Preview: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 impresses

In beta 2, Visual Studio 2010 is beginning to show the rather attractive shape of things to come.

By Martin Heller | 16 December, 2009 02:24

Tags: Visual Studio 2010

First look: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 beta

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a major upgrade from SharePoint 2007 in several areas. It has a much improved user interface, especially for online editing. It supports more browsers. It does a better job of integrating with Microsoft Office. It provides more opportunities to developers and designers, as well as to shops that might want to consolidate other products (such as blogs and wikis and business applications) with SharePoint.

By Martin Heller | 24 November, 2009 22:14

Tags: sharepoint 2010, Microsoft

First look: gDoc Fusion

If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said that the PDF software category was completely bracketed and saturated, between Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended at the high end, Adobe Reader for free, and numerous cheap third-party Acrobat clones in between.

By Martin Heller | 19 May, 2009 10:23

Tags: gDoc, pdf, XPS

Rich Internet apps that double as desktop apps

Finding a single development environment for all purposes has so far proven an unattainable goal. But with the advent of rich Internet applications (RIA), development nirvana gets a bit closer.

By Martin Heller | 03 February, 2009 09:15

Tags: rich internet applications

Windows Azure Services Platform gives wings to .Net

Microsoft intends its new Windows Azure Services Platform to be a serious cloud computing platform for a broad range of developers and scenarios, from lone developers starting up a new Web-based company on a shoestring to large teams of enterprise developers looking for high-performance, highly available, and scalable Web sites, computing, and storage. A few years out, Microsoft wants Azure to be seen as the preferred location for enterprise data, not as a business risk. It's off to a good start.

By Martin Heller | 17 December, 2008 09:26

Tags: microsoft azure

Silverlight, for real this time

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA (rich Internet application) and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.

By Martin Heller | 19 November, 2008 08:58

Tags: silverlight

Who needs an enterprise AJAX solution?

One thing that the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development community has aplenty is choice. Want a free, open source AJAX framework? We have (alphabetically) Dojo, Ext, Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, MooTools, OpenRico, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and the Yahoo User Interface Library, and frankly they're all pretty good. There are hundreds more, but unfortunately I can't keep up with them all.

By Martin Heller | 30 October, 2008 08:42

Tags: ajax, programming

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is icing, and more cake

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (VS08) Service Pack 1 (SP1) took eight months to arrive. Considering the capabilities that have been added, eight months might not seem so long. In some ways, SP1 feels like the completion of what Visual Studio 2008 was supposed to be. It's certainly not just the collection of bug fixes that you'd expect from the term "service pack."

Climb aboard Ruby on Rails

The Ruby on Rails site bills its eponymous project as "Web development that doesn't hurt." I'm not really sure what that means, but it certainly sounds good.

Curl Nitro offline RIA samples available

As ComputerWorld reported in April, RIA vendor Curl has taken on Adobe AIR with an extension to its RIA environment called Nitro. Curl calls Nitro a "Fit Client"; I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean, but this is how they describe it:

Imote2 .Builder Kit makes creating wireless sensor networks a snap

I spent several hours today exploring the Crossbow Imote2 .Builder Kit, a "complete development environment for high performance wireless sensor networking (WSN) applications leveraging the Microsoft .NET Framework," as the company describes it.

The Test Center guide to rich Web app dev tools

Rich Internet applications, or RIAs, comprise a spectrum of application types and technologies. The lightweight end of the spectrum has seen most of the attention in recent months, with Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's AIR (Application Integrated Runtime) getting attention as the new kids in town. But AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is still where most of the lightweight action resides. And despite the recent focus on lightweight app dev, significant developer focus remains on the heavyweight tools in the Microsoft .Net and Sun Java worlds.

Curl 6.0 enriches the rich Internet toolkit

One of a number of "middleweight" solutions in the RIA (rich Internet application) spectrum, Curl is a language, an IDE, and a runtime engine that goes beyond the capabilities of lighter-weight AJAX without incurring the heavier overhead of the Java or .Net runtime. A number of Curl characteristics make it especially suitable for enterprise use: excellent performance, the ability to handle intermittent connectivity, support for large data sets, and graceful presentation of complex interfaces.

The best open source programming language

When we started working on the Bossies, we divided the broad Application Development group into many subcategories, including Language. It seemed like a good idea at the time.