Airgas recently underwent a rapid expansion, but its workflow was done the old-fashioned way—manually. Manual processing is always painstaking, but entering data for 80,000 SKUs for specialty gases is especially tedious.
In-process integration beats out other, out-of-process integration approaches in many ways. You get higher performance, more reliable integration, and better security.
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.
Microsoft says SQL Server 2005 is its most developer-friendly RDBMS ever, with improved integration via Visual Studio .NET and support for the .NET framework. Some skeptics say Microsoft is courting disaster.
Through 2007, enterprises will spend close to a COBOL developer’s salary if they choose to train that developer in Java and then retain the developer.
Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are collaborating to enhance interoperability between .NET- and Java-based technologies.
Skeptics who question Microsoft’s decision to integrate its .NET CLR with SQL Server 2005 tend to use the language of doomsayers such as Jeremiah or Cassandra to make their points. They believe in-process CLR is an insanely bad idea that could jeopardize the scalability and reliability of SQL Server.
The Common Language Runtime is at the heart of Microsoft’s .NET vision. It promises to co-opt the benefits of Java–it’s a run-time environment that features a just-in-time compiler and built-in management services–with the bonus that (unlike Java) it’s language-independent.
When Microsoft announced in January that it was dropping XQuery support from the next release of the .NET Framework, the company’s reasoning seemed sound enough: XQuery will not receive final approval from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body shepherding its development, until early 2006. But the .NET Framework 2.0 (code-named “Whidbey”) is due this summer, which means that Microsoft will be finalizing the code well before XQuery becomes a W3C recommendation, “making it impossible,” says Microsoft, “for us to guarantee forward compatibility between any XQuery support in .NET 2.0 and the eventual XQuery 1.0 recommendation.”
It’s not uncommon to have development teams who are proficient in a Microsoft environment, but customers who demand applications that run on J2EE, UNIX or Linux. Solutions such as rewriting the code or manually porting it after development can take many months.
If one of your considerations in planning a .NET or J2EE project is finding developers with the right skill set, your location may be a factor.
Borland Software launched a major update of its Together modeling platform last week. With this release—Together 2005 for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET—the software development toolsmaker breaks new ground in two areas: it provides Microsoft coders with support for the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and it marks Borland’s first foray into role-based modeling.
In an effort to help companies develop secure applications for Microsoft .NET and Java, PreEmptive Solutions released Dotfuscator Professional Edition 3.0 and DashO 3.2.
If one of your considerations in planning a .NET or J2EE project is finding developers with the right skill set, your location may be a factor.
If one of your considerations in planning a .NET or J2EE project is finding developers with the right skill set, your location may be a factor.
Microsoft hopes to lure more developers into the .NET camp with a free Java to .NET Framework Migration Workshop. The workshop features online, self-paced training designed to introduce Java developers to .NET development concepts based on using their Java skills as a frame of reference.
Use the built-in functionality of SQL Server to make your business processes more efficient with data mining.
Enterprise Application Integration Using .NET shows you how to overcome the issues and obstacles involved in integrating enterprise-scale applications successfully.
Compuware Corp. has enhanced its QACenter automated functional and performance testing suites in both the enterprise and performance editions. The enterprise edition now includes TestPartner 5.3, the most recent version of Compuware's functional testing software. The performance edition features enhancements to Compuware's load testing application in QALoad 5.2.
Ari Bixhorn discusses Microsoft's plan to create a unified programming model (code-named Indigo) for building distributed, interconnected apps in an interview with VSM Editor in Chief Patrick Meader.