Earlier today we reported on the
release of TX Text Controls ActiveX 16.0
, a collection of word processing components for ActiveX app development. The new release brings the ActiveX control suite to par with previously released WPF and Windows Forms versions of TX Text Controls 16.0.
For Bjoern Meyer, vice president of product management at component maker Text Control GmbH, the decision to release an ActiveX port of its latest TX Text Controls package was a simple matter of customer demand.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/26/20110 comments
French development tools maker
SoftFluent
recently announced the release candidate (RC) of its CodeFluent Entities Modeler, a visual interface for the CodeFluent Entities model-driven software factory tool. You can read our coverage of the release
here
.
CodeFluent Entities Modeler enables dev shops to build out application components using a model-driven approach. What's interesting is that Microsoft had big plans of its own in the model-driven development space, with the project formerly known as Oslo. You can read about Oslo's demise here and here.
I asked SoftFluent co-founder Daniel Cohen-Zardi about how Microsoft's decision to set aside Oslo might impact his company's work on CodeFluent Entities.
"We have been working on our pragmatic, non-UML, model-driven approach for more than five years. We know that this is not an easy topic, from a technical standpoint, but also politically," Cohen-Zardi responded. "For a complex organization such as Microsoft, it requires striking the appropriate balance between various product groups with diverging interests, some of them having a vested interest into sticking customers to Microsoft technology.
Cohen-Zardi said dev shops today have three options. Abandon model-driven development and accept the re-development will have to happen with each new technology wave; take on the cost and risk of building custom domain specific languages (DSL); or commit to a model drive solution like CodeFluent Entities.
"The Oslo failure, as well as the limited success of [Microsoft's] DSL tools approach, validates what we had anticipated based on our 50 years of cumulated field experience as former Microsoft employees," Cohen-Zardi said.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/20/20101 comments
The real surprise about Ray Ozzie's departure from Microsoft isn't that he's leaving the high-profile post as chief software architect at Redmond, it's that it took this long to occur.
From the very beginning of Ozzie's tenure, it was clear that the Groove founder and former Lotus executive was something of a misfit in Redmond. A widely-respected technician and innovative thinker, Ozzie was responsible for a pair of game-changing software products -- Lotus Notes and Groove. Early in his career he also worked on VisiCalc with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. Ray Ozzie's fingerprints are all over the software industry, and he seemed at first glance like an excellent candidate to follow Microsoft founder Bill Gates in the role of chief software architect at the company.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/19/20103 comments
As reported by Redmond Magazine executive editor Jeffrey Schwartz, Microsoft today
officially launched Windows Phone 7
. The new phone platform has a decidedly consumer bent, with social networking and other features that will appeal to non-enterprise users. However, Windows Phone 7 offers intriguing SharePoint integration. As IDC Analyst Jeffrey Hammond told Schwartz after the launch, SharePoint integration could be a key differentiator for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 against the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/12/20101 comments
As my colleague James Powell
reported last week
, coding and data tools provider
Embarcadero Technologies
recently published an interesting study that looked at some of the key challenges facing professional developers. According to the survey of 606 developers, analysts and architects, more than half (52 percent) said they simply do not have enough time to complete their work. Nearly one-third (31 percent) singled out poor unit and system testing as a top challenge.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/11/20102 comments
Back in June I blogged about the Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2010 Conference in New Orleans, and the fact that attendance figures at the show
went well beyond Microsoft's expectations
. I regarded it as a very welcome sign for the industry. In that post I also wondered if more developers might make the trip up to Redmond, Washington, for the
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/06/20103 comments
I have to admit, Andrew Brust called it. When I got the first draft of Andrew's take on the new LightSwitch visual development tool for his Redmond Review column in the September issue of Visual Studio Magazine, I scoffed at the notion that
LightSwitch
would kick off a huge ideological debate over who is, and who is not, a "real" programmer.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/04/201015 comments
Microsoft today
announced the launch
of its new Visual Studio LightSwitch business application development environments at the
VSLive! Conference
in Redmond. Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester Research, has been tracking the LightSwitch project and provided insight into the new solution, which promises to enable robust application development for business users.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/03/20100 comments
VSLive! Conference
attendees today took in a series of day-long, pre-conference workshops offering explorations of development in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Communication Foundatoin (WCF), and Silverlight/Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Magenic Principal Technology Evangelist Rocky Lohtka and DotNetMasters founder Billy Hollis headlined the presentation on Silverlight and WPF, detailing a powerful development environment that can be at times inspiring and frustrating.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 08/02/20100 comments
Looks like Microsoft is planning to host
another Professional Developers Conference
(PDC) this year. The event is slated to run for just two days, October 28 and 29, and to take place at the Redmond, Washington campus.
The upcoming PDC10 is unusual on a number of fronts. For one thing, PDCs have never been annual events, instead only taking place when Microsoft has pulled together enough strategic developer content to drive the conference. PDC08, for instance, featured the Windows Azure announcement and Windows 7 beta launch, in addition to a host of other critical technology updates. PDC09, by contrast, was short on new stuff, but long on important updates to previously released strategic initiatives. It was an important show for developers.
PDC10 will be the first time Microsoft has held three PDCs in a row. It will also be the first time the event has been held on Microsoft's campus -- the show in the past has typically taken place in Los Angeles. Perhaps the decision to host a downsized PDC event this year was driven by the surprisingly high turnout at the Microsoft Tech-Ed Conference held in May in New Orleans.
What's on the agenda for PDC10? It's a good question and one I'll be looking to answer this week.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/12/20100 comments
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, released in April, brought a number of critical changes to mainstream managed languages like C# and Visual Basic. But the latest version of Microsoft's integrated development environment and managed framework also shifted the playing field for dynamic and functional languages, like F# and IronRuby.
We posed three questions to Mark Hoban, Microsoft senior program manager for F#. Here's what he had to say:
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/14/20100 comments
The biggest news to come out of the Tech Ed North America 2010 Conference has little to do with Windows Azure or Windows Phone 7 or Microsoft's expanded business intelligence stack. No, the most important thing that I learned at the show was that more than 10,000 people attended the Tech Ed event in New Orleans this week.
That figure is significantly higher than the 8,000 or so that Microsoft expected, according to a couple people I spoke with. Apparently a late rush of registrations in the past month or so drove the attendance numbers well above Redmond's expectations. And given the calamitous state of the events industry in the IT and dev space over the past few years, the figures are a certainly welcome sign.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/11/20104 comments