With the Information Bridge Framework, Microsoft tries to tighten the
connections between three of their product lines. Is this worth your while to
look at?
Online trading giant eBay expanded the reach of its growing developer program by signing up Borland Software to distribute eBay and PayPal SDKs to Delphi developers.
Sure, there were lots of significant software announcements at this year's Tech
Ed. But you might have missed some of the other downloads that snuck out of
Microsoft with less fanfare.
At Microsoft TechEd 2004 in San Diego, Microsoft provided further details on its upcoming database release now known as SQL Server 2005 (formerly code-named “Yukon”). The software will natively support Web services, XML and encryption.
BEA Systems' chief exec Alfred Chuang kicked off the ninth annual eWorld user conference in San Francisco this week by officially rolling out his company's Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy, which is based on BEA's vision of a "fluid enterprise" enabled by a set of products and services collectively dubbed "Liquid Computing."
BEA Systems used the stage of its annual user conference in San Francisco to disclose plans to turn its open-source Project Beehive effort over to the Apache Software Foundation.
Visual Studio 2005 Team System was announced on Monday, and now the pundits will
be
scrambling to tell you what to think. I don't know what I think myself yet, but
here are a few preliminary thoughts.
Microsoft is urging developers working on or maintaining applications running on Windows XP to get up to speed on Service Pack 2 (SP2), currently a Release Candidate 1 (RC1).
Despite plenty of pre-briefings and a measured rollup to launch, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (formerly Whidbey) packed a few surprises when it was formerly announced at Microsoft's TechEd conference this week in San Diego. While the company had already suggested that operations modeling would be part of the mix, the breadth of promised integration between different application life-cycle tools was notable.
As part of its kick-off at CAWorld 2004 in Las Vegas, Computer Associates (CA) officials will describe a renewed effort to promote an application life-cycle software strategy with a wider collection of products now placed
under the AllFusion umbrella.
Steve Ballmer discussed the next release of Visual Studio 2005, which will include a
version known as "Team System." The toolset is intended to reach out beyond developers to include more workers involved with the application life cycle.
Microsoft is set to release the 2.0 version of its Web Services Enhancements for .NET. Basically, WSE is an add-on to the Visual Studio .NET dev tool and the .NET
Framework. It is designed to allow developers to write and implement advanced
Web services specifications, such as WS-Security, WS-Routing and WS-Attachments,
by adding a few lines of code to their Web services applications.
The Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Organization has released the working-group draft of its Basic Security Profile for public comment.
Many of Gartner's predictions of Web services are pretty far out in time, some relating to technology we may not see until 2014. But one trend, the mapping of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to programming languages, most notably Java, is happening now.
BEA Systems is donating the application framework in its WebLogic Workshop Java development environment to the open source community, the company disclosed last week. All future development of the newly re-branded Project Beehive will be done in the open-source community by BEA engineers and community participants.
Various J2EE toolmakers have worked in recent years to ease the task of developing to the J2EE platform. Perhaps only a few of their advances have had much effect to date on EJB design, which is for some shops a key part of J2EE.
I know they didn't plan it that way, but Microsoft's most recent Issues essay
couldn't have come out at a more unfortunate time.
When the head of the CIA in April estimated it would take five years to build new intelligence organizations, many bridled. After all, this is the age of just-in-time systems! But for IT systems, if not international intelligence networks, such a long view is not a bad thing at all. That was the word recently from Ken Orr, author of “Structured Systems Development” and “Structured Requirements Definition,” and a perpetually friendly gadfly on the systems scene.
MIT expert Michael Cusumano’s new book considers the lot of software vendors. If they don’t regularly examine how they do business, he concludes, trouble can ensue.
Unlike other books of its ilk, "Lessons in Program Management" does not set out to teach you about some complicated project management scheme. Instead, it simply tries to teach some basic concepts that apply no matter what complicated project management scheme you're trying to use.