News bits

So, it's been a while since I caught on on short news items. Here are a few things that caught my eye. For starters, if you've been programming for a while you've undoubtedly heard of Donald Knuth's THE ART OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING, surely the definitive reference on algorithms. The first three volumes came out decades ago, and there's been a bit of a lapse in publication since then. But now, volume 4 is appearing at last! Addision-Wesley is shipping it in "fascicles," small chunks that are later destined to be rebound as a complete book. You can see the progress so far and read an excerpt over at the Bookpool Web site.

Stylus Studio XML Professional Edition, Release 2 (whew!) is out. This adds a whole mess of new features to an already-excellent XML development environment. New stuff includes a new XML schema editor, XQuery and XPath updates, EDI-to-XML mapping, a new XML grid view, and a new utility for converting legacy files to XML. You can download a 30-day evaluation to check it out for yourself.

Zero G Software has upgraded their InstallAnywhere.NET setup-building tool to release 3.1. Major changes in this version include support for Windows Installer 3.0, support for Windows 2003, and improvements to the user interface editor. If you've outgrown the setup projects built into Visual Studio .NET this is one of the alternatives you ought to take a look at.

About the Author

Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.