve Ballmer threatening to crack kneecaps or Ray
Ozzie offering olive branches, the signals coming out of Redmond have been decidedly
mixed.
Well, they're not so mixed any more. On Monday, Fortune magazine reported
that Microsoft claims 235 software patent violations by open source software
products and that companies using Linux could face the prospect of paying up
for their use of infringing technologies. See our coverage here.
Given that Linux accounts for a sizable percent of enterprise servers, the statement
was a nuclear FUD strike that seemed designed to chill any corporate interest
in Linux in specific and open source solutions in general.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/16/20070 comments
Looks like the long-awaited Longhorn Server is starting the long roll down
the runway. One telltale sign: The new product has an official name. And no
surprise, it's Windows Server 2008.
As reported by Executive Online Editor Becky Nagel here,
Bill Gates announced the name during his keynote speech at the Windows Hardware
Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles. News of the new name had actually
leaked the
week before, after Microsoft accidentally published it in press materials
on its Web site.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/16/20073 comments
Research In Motion's BlackBerry has captured a huge market of corporate users
determined to stay connected. Now, RIM is in the middle of a software push that
it hopes will extend the world's addiction to its e-mail- and 'Net-friendly
devices and smart phones.
In April, RIM announced a software suite that would enable
a "virtual" BlackBerry experience on phones running Microsoft
Windows Mobile 6 (WM6). The move would do more than simply provide a consistent
UI to users across the BlackBerry and WM6 platforms; it would also enable the
growing fleet of WM6-enabled phones to tap RIM services, including the push
e-mail service at the heart of BlackBerry's success.
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Posted by Lee Pender on 05/09/20070 comments
Impressed as I am by the Silverlight story Microsoft is telling, I've been
disappointed by two things. One has been the lack of support for the excellent
Opera Web browser. Well, it seems Microsoft has addressed that blind spot. Check
out the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference graphic
here
.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/09/20070 comments
I can sum up the results of the MIX07 Web development conference in two words:
Game On.
Microsoft protests consistently that Silverlight is not just a Flash competitor.
After all, the company wired Silverlight to leapfrog the mass-market concept
of a multimedia runtime engine to deliver a rich Internet application platform
in progress. And while today's working version of Silverlight won't pay off
on these promises, the upcoming Silverlight 1.1, currently in alpha, almost
certainly will.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/09/20070 comments
It's barely spring, at least up here in the Northeast, and yet it seems like
we've been talking about the next version of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas,"
forever. That's why we're running a cover story on the first Visual Studio "Orcas"
beta in our May 15 issue of
Redmond Developer News
, and it's why we've
been keeping close tabs on the highly anticipated update to Microsoft's flagship
IDE since the day we launched.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/02/20072 comments