In its new version, Alpha Five brings impressive Web accessibility to desktop databases - turning them into full-fledged Web applications without any code.
From time to time I intend to use this space to mention truly useful bits of
software that I use on a regular basis. Today is a good time to start, and the
picks for today are the WinZip E-Mail Attachment Add-On for Outlook, the
search program X1, and SpamBayes.
Now in its second major release, ANTS Profiler is a super-easy to use profiler for .NET applications, letting you track speed or memory usage and drill down to a very granular level.
Fortify's toolset is designed to catch security bugs through static code analysis. With editions covering a wide range of price and functionality, they're accessible to almost any developer.
If your organization is like most out there, you've got a raft of disparate
legacy applications that don't talk much to each other. Butch Clark's new book
provides a recipe for injecting some order into this chaos. Read on to get my
impressions of the book.
Microsoft has been heavily promoting and investing in the Tablet PC, even to the
extent of paying out prizes to developers writing software for it. Despite the
hype, though, I haven't been able to find any good reason to buy one myself.
Here's my current reasons for staying off the Tablet bandwagon.
Grand Central offers an easy way for you to get started on a service-oriented architecture without investing a ton of money.
Now Developer Central is a blog rather than an e-mail newsletter - but you can
still expect the same developer-oriented content, and a bit more!
Web services have become a standard for building client/server applications. Learn an approach for using the JAX-RPC SI toolkit to generate a Web service's client-side code.
Information systems have earned an unfortunate reputation as a retardant of business innovation. Structured programming and modern database design methodologies have established a mandate to closely control business analysis.
What if software were manufactured like an automobile or a refrigerator, using off-the-shelf
components and assembly-line production
techniques to help automate many of the most repetitive development tasks? A new Microsoft strategy revives debate over whether software development can become a manufacturing discipline.
For many companies, outsourcing IT work is
seen as mandatory to stay competitive,
and even software product companies
are offshoring product development
and maintenance work to reduce costs.
But many experts will tell you that outsourcing
software development carries increased
risks, most notably, quality.
I thought of Charlie Chaplin’s classic film, Modern Times, after reading Stephen Swoyer’s piece on software factories, a concept
for automating software development that Microsoft has beenchampioning lately.
Modern Times was Chaplin’s protest against industrial society and the dehumanizing effect of the factory assembly line.
In many cases, IT and the business side continue to battle each other for control. But technology, and changes in attitude on both ends, can help improve business-IT alignment.There is a lot of talk about the need to align business objectives and the IT department, but enterprises are making little progress.
News from vendors on new products for application development.
Location-based services help enterprises track employees, manage inventories, process customer orders and even find potential customers
Gartner, which plots market leaders and
challenges in a "Magic Quadrant," says the
2004 project and portfolio management
leaders are Primavera, Niku, Mercury, PlanView, Systemcorp, and Lawson Software; and the challengers are Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft.
IT and the enterprise want it all: time to market, quality, and cost. And they want
it quickly. Now, they just might have the right stuff to get it.
Two years ago, the Object Management Group (OMG) introduced the model-driven architecture (MDA), a development specification that taps the OMG’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) to automate the integration of software from applications, middleware, or custom components. To a certain extent, says Thomas Murphy, a vice president with consultancy META Group, the software factory and its attendant notion of Domain
Specific Languages (DSL) constitute Microsoft’s response to MDA.