RSS guru and popular blogger
Niall
Kennedy
sure didn't last long at Microsoft. The former Technorati star had
been hired into Microsoft's Live group just as the Ray Ozzian buzz had hit its
apex, only to depart six months later to strike out on his own. Kennedy expected
to set up shop in an oasis of free-thinking development in Microsoft's Live
division. Instead, he found his team stuck on the tarmac, frozen while projects
like Vista, Longhorn and Office 2007 took months to line up for takeoff.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/06/20062 comments
It seems not all that long ago that Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie
turned a lot of heads with his demo of Live Clipboard last March. The technology
was cool, to be sure. Ozzie's Web-based "clipboard" would let people
grab bits and parts of other sites and aggregate them on the Web. What's most
important is that this stuff was wide open, based on open standards and unattached
to the Windows monopoly.
Suddenly, the company known best for producing antitrust lawsuits and threatening
to "cut off the oxygen supply" of choice competitors (cough, Netscape,
cough) was getting that mashup religion. This summer, we heard talk of an honest-to-goodness
Live development
platform, expected sometime around the new year. Yet now, on December's doorstep,
there's been remarkably little buzz about these
once-exciting developments.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/29/20060 comments
In the course of putting together the launch issue of Redmond Developer News, I ran across an interesting blog, which we highlight in our
DevScope
section in the front of the magazine. It's called An App a Day (
www.anappaday.com
),
and it essentially recounts one .NET developer's personal challenge
to write a software application a day, every day, for a month. Thirty
days later, Dana Hanna emerged, blinking, from his self-imposed coding
exile with a passel of applications and a fresh mastery of C#. He
also found himself with a pretty engaged audience of fellow coders
who watched Hanna's project with interest.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/20060 comments
There are programming legends, and then there
are
programming legends
. Dan Bricklin certainly belongs to the second group. I got a chance to speak with the 'father of the spreadsheet' a few weeks back for a story appearing in the November
issue of Redmond Developer News. Back in the 1979, Bricklin's VisiCalc
erupted onto the computing scene, emerging as the first 'killer app' of the personal computing age -- you can check out the history of VisiCalc at
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/20060 comments