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Technical PerspectiveMicrosoft Tries Its Hand at Open Source With the first beta release of IronPython Microsoft is testing not just its first dynamic language but also the first open-source project adopted for release under its own name while preserving the open nature of the effort. While other open-source developers have joined Microsoft—notably Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham—this is the first time Microsoft has adopted an open-source project to release with the Microsoft name. IronPython is an implementation of the Python language for .NET started by Jim Hugunin creator of Jython (Python for Java) and AspectJ. He was hired by Microsoft in late 2004 to continue work on IronPython which at the time had a development community of one. more > Borland: Delphi 2006 Will Build Morale As Microsoft marches its developers toward .NET and the future of Windows Borland Software with the next version of Delphi has set its sights on eliminating the common annoyances that plague developers throughout a project and filling in the gaps left by Microsoft tools. The company demonstrated an early version of the new IDE at its DevCon show in San Francisco in November. Rob Cheng Borland’s director of product marketing said that one of the most interesting pieces of functionality that doesn’t exist in Visual Studio is persistence. “[Developers are] familiar with J2EE object persistence and mapping [but] that doesn’t exist in .NET.” He said Borland’s Enterprise Core Objects persistence framework gives that capability to Visual Studio developers. more > Computer Reseller News Reports TenFold Outperforms .NET and J2EE TenFold(R) Corporation provider of the EnterpriseTenFold(TM) platform for building and implementing enterprise applications announced that CRN a leading news magazine for solution providers and technology integrators recognized TenFold's superior technology over .NET and J2EE in a product review published October 7. In the article the author Seth Johnson CEO of Redi2 a TenFold VAR points that according to Gartner 80 percent of IT budgets are spent on the management and maintenance of legacy systems leaving only 20 percent to be spent on innovative business practices. However when trying to spend IT resources on innovation (replacement of legacy systems or development of new applications) many companies are wasting time money and resources on what often ends up as failed IT projects. more > Mainsoft Mono Help with Crossover Development It’s no secret that developers dabble in open source even if their primary development environment is Microsoft’s .NET. According to a study by Evans Data one in five developers whose primary IDE is Visual Studio .NET has also written at least one Linux application. The study also indicates that more than half the .NET developers surveyed used open-source components in their application development. more > BEA Tuxedo 9.0: A Platform for Extending Legacy Apps to SOA It has been almost 22 years since AT&T’s Bell Laboratories spawned its first transaction processing monitor technology that evolved into BEA’s Tuxedo system. Enhanced and extended over the years Tuxedo grew into the de facto standard for open online transaction processing solutions. Tuxedo was a cornerstone on which BEA built a billion-dollar application infrastructure middleware business says George Gould BEA’s director of business development. BEA’s founders recognized early on the importance of Tuxedo’s ability to provide infrastructure for traditional procedural languages such as C C++ and COBOL Gould says. more > CASE STUDY: Calling doctor fine In the healthcare industry especially a hospital with a hyper-busy emergency room getting the right information at the right time is job one. Community Medical Center in Toms River N.J. part of the St. Barnabas Health Care System needed to automate its manual bed board system to provide more accurate real-time information on patient location and bed availability. The system tracks patients and where they travel within the 596-bed hospital along with bed availability. St. Barnabas found it ineffective; end users had to rely on information that became quickly outdated. There was “a lot of room for human error” in the system says Ryan Grim a .NET architect and SQL database administrator with St. Barnabas. more > Microsoft Avalon Indigo to Help Align .NET Microsoft unveiled a new set of developer tools and partnerships today it hopes will make its .NET framework work better with the outside world. The announcements this week at the VSLive! 2005 developer show here highlight Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates' pledge of interoperability with other platforms like J2EE and Web services initiatives. Key to the strategy is advancement of the Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 developer platform code-named Whidbey along with a subsystem for its Longhorn platform known as Avalon and its unified programming model for building service-oriented applications called Indigo. A second beta version of Whidbey is due this spring. Microsoft advanced its release of Avalon today and is expected to do the same for Indigo later this week. more > .NET Tilts the Build-Vs.-Buy Balance Microsoft’s .NET Framework is changing how developers view third-party components. COM .NET’s predecessor spawned a market for third-party components used in Visual Basic applications (usually written in C++ since VB is unsuitable for creating many kinds of components). A similarly successful third-party component market didn’t emerge in the C++ world largely because developers prefer writing code themselves. But .NET is different for a couple of reasons. more > Case Study: Time Warner takes the uncertainty out of custom code Time Warner's employeeConnection portal enables more than 80 000 employees to keep up with everything work-related from their benefits to the availability of free tickets for newly released movies. It's a 'massive' portal with a tight security model says Robert Caruso senior business analyst for the media giant. The portal was built entirely in-house using Macromedia's ColdFusion middleware with some ASP and .NET in the mix. Unlike an off-the-shelf application there wasn't an easy way to determine how many users the portal could support among many other considerations. more > eBay to Drop Passport .Net Support Auction site eBay announced to members on its Web site Wednesday afternoon that it will drop support for Microsoft's Passport and .NET Alerts by late January. Users were told that once this takes place the Microsoft Passport button that is currently displayed on Sign In pages will be replaced with links to a page with more information. The announcement came with practically no warning; however in recent months it had become much more difficult to sign up for alerts through Microsoft's .NET services as the pages to do so were buried on eBay's site. more > Using .NET to make applications play together You probably know the problem: there are six different systems involved in handling a simple business process and no easy way to make them all talk to each other. This book offers one application integrator's perspective on how to come up with a .NET-based solution. You might not find yourself agreeing with Clark's approach when you get to the end of the book but you'll probably pick out a few nuggets that make it worth reading. more > Longhorn debuts but few pay attention Over the past three years Jeff Parker has rewritten more than 60% of his company’s financial reporting applications to help it comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. Central to that strategy was adopting the Microsoft .NET Framework. Because .NET enforces more rigorous object-oriented software engineering practices he believes the new code could generate more reliable audit trails. Fast forward several years and Microsoft is now openly promoting the successor to .NET. Code-named Longhorn the platform encompasses Microsoft’s next-generation Windows operating system. Having benefited from .NET does Parker’s company now anticipate similar benefits from Longhorn and are they ready to embrace it? more > A look forward a look back Because Longhorn remains a vague concept to most Microsoft customers a clue to its eventual success might be found by looking at how the installed base fared with .NET released barely two years ago. The verdicts are mixed. “It’s been slow but then again our clients tend to be slow adopters ” observes Jeff Bocarsly VP and division manager for functional testing services at Real-Time Technology Solutions a New York-based software testing consulting firm. For instance a cursory glance at message boards and online forums such as DevX reveals that developers are still asking basic questions about how to transition from classic Visual Basic programming to the newer .NET-based languages. more > Windows & .Net: A Study Doesn’t Make It So A new study supports my belief that .NET is more productive than J2EE. Nevertheless I don’t think you should make business decisions based on the study. The Middleware Company’s “Comparing Microsoft .NET and IBM Websphere/J2EE” is probably the best-designed study of programming platforms that I’ve seen and the conclusions line up with my opinions on the relative strengths and weaknesses of .NET and J2EE. Nevertheless I think that developer-team and individual programmer productivity is so variable and long-term success is so dependent on iterating existing code that it’s unwise to base one’s decisions on any study that pits small teams of experts implementing a never-before-seen specification from scratch. more > The basics of Longhorn Longhorn will combine a new Windows platform with a new software development platform that expands on and in some ways changes the .NET Framework. Avalon one of the core elements will provide a unified framework for developing user interfaces that will replace Windows client technology some of which is more than a decade old. Consolidating all the elements necessary for depicting text documents screen widgets or controls graphics images audio and video Avalon should simplify tasks such as resizing text for video displays and vice versa. Avalon also adds Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) an XML-based language that can be used as a simpler alternative to conventional languages like C# or Visual Basic for developing user interfaces. Although Microsoft will continue to support the WinForm and WebForm clients introduced by the .NET Framework three years ago Avalon becomes the company’s future direction. more > Is it time to 'Go Live'? Microsoft introduced their Go Live license way back when ASP.NET was in its very first round of testing. As soon as the product entered the beta 2 stage users could visit a special Web page at Microsoft.com and electronically sign a license agreement. That done they were freed from the usual beta testing language forbidding deployment of beta code. In fact they were positively encouraged to deploy their ASP.NET Web sites using the beta 2 technology and many of them did. The result was a big win all around. more > Microsoft scales back Passport ambitions Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its .NET Passport identification system saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the web at large the company said. Microsoft repositioning of Passport comes as careers website Monster.com said it was dropping support of the authentication service. Monster was one of Microsoft's banner Passport users. Once a key part of its hosted services strategy Microsoft has been quiet about Passport in the past few years and has not done any significant development work the system. Instead the company has been quietly scaling back Passport's components. more > MKS Enhances Tools for Eclipse .NET SCM vendor MKS Inc. deepened its commitment to IBM’s and Microsoft’s development environments last month—and offered a glimpse of additional product updates it expects to deliver by January of next year. The Waterloo Ontario-based company announced the integration of its process and workflow management offering Integrity Manager with Eclipse Visual Studio and WebSphere Studio Application Developer. Later this year it plans to integrate that same offering with Telelogic AB’s requirements management tool DOORS and with Mercury Interactive Corp.’s testing tool TestDirector. In addition MKS plans to deliver its own requirements management tool this year and by January will launch the next version of its MKS Integrity Suite. more > Is the ASP.Net Bug a Big Deal? MS Thinks So You might have to wait six months or more to get your highly critical browser bugs patched but Microsoft takes ASP.Net problems seriously. I sat up and took notice when Microsoft released not one but two interim fixes to an announced flaw in ASP.Net and released them fairly quickly. This is not SOP in Microsoft Land. The original report actually came out weeks ago and somehow flew under the radar until just the last few days. To be honest I'm still not sure just how many sites are actually vulnerable but I take all the attention Microsoft is paying as a sign that it's a large number. more > Longhorn and Mono race for .net users Windows developers who want to move their applications and skills to other operating systems have had a limited choice in the past - develop in Java or rewrite source code to support different platforms’ APIs. Now the answer to application portability may have arrived from an unexpected source - Novell. Microsoft’s submission to the European Computer Manufacturers’ Association of specifications underlying its .net architecture was certainly an astute political move. The company had long suffered from accusations of proprietary marketing so submitting .net’s Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) specification was a way of silencing the critics. more > Stryon Debuts .NET-to-Java Bridge Recognizing that Java and .NET applications are no longer islands a growing number of vendors are offering tools to bridge the gap. The latest entrant is Stryon Inc. which last month announced iNET a tool that converts applications written in .NET languages into Java. The product is aimed primarily at Microsoft developers who need to deploy applications not only on Windows but also on Linux Macintosh and Unix said Jim Stewart CEO of the Grand Rapids Mich.-based company. more > Adoption Of .NET Continues Study Says It’s been two years since the introduction of .NET and Microsoft Corp.’s new platform is well on the way toward dominating the Windows environment. Even so there’s a tough road ahead of it—especially since Java usage also is expanding. Those are the results of the third annual .NET adoption study conducted by BZ Research in July. BZ Research is a subsidiary of BZ Media LLC publisher of SD Times. This study was completed by 943 subscribers to SD Times and has an accuracy range of 3 percentage points. more > Microsoft: Study Shows Visual Studio .Net Tops WebSphere ORLANDO Fla.—Microsoft Corp. has commissioned a study showing that its .Net development environment is more productive than comparable Java environments a top company executive said at the VSLive! Orlando conference here. Microsoft Developer Division Corporate Vice President Soma Somasegar said Microsoft commissioned The Middleware Co. Inc. to study productivity and performance comparisons between Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net 2003 and IBM's WebSphere and other tools and Microsoft fared significantly better. more > Tonic Catches Glitches in .Net With Microsoft Corp.'s .Net projects moving from development to production users increasingly need to monitor and manage transactions. One applications management provider is stepping up to help with its first .Net management tool. more > Mono 1.0 Brings Linux .Net-Style Development Novell Inc.'s Mono 1.0 is an open-source implementation of Microsoft Corp.'s .Net development platform that provides companies with the opportunity to pursue the latest Microsoft development technologies while leaving open the door to cross-platform support. more > Open Source Not Ready for Anti-Virus Anti-virus software is definitely a challenge for the open-source model and while there is at least one active program there's no good evidence of how well it works. more > AIM Security Hole Opens Users to Remote Attack Two security research and consulting companies have reported a vulnerability in the AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) program that could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on another user's Windows-based system. more > Data-Driven Hospitality Hilton's customer-data system tells the people who need to know who the best--and occasionally the worst--customers are John Fiorendino a classic road warrior who spends more than 200 nights a year on the road as senior director of global business development for Hitachi Data Systems is very clear on what it is hotels still get wrong. His short list: coffee that tastes like yesterday desk chairs that double as instruments of torture and shower curtains covered with grime. Business technology might not seem to have a role in preventing slimy shower curtains. But there's much within the hotel industry that stretches the mind--such as the fact that Hilton Hotels Corp. has learned that customers are more satisfied when they have a problem and the hotel staff takes care of it than if the stay goes flawlessly more > Introduction: 5 ways to better Web services Web services to date have largely been something of a theoretical matter for standards bodies. But real-world development is beginning to proceed in Web services. While not every thread of standards is perfectly in place teams have moved ahead on this new technology. more > Introduction: 5 ways to better Web services Web services to date have largely been something of a theoretical matter for standards bodies. But real-world development is beginning to proceed in Web services. While not every thread of standards is perfectly in place teams have moved ahead on this new technology. more > Lydian Trust: It's the application framework stupid What we're doing is building an app framework said John Stoddard CIO at Lydian Trust. We include all of the basic functionalities security auditing Web-based schema validation self-documenting interfaces and even subscription capabilities where you can make a Web service so that if a request comes in it sets up a virtual tollbooth for every request that comes in. more > NET in the ER Keith Brophy CTO at Robertson Research Institute Saginaw Mich. has been working on a Web services application whose objective has special relevance -- saving lives. more > NET & Beyond: J2EE split ending war with .NET The big story in app development for the past few years has been the competition between Microsoft’s .NET Framework and products that support the J2EE specs. Lots of people have talked about it and many development organizations have been faced with this issue. To a large extent the .NET vs. J2EE struggle has defined the recent app development landscape. more > Safeway Turns To Velosel To Get Kinks Out Of Supply Chain The retailer is using Velosel's Collaborative Product Information Management tool to optimize its data-synchronization efforts When Safeway Inc. looked for a long-term strategic software partner that would not Band-Aid longstanding problems in its business process but instead help to reengineer them to drive efficiencies in the supply chain VP of supply chain Linda Nordgren tapped into Velosel Corp. for its Collaborative Product Information Management tool to optimize the company's data-synchronization efforts more > Scripting Language Tools Get Upgrades ActiveState and Zend Technologies both have updated their tools for open-source scripting languages. Scripting languages such as Perl or Tcl frequently are what make the disparate parts of corporate Web sites work together. Two companies that supply tools for open-source scripting languages upgraded their offerings this month. more > SEC Gets Closer To XBRL The format's advantages include being able to query a document as if it were a database. The Securities and Exchange Commission may soon permit regulatory filings to be submitted using the Extensible Business Reporting Language an XML-based markup language for tagging individual line items in financial statements. The SEC is considering adopting a rule permitting voluntary filings of financial data using XBRL beginning with the 2004 calendar year-end reporting season. more > Microsoft To Issue Browser Patch Next Week The fix for Internet Explorer will finally plug the hole that hackers exploited in a sneak attack last month. Microsoft executives say a comprehensive patch for Internet Explorer will be released next week finally plugging the hole that hackers exploited in a sneak attack last month. more > IBM unveils Product Information Management tool IBM is harvesting the fruits of its April 2004 acquisition of Trigo Technologies in the form of new middleware designed to help businesses better track manage and control product information. The company has unveiled IBM WebSphere Product Center Version 5 which is designed to help users develop a central repository of product information that is synchronized with internal systems and shared across supply chains. more > Review: SQL Packager SQL Packager is the latest addition to the growing array of SQL Server tools available from Red Gate (previous tools in the series handle comparison and synchronization chores). This one is very simple and very useful indeed. The goal is to make it easy to install or upgrade a database on a customer's server and it's hard to see how it could be easier. more > AmberPoint Adds Web Services Management To Visual Studio Express version of the software is in beta one of Microsoft's new Team System product more > New Bagle Worm Is Spreading Its Source Code Broadly distributing the source code is like a parking attendant throwing keys to would-be joyriders. more > The Observer: Better Is Better For Companies And Trade Shows It's not always true that bigger is better says Lou Bertin. Sometimes bigger means too large to respond quickly to market shifts. more > Disclosure: Security Pros Want Flaw Information Sooner More than 10 software vulnerabilities are discovered each day. These flaws in operating systems and business applications make it easier for hackers to use worms and viruses to attack business-technology systems. more > eBay courts developers eBay has expanded its developer program to include members of a newly formed 'affiliate tier ' significantly broadening its support for builders of third-party applications for the eBay platform executives told attendees of the annual eBay developers conference last week in New Orleans. more > Logistics Providers Ready RFID Services DHL Solutions expands RFID service to help customers across Europe with deployments European customers of DHL Solutions' logistics service now can call on the company to handle their radio-frequency identification tagging requirements. DHL this month expanded to companies across Europe its TagFIT RFID service which it had been offering only to Metro AG's top 100 suppliers to help them meet the retailer's RFID-compliance mandate. more > Corporate Cost Controls Push Up Cognos Profit Expanding use of business-intelligence tools is boosting the bottom line at Cognos Inc. which last week reported a 62% increase in net income for the quarter ended May 31. Revenue for the period rose 15% from a year earlier. more > Net Faces New Attack A major Internet attack was under way last week using malicious code to infect Web sites and the servers and PCs that visit those sites. Several Web administrators from major companies said their Windows-based Web servers were compromised despite being up to date on security patches security analysts report. more > Work/Life: At Reuters Mr. How-To Hits The Road From 'nyet' to .Net Bill Evjen travels the world to talk about software architectures. In the world of software architectures--where hundreds of protocols and languages and APIs need to work in harmony--it's hard enough for one company to get its computer systems tuned smoothly let alone humming with those of its customers or partners. That's a challenge Reuters America Inc. faces in getting its real-time information services into the eager hands of financial companies. It's Bill Evjen's job to make it happen. more > Billion-Dollar Bet SAP's future began on a cold February day in 2002 during the company's annual retreat at Sylt an island in the North Sea just off the coast of Germany. There dozens of SAP executives first saw a technology that ultimately will replace almost all the code and logic underscoring SAP's existing and extremely successful applications portfolio. The architect: Shai Agassi a 36-year-old Israeli who's been with the company for just four years. more > Business Technology: Microsoft's Strategic Biz-Process Shift Can Microsoft be a major player in the complex and sophisticated market for high-end enterprise applications? Bob Evans thinks Microsoft's recent and huge emphasis on weaving business-process expertise and flexibility into its code and its services is proof that the company has very ambitious plans in this $25 billion market. more > Visual Studio openness and arrogance Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 isn't in beta yet but that hasn't kept them from making lots of code available to outside testers already. The Community Technical Preview builds have provided early (and somewhat buggy) exposure to changes coming as Visual Studio .NET nears its next incarnation. But coupled with other Microsoft community efforts they've also made it easier for outside developers to find out what's coming - and to disagree with it. A few examples that have come out in recent weeks: more > Good Times Keep Rolling At Oracle The software maker in court over its hostile bid for PeopleSoft posted a 15% rise in 4Q net income--its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth. Oracle's legal fight to take over PeopleSoft hasn't diminished its appeal to customers as businesses continue to open their wallets for new technology. more > IBM Releases Test Version Of Corporate Search Tool The upgrade to DB2 Information Integrator code-named Masala is designed to make it easier for users to wade through business data. IT shops can now get their hands on the beta version of the forthcoming upgrade to IBM's DB2 Information Integrator. The product code-named Masala is scheduled for full release early in the fourth quarter an IBM spokesman says. The beta version was released Monday. more > Architectures have layers - just like ogres Layers layers layers. I seem to be running into layers a lot lately and I'm getting as tired of them as I am of ogres. For the benefit of those of you without small children or a social life I present this bit of dialog from the original Shrek movie: more > One man's spam fight A while back Microsoft announced the Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative which aims to severely reduce spam over the next several years. So far the CSRI has put out a bunch of ideas but hasn't actually released any software. Fortunately it's possible to put a severe dent in your spam without waiting. more > Sears Outsources IT Infrastructure To CSC The 10-year deal is valued at $1.6 billion. Sears Roebuck and Co. is hiring Computer Sciences Corp. to provide support services for its IT infrastructure under a 10-year $1.6 billion contract revealed Monday. more > Integration tools snapshot Recent data access offerings focus on improved adaptors high availability XML functionality and more. The middleware and data integration area has found new interest in recent weeks and months as a host of vendors have focused efforts here. more > BEA The Middleware Co. create SOA blueprints BEA Systems and The Middleware Company (TMC) have jointly published a set of 'blueprints' for developing and implementing applications that use Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) the two companies disclosed last week. more > Report Says IT Hiring Should Remain Positive Due To Business Growth A study by Robert Half Technology says only 3% of CIOs surveyed expect to pare staff in the third quarter while 8% expect to add workers and most will remain unchanged. The number of CIOs looking to increase their IT staff is forecast to dip in the third quarter but hiring should remain positive because of expected business growth a recruiting company said Tuesday. more > Sometimes Microsoft can keep a secret Microsoft is set to release the 2.0 version of its Web Services Enhancements for .NET (WSE or as the Microsofties pronounce it ''wizzy'') at the company's TechEd 2004 conference in San Diego which runs May 23-28. more > Defection: Microsoft Proponent Moves To Linux 'Suppose I upgrade to Windows 2003 and Windows XP. What would I be able to do then that I can't do with my current boxes? Nothing. I don't need all of the collaborative features ' Hentzen says. Since its inception more than a decade ago Linux has held a special appeal for small businesses because of its low startup cost kernel stability and communal approach to problem solving. It was so attractive that Whil Hentzen an eight-time recipient of Microsoft's Most Valuable Programmer Award has for the past two years been converting most of his company's Windows systems to open source. more > War Against Spam Rages On As spammers refine their techniques software vendors fortify the battlements around E-mail in-boxes The pitch for StealthMail Master is as blunt as it is troubling. For anonymity E-mails are sent out through open proxy servers making your E-mail look like it came from somewhere else boasts online promotional copy for the bulk E-mailing software. Your ISP won't hear about your bulk E-mail operation anymore. They will stop hating you for ruining their reputation. more > Ballmer: ITýýýs Potenial Untapped New MS Tools On Tap Steve Ballmer opened Microsoft's annual TechEd conference in San Diego on Monday promoting the need for business and technology people to think aggressively about the untapped potential of information technology. Microsoft's CEO then drilled into the nitty gritty of getting it done announcing Web services advances and new tools designed to help different kinds of IT professionals collaborate during the lifecycle of Visual Studio applications more > BEA Turns To Open Source To Boost Sales It plans to work with the open-source community to develop a better framework for building software. BEA Systems Inc. looking to boost sales by reaching more developers said Wednesday that it plans to work with the open-source community to develop a simpler framework for building software. more > Cell Calls Travel The Net Cell-phone users can make calls over the Internet using a service that i2 Telecom International plans to introduce next month. Customers will need to install the company's InternetTalker MG-3 device on broadband phone lines and Web connections in their homes or offices. When a customer dials his home or office number caller ID will recognize the cell phone's number and connect to the InternetTalker which will route the call over the Internet. That will permit calls to anywhere in the world with no extra charges other than normal cell-phone charges and i2 Telecom's charges. The company plans to charge 5 cents a minute for calls to China and 3 cents to the United Kingdom. more > The Cost Of Spam Spam is starting to cost businesses a substantial amount of money. A study released last week by technology-research firm Radicati Group says an organization with 10 265 employees that doesn't use spam filtering loses $2 923.20 per user per year or a total of $30 million annually in terms of E-mail productivity. The survey of 15 businesses representing 155 375 users indicates that after adopting anti-spam technology the average company reduced its annual loss to $4.8 million a difference of $25.2 million. With a total cost of ownership for anti-spam systems coming to $521.32 per person a year over three years the net savings comes to $19.9 million. more > Microsoft Looks For Gold In Search The software behemoth has used its strength money and reach to go from underdog to top dog on everything from Internet browsers to digital content players. Now its attention turns to the growing field of search with a broad-based push that extends from its dominant Windows operating system to its MSN online division. more > SAP Puts Its Money On Web Services The software maker will include NetWeaver its new computing engine based on Web services in all applications it ships. Every application SAP ships from now on will include a native version of NetWeaver its new computing engine based on Web services. By 2007 SAP will have retooled its entire software suite to run on NetWeaver and what SAP calls its Enterprise Services Architecture. And the German software vendor is redoubling its efforts to get NetWeaver in the hands of its customers promising that by year's end there will be 1 000 happy customers who can talk about the benefits they've achieved from the technology. more > Software of the future The June issue of MSDN Magazine got here this week. It's currently sitting on my desk with the plastic wrapper unopened. That's because I can see the inch-high type on the cover: ASP.NET 2.0 Revealed! And every single story appears to be related to ASP.NET 2.0. more > Two Roads Ahead Every few years it's time for developers to take stock and decide where to put their efforts for the future. For the last decade or so I've been following along as Microsoft releases new versions of Windows and the odds are that you have been doing the same. After all that's been the safe choice. But for the next round it looks like there are more than ever two paths to follow. more > Worms Are Big Business For Antivirus Vendors Virus and worm attacks that increasingly plagued Internet users over the past year have proven profitable for Symantec Corp. and Network Associates Technology Inc. The two leading antivirus software makers last week reported strong growth in antivirus software sales citing persistent virus and worm outbreaks as largely driving that growth. However their market leadership may come under fire in coming quarters as other vendors move into this market. more > SAP development strategies: NetWeaver this way comes No company has come to better represent the idea of enterprise applications than SAP AG headquartered in Walldorf Germany. Today more than 20 000 companies run more than 64 500 installations of SAP software for their back-office infrastructure. The lion's share of those installations are SAP's R/2 and R/3 ERP systems. When big companies talk about integrating applications today there is usually an SAP application in there somewhere. more > A review of RMTrack 2.0 and Cape Clear SOA Editor 4.8 I reviewed RMTrack 1.2 last fall. Now that they have their 2.0 version out I figured it was time for another look. It remains a very customizable ASP.NET-based bug-tracking system that should be adaptable to nearly any organization's needs. more > Wanted: A brain the size of a planet I recently took the beta versions of Microsoft's upcoming Application Security exams on the MCAD.NET/MCSD.NET track (70-330 for VB .NET and 70-340 for C#). They were to be frank brutal. I've been taking MS certification exams for more than a decade now (isn't it time to retire yet?) and usually I leave the test center knowing that I passed. This time around I was wrung out and I'm still not sure what the score report will say when it comes back in a month or two. more > E-Trade Eases Funds Transfer Online Brokerage E-Trade Financial Corp. has licensed Yodlee Inc.'s Instant Account Verification software to let customers view account information from multiple banks at a single Web page and make funds transfers in real time. more > InfoWorld TechWatch: Microsoft holds out olive branch on Java Microsoft may not exactly embrace Java but the company is at least making strides toward accommodation. In attending recent Microsoft developer conferences including the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in September and VSLive last week I searched in vain on the agendas for something anything to do with acknowledging Java as a force in development other than sessions on how to migrate Java programs over to .Net more > U.S. Internet Leadership Is Slipping A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit says the United States now ranks sixth in E-readiness. With the commercialization of the World Wide Web a decade ago the United States easily surpassed all other nations as the leader in Internet use. As the popularity of the Web grew internationally Americans' use of the Internet grew faster in part because unlike the citizens of most other foreign nations they weren't paying by the minute to access the Internet which curtailed Net growth abroad. more > Security Vulnerability Threatens Internet A new set of security flaws involving the Transmission Control Protocol could open corporate networks and the Internet to attacks. more > SwiftNet Speeds Data Exchange Upgraded IP messaging system lets banks share information faster more securely and less expensively more > SmartAdvice: Define Data-Center Needs Before Selecting Hosting Solution Outsourcing your company's data-center management can be cost-effective but make sure you first understand the options The Advisory Council says. Also compare J2EE and .Net for building distributed service-oriented applications and learn how to become a player in organizational politics. more > Computerworld Zones Web services simplify enterprise application integration and create new revenue opportunities by enabling organizations to offer data and services to both customers and partners. Computer Associates presents this selected content from the web services zone. White Paper: Management and Security in the world of Web ... more > E-Commerce Results Please Most Retailers Not only has internet shopping become mainstream for consumers most executives are pleased with their companies' investments in E-commerce. more > Macromedia ships Flex rich interface server Macromedia has finally begun shipping Flex its much-anticipated presentation server and application framework for enterprise developers. The product has been in beta since November 2003 and began shipping last week. more > Openness can be good business SourceForge is not a Web site that one normally associates with Microsoft. Home to tens of thousands of open source projects it has a large population of developers with largely anti-Microsoft sentiments. Yet if you surf over there right now you can find the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset projects: an actual Microsoft-hatched open source project released under the Common Public License (CPL - an open source license developed by IBM. more > Outsourcing Isn't All Bad Offshore outsourcing of U.S. tech jobs sends some jobs overseas but it's creating jobs too. Growing economies are consuming economies Roy Dunbar president of international operations at Eli Lilly & Co. said last week at InformationWeek's Spring Conference. Yet recent research paints an uncertain picture of the net U.S. impact. more > Review: DirectSkin Skinnable applications are increasing in popularity all the time. If you've been living in a cave this refers to applications that let the user (rather than Windows) be in control of things like the appearance of title bars buttons scrollbars and so on. Even Microsoft has gotten into the act with Windows Media Player being skinnable. Although some horrid user interface crimes have been perpetuated through skinning there's a good deal to be said for allowing the end user to perform such customization. more > WebFACTS lets Ohio county focus on the kids A key to success for any child welfare agency is ensuring that caseworkers can spend their time working with clients in the field rather than sitting at desks doing paperwork. A few years ago the Montgomery County Children Services (MCCS) agency in Ohio sought to do that by building a Web-based system that lets caseworkers and counselors access data and document actions while working on child abuse and neglect cases in the field. more > Too much too soon? How fast can Microsoft change technologies? More importantly how fast can developers learn and exploit the new technologies that Microsoft produces? Take building GUIs for instance. Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and Visual Basic 6 were the Windows standards for this in the pre-.NET era. When the .NET Framework shipped in early 2002 Microsoft told us to start building new app GUIs using Windows Forms instead. Windows Forms is an improvement on these earlier technologies and it also provides a common approach for any .NET Framework-based language so the change counts as progress. more > Review: ILOG Gantt for .NET If you've ever looked at Microsoft Project you know what a Gantt chart is: it's that series of little bars representing activities and lines representing dependencies that your manager uses to explain how you're holding up the whole project. ILOG Gantt for .NET is a set of Windows Forms components and associated support classes that you can use to bring Gantt charts to your own applications. more > In Short: Aprimo Builds Suite On .Net Platform Aprimo Inc. which makes marketing-management software for tasks such as lead generation and financial planning this week will release a version of its suite that's sold in modules based on function. The new approach provides customers with more purchasing options. It's also the first Aprimo release to be built entirely on the Microsoft .Net platform. VP of marketing Joe Meyer says the .Net architecture has improved the performance and scalability of Aprimo's software. Pricing for a five-person deployment of three to four Aprimo modules starts at about $125 000. more > Get Set For Delays Key upgrades to Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net development environment and SQL Server database that had been scheduled for release this year are being postponed until 2005 the company disclosed last week. Whidbey the code name for the next release of Visual Studio .Net and Yukon the follow-on to SQL Server 2000 are both getting pushed back. They're also getting real names: Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. According to Microsoft the second beta test of Yukon and first beta test of Whidbey are planned for the coming months. (For more on this story see Microsoft Delays Toolset And Database. ) more > Development Highlights from Around the Web Best of the Web Latest Additions: Generate dynamic content based on referring URL From Designplace.org: This string-battering tutorial demonstrates how to take the referring URL string and break it up with a view to generating dynamic content based on where the user came to that page from. more > The Rest Is Salient The “three pillars of Longhorn” are a new display stack a service-oriented messaging model and a metadata-oriented data store. Individually known as “Avalon ” “Indigo” and “WinFS ” and together as “WinFX ” these technologies have a common theme: increasing the interplay between processes and applications. more > Building Java .Net Apps Sans Coding A small but growing software company is rolling out a major upgrade that lets developers build standards-based Java and .Net applications with no coding. Kinzan Inc. this week will release Kinzan Studio & Server 4.0 a development and deployment environment that lets developers build enterprise applications through an assembly model by simply linking components in a drag-and-drop format. more > .Netting Office VSTO-Style Visual Studio Tools for Office is an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio that allows you to program Word and Excel in C# or Visual Basic .NET. While it doesn’t make these powerful applications seamless software components able to consume and provide services for arbitrary .NET classes it does bring considerable power to document processing solutions. The expressiveness of object orientation and the vast .NET Base Class Library reduce the difficulty of many tasks that otherwise would require daunting amounts of Visual Basic for Applications. Even if you’re not particularly interested in Office solutions VSTO points the way toward the more sophisticated security models that will be the rule in the “Longhorn” time frame. more > Modeling for .NET Modeling and software design are once again riding a wave of popularity at least in some limited circles. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) and recently the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) have gained notoriety in the industry and the idea of better design up front clearly has interest. But the clamor around modeling does not always seem to encompass the .NET space. As much as any others what .NET programmers want most is to just code. But modeling improvements are proceeding on planet .NET at the same pace as on planet Java. more > Migrating Legacy Applications with Microsoft Virtual Server We all have plenty of reasons to procrastinate and many of us had a good reason for prolonging the migration process from Windows NT—application incompatibility. If my NT applications can't reliably run on a Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 system then I'm better off addressing the known concerns of running these programs on NT and planning for periodic reboots than tackling new problems associated with a new OS. Although some companies can replace or upgrade legacy applications to facilitate a migration other organizations don't have that luxury and must maintain legacy OSs to support needed applications. more > In search of a gentler Java Corporate managers bought into J2EE technology and tools in a big way. Now faced with the difficult task of building complex enterprise Java applications they worry if they can find enough skilled Java programmers. For their part Java tool vendors are trying to bring out tools that make J2EE much easier to use. *********** more > Whidbey First Look Well we've been talking about Whidbey -- the next version of Visual Studio .NET -- for months now. At the PDC this year Microsoft handed out DVDs with early code to attendees. They also made them available to any MSDN subscriber who wants a copy (drop by the subscriber downloads page for details; you actually need to call customer service on the phone to get a copy). I've got mine and after various travails got it installed on a test box. more > Why Web services aren't just a rerun Web services can seem too good to be true. After decades of disagreement all of the major vendors have finally bought into a common approach to connecting applications. It's hard not to harbor some doubts about whether this technology will live up to its promise. Why should we believe that Web services will usher in ubiquitous connections between applications when every previous attempt has failed? The most often-cited counterexample is the OMG's Common Object Request Broker (CORBA) which shared many of the goals that Web services strive for today. more > On the track to integration Systems integration has long been the kiss of death for IT projects. Software history is loaded with ill-fated attempts to standardize the way programs integrate from proprietary technologies like IBM’s SAA to SQL relational databases and Rube Goldberg-like CORBA component architectures. Yet integration remains the costliest part of a software project. Recently middleware has become the most popular approach and most tools use proprietary technology-based hubs to direct interactions between apps messaging systems and data sources. more > Microsoft builds support for .Net Framework In a move that builds support for its .Net Framework Microsoft last week launched Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. Visual Studio Tools extends Visual Studio .Net 2003 and the Microsoft .Net Framework to support applications built on versions of Word and Excel featured in the Office 2003 suite. The suite is set to be officially released on Tuesday. Microsoft is pledging that developers building Word- and Excel-based applications will find greater productivity with the new tools. Developers can build business systems that feature the familiarity of Excel and Word on the desktop. They can also write business logic and data access code in Visual Basic .Net or Visual C# .Net. more > Ink Dries on .NET Components Calling its latest components the industry’s first to ink-enable applications written for Microsoft’s Tablet PC Infragistics Inc. in early October shipped its NetAdvantage 2003 Volume 3 suite for .NET. The component set offered as part of the company’s subscription offering also includes new charting and calendar components. Developers can ink-enable nearly any Windows Forms application according to Brad McCabe the company’s technology evangelist allowing pen input on pen-equipped PCs running Microsoft’s Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Further he said the company has exchanged ink capability beyond what Microsoft offers in its own pen-input panel. ************* more > Source: Microsoft's Longhorn PDC preview to lack GUI October 13 2003Microsoft Corp.is expected to show off its next-generation operating system at its upcoming Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles later this month but attendees hoping to get their hands on a version with the new interface will probably be disappointed. The word from Redmond is that the software giant will hand out a pre-beta of the OS code-named Longhorn during Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates' opening keynote but the new Aero GUI won't be part of it. *********** more > Heard on the street: Tales of .NET The Microsoft roadmap to Web services on .NET is leading the development of real-world business applications using XML technology. But the journey is not without surprises both pleasant and unpleasant. Developers interviewed for this article were pleasantly surprised at how easy it is for most programmers to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET tools. And despite XML’s verbosity performance and scalability on the Microsoft platform are surprisingly good. But there are some bumps in the road including sketchy security standards as well as interface and synchronization issues. ************ more > Microsoft Partner Conference: Security First Then the Longhorn Wave At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2003 late last week in New Orleans various Microsoft executives and representatives discussed the company's long- and short-term plans focusing primarily on security. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer didn't mention Longhorn once during his keynote address preferring to discuss more pertinent topics such as security partnering customers and why the company doesn't promote specific features of its products but rather concentrates on a whole that's greater than its parts. I really want to spend a lot of my time on the number-one issue that I'm hearing from our joint customers because if we understand ... both the [security] threat and the opportunity that it represents I think it's going to help ... all of us perform better in our own businesses and in service of our customers Ballmer said. more > .Net-Based Receiving Software Adds To List of RFID-Enabled Tools GlobeRanger Corp. this week added RFID support to its Microsoft .Net-based software for receiving goods. In so doing GlobeRanger joins many other vendors scrambling for the attention of companies looking to adopt the radio technology within their supply chain. The four-year-old Richardson Texas company launched the 4.0 release of iMotion at the EPC Symposium and International Supply Chain Week Conference and Expo in Chicago. GlobeRanger also announced a partnership with Manhattan Associates a supply-chain execution software maker to integrate their respective products. more > Borland joins Together and .NET Borland has expanded its Together analysis and design tools with the unveiling last week of Together Edition for Visual Studio .NET which company reps say can provide architects and developers with a clear view of software development. “The solution is not a portal for Java or J2EE solutions; it’s really a native C# offering ” said Michael Faisst director of product management and product marketing for Borland’s Together Solutions group formed following Borland’s acquisition of TogetherSoft last year. The idea he said is to allow two normally separate groups to see projects in the same way. more > Borland IBM team for .Net apps Borland Software Corp. and IBM are teaming to boost development of database applications for Microsoft Corp.'s .Net Framework. The agreement between the two companies to be announced Thursday is intended to provide customers with offerings for developing and managing the application life cycle for .Net without vendor lock-in according to Borland and Microsoft. Officials at Microsoft and Scotts Valley Calif.-based Borland both said that momentum is growing for .Net. more > Straight Talk on Windows Migration Although the prospect of migrating to a new operating system can be daunting the more informed you and your team are the easier the move will be. .NET Magazine executive editor Elise M. Peterson sat down recently with Ronnie Blewer senior product manager for NetIQ Corp. to get his advice on ways to approach the process. He also addressed common misconceptions and discussed how NetIQ's administration and identity-management products can come into play. more > Simplify application deployment You want app deployment in your enterprise to go smoothly. That means ensuring the essential elements to support the product are in place which isn't always easy especially in a mass deployment. To simplify the process Wise for Windows Installer produces Microsoft Installer (MSI) installation packages which automate some of the steps you'd otherwise do manually. Wise for Windows Installer supports deployment to various platforms including .NET Win32 Palm OS and Pocket PC. Other features include the capability to configure Internet Information Services (IIS) a share point for team-based installation development support for SQL Server scripting assembly dependency checking and the ability to deploy application updates over the Web with WebDeploy and WiseUpdate. more > Make a Smooth Move to Windows Server 2003 So you’ve decided to move to Windows Server 2003. While your reasons for the migration might vary from another organization’s one thing is sure: The structure of the project should be more or less the same across the board. However the scope of the project is variable. It’s based on the size of your network the number of servers it holds and the number of users it serves. But in all cases and for every business the move is a significant project with considerable costs. This is why you need to plan it well. Of course everyone involved in an operating system upgrade project will do his or her utmost to deliver a great product (the new network) but not everyone will be ready to invest him or herself fully into the new operating system immediately. People accept change at different rates. Therefore you need to plan your migration properly and make sure your plan addresses transition issues. One of the best ways to do this is to use a structured approach for migration or deployment. more > Q&A: SOAP gains traction SOAP message processing and interop and that goes across the board. Actually it’s more than just IBM and Microsoft it’s the Java world as well as other worlds that exist out there. There are Lisp implementations for instance that are finding interop as well as WSDL and the WS-I basic profile they’ve defined. There are about a 100 partners if not more collectively collaborating on profiling how you do interoperability of SOAP WSDL and the basic Web services protocol. There are also numerous implementations deployed based on that interoperability. more > Q&A: Microsoft’s Jim Allchin on the Longhorn timetable Longhorn is the code name for the next version of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system and the company often refers to the “Longhorn time frame” when discussing Windows and various associated products. But company officials have gotten increasingly sketchy about just when that time frame is. During an interview last week with Computerworld Jim Allchin group vice president of platforms confirmed that the target date for the next version of the Windows client operating system is still sometime in 2005. Allchin also discussed the philosophy behind the company’s operating system plans as well as the next service pack for Windows XP which is due next year. more > Microsoft Releases Beta Code For Whidbey Visual St Microsoft this week released the first beta of its “Whidbey” version of Visual Studio .Net. At VSLive in New York the Redmond Wash.-based software giant gave its first demonstration of the next-generation Visual Studio platform for Microsoft’s upcoming “Yukon” database. Eric Rudder senior vice president of servers and tools at Microsoft said improving data access and simplifying development on the Yukon wave of products are major goals of the Whidbey release which is expected to coincide with the release of Yukon in late 2004. more > |
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