News bits

• By Mike Gunderloy
• February 21, 2005

Once again, I've got a collection of items that aren't quite long enough for an entire blog posting, but still deserve a bit of virtual ink. I'll start with PreEmptive Solutions, who just pushed out a release candidate of version 3.0 of their flagship product, Dotfuscator Professional. As you probably know, if you don't take any special steps, it's relatively easy to recover source code from .NET assemblies. Dotfuscator takes those special steps by mucking around with the compiled assemblies to make them harder to decompile. New features in 3.0 include watermarking (which can act to protect intellectual property or trace piracy), assembly linking to minimize the size of the product you need to ship and install, integration with Visual Studio 2005 and MS Build, and support for .NET 2.0 generics.

Salesforce.com recently made some announcements of their own in connection with the Microsoft Office developers' conference. Specifically, they've created the "sforce Developer Program for Microsoft Office," which makes free tools and resources available for Office developers who want to integrate their applications with Salesforce.com. The idea is to get the sales, marketing, and support information already in the Salesforce.com platform hooked up directly to Office applications through the company's sforce API set. You can download the beta sforce Toolkit for Office from their sforce.com site.

My final note today comes from SYWARE, who have just released version 9 of Visual CE, their database application programming platform for Windows CE and PocketPC devices. New features include more flexible image controls, a wizard to build distribution disks, custom menu bars, new command button types, nested macros, and more. They've got a trial download on their site; if you need a forms-and-database oriented tool for mobile development it's worth a look.