There were a lot of folks who were skeptical about AJAX development, particularly
in the business realm, where concerns arose about server-side manageability,
JavaScript-borne security threats and difficulties in testing and proving code.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare, some corporate dev pros felt AJAX was "a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
A February report from Forrester Research showed that businesses -- and, in
particular, enterprises -- have been slow in adopting AJAX. But there's growing
evidence that these wait-and-see shops are piling onto the bandwagon.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/28/20070 comments
As far as technical circles go, Don Ferguson was a made man. An IBM fellow
and chief architect in IBM's Software Group, Ferguson was the driving force
behind Lotus WebSphere in the 1990s and has been active in the areas of SOA,
Web services and, more recently, Web 2.0.
Ferguson had reached a spot at IBM that few relinquish -- the
technical equivalent of a Supreme Court appointment. So when Ferguson abruptly
jumped ship to join Microsoft to become a technical fellow in Platforms
and Strategy, it grabbed our attention. Big time.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/21/20070 comments
Last week, I noted an article that
took
a dim view of trends in the programming arena
. And readers had a thing or
two to say about it all.
Reader Joel runs a skewer through the argument with this incisive response:
Of course not. It's a great hallmark of progress that most people can
work and live their lives at much higher levels of abstraction than before.
I for one don't want to make my own clothes or catch my dinner.
There will always need to be a handful of people writing microprocessor
code for the assembly programmers, a few hundred assembly programmers writing
compilers for the C/C++ programmers, several thousand C/C++ programmers building
frameworks like Java and .NET for the application programmers, and finally,
millions of application programmers building the apps that 99 percent of the
world actually uses. If Mr. McBride can point to a single time in computer
history when there were more software developers, more (or better) development
tools, or more programs in existence, I could take his concern seriously.
Did automotive science die when mass production put 99 percent of the
tinkering machinists out of work? Or did it encourage even more investment
because the ones who remained multiplied their innovations by 10 million cars
instead of one? Yes, someone somewhere needs to know how to write the assembly
language code that makes all the levels above it possible, and I hope those
people are getting paid handsomely. But the other 99.9 percent of us should
take a quiet moment to be thankful it isn't us, then get back to writing our
applications instead of worrying about the death of the field.
Mr. McBride correctly states that computer science curricula need to be
more relevant and vocational, but I hope he understands that if that isn't
done, it will be computer science departments that die, not computer science.
-Joel, New York
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/21/20070 comments
Our buddies over at
Redmond
magazine are at it again, poking around
Microsoft about issues related to open source and
discovering
some very interesting things in the process
. Whether it's Ray Ozzie's touted
Live initiatives or the SourceForge-esque CodePlex site for sharing open source
code, it's clear that Microsoft has been changing its tune.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/21/20070 comments
Bad news for FoxPro fans: Microsoft confirmed to third-party developers on
Tuesday that Visual FoxPro 9 will be the last incarnation of Microsoft's desktop
database developer tool. Read Stuart Johnston's coverage of the story
here
.
Surprised? Saddened? Tell us your tales of FoxPro development. We'll make a
place for 'em in the magazine. E-mail me at
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/14/20072 comments
As development industry big-hitters go, few hit as large as Anders Hejlsberg.
The distinguished engineer at Microsoft has been knocking pitches out of the
park since the mid-1980s, when at Borland he authored the Turbo Pascal IDE and
later architected the Delphi IDE. You can check out his bio
here
.
Since joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg has led a parade of key projects,
including J++, C#, .NET Framework and now Language Integrated Query.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/14/20070 comments
That's the question a British lecturer is asking at the British Computing Society
Web site. You can find Neil McBride's opinion piece
here
.
McBride calls out issues we've chewed over before -- including the decline
in computer science enrollment at U.S. universities and efforts
to bolster interest. But the piece comes back to a visceral theme: In an
era of visual programming languages where 8-year-old kids can program robots
with a drag-and-drop interface, is there really any room left for steely-eyed
assembly coders?
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/14/20070 comments
Like the $6 Million Man,
Redmond Developer News
is getting bigger, stronger
and faster. Starting with the April 1 issue, RDN transitions to a twice-monthly
schedule that allows us to deliver more issues, more coverage and quicker turnaround
on news and events in the industry.
No surprise, we've had to staff up to achieve the doubled frequency. I'm proud
to announce the arrival of executive editor Jeffrey Schwartz, who was previously
senior editor at VAR Business. He will be heading up features coverage in RDN,
as well as contributing to our regular news coverage. Also joining the staff
is veteran news journalist Thomas Caywood. As a senior writer on staff, he'll
be instrumental in our news coverage, as well as producing features and other
articles for the magazine and Web
site.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/07/20070 comments
Yesterday, Microsoft released the
Visual
Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista
. The refresh promises an improved
user experience for those developing under the Vista OS, building on the Visual
Studio 2005 SP1 release targeted for Windows XP back in December.
In a Q&A
on Microsoft's site, Microsoft Developer Division Chief Soma Somasegar offers
additional detail about the new release and Vista. Among the nuggets is information
on what was fixed with the SP1 Update for Windows Vista, including "significant
issues around debugging and profiling, and around creating ASP.NET applications
for IIS on the developer machine," Somasegar says. "We also wanted
to improve the feedback that Visual Studio gives to developers when an error
occurs on Windows Vista."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/07/20072 comments
Like Clark Griswold's legendary membership in the Jello of the Month Club in
the film
Christmas Vacation
, it seems that
DST07
is the gift that keeps on giving
.
One erstwhile IT manager working overtime to remediate issues at a Midwest
law firm says the problem continues to get worse. His team is currently working
to ensure that the firm's fleet of BlackBerrys won't stagger under the time
switch, but he says "it's taking us seven days to get responses from BlackBerry
and we are paying huge dollars for support. They are swamped."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/07/20070 comments
Looks like Microsoft decided to shut down the
GotDotNet
Web site
. According to Microsoft, the move is intended to eliminate redundancies
with other Web resources and reflects declining traffic on the site.
The Partners, Resource Center and Microsoft Tools have already been shuttered,
and Private workspaces, Team pages and Message Boards will be next on March
20. By April, the GDN CodeGallery will be dark. The whole schmear will fall
offline on June 19, according to the projected schedule.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/28/20070 comments
A couple of weeks ago, RedDevNews delved into the emerging issue around
this
year's early switch to Daylight Saving Time
. For years, DST has kicked off
predictably at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April. But this year, the switch
is coming early, on March 11.
The early change is causing a scramble among software vendors, IT managers
and dev shops, which must ensure that time-sensitive code is ready to recognize
the sudden spring forward. One IT director with a Midwest law firm who oversees
some 40 servers and 300 Windows XP clients says the early time change has crushed
his staff. He has four admins running overtime, applying patches, checking code
and badgering external customers to make sure their interfacing software doesn't
introduce errors when the switchover occurs.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 02/28/20072 comments