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Paul Harvey, the great American radio personality, would always conclude his colorful broadcasts with the quip “And now you know the rest of the story.” For those of you not acquainted with Paul’s broadcasts, here’s a sample. If you get to about 3:40 in, you’ll hear the classic remark....Feb. 16, 2012 10:30 AM EST Reads: 351
If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to notice that in almost any given week some company seems to have experienced an electronic break-in or in some other way experienced a form of computer or network compromise. While computer security professionals can help to mitigate such r...
Unit testing is a best practice in any modern methodology, including Agile development. With automatic unit testing in place, if we introduce a bug into the software, one or more tests will fail and we'll know about it immediately.
We've been writing in C++ for almost 30 years now, an...
One of the biggest issues I see in a lot of IT / Software Development environments is the lack of understanding when it comes to context switching.
There are a lot of managers that don't understand how much work is lost when they expect their team to multitask. More disastrous is the ...
It was nice while it lasted. I received the email below this afternoon announcing a $35 charge will soon be in place.
From this forum, it looks like Red-gate was hoping for a big pay day from Microsoft.
Quote from the forum:
"Right now I'm hoping MS wakes up to the importance of Ref...
This is a book that would be good for anyone that wants to get a snapshot of the current Microsoft technology stack.
It gives decent primers on Window Communication Foundation (WCF) 4.0 and Windows Workflow (WF) 4.0, Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk, SQL Server, and Windows Azure.
T...
If you’ve been following Sybase’s announcements concerning their plans for future versions of PowerBuilder, you’ll know that they are planning for PowerBuilder 15 to be able to generate a Silverlight application and are looking at having it generate applications based on HTML5 as well....
Microsoft's Office 365 announcement yesterday made it unclear how big a role service providers might play in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem. One executive said provider partners, like telcos and hosting services, are essential to the reliability and functional richness they can add to ...
Sybase is currently in the middle of the most aggressive marketing program that I’ve seen for PowerBuilder in recent history. If you’ve been following my blog (and if you haven’t you should) you’ll know that Sybase recently ran a four-page ad in Visual Studio magazine promoting the rel...
The migration march to PB 12.NET will have many shops revisiting legacy applications. In my previous article, “Refactoring Is Not an ‘R’ Word” (PBDJ, Vol. 16, issue 12), you read why refactoring code before migration helps ensure smooth migration and enterprise integration. You were in...
Not long ago Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted as saying that Microsoft is "betting the company" on cloud computing. So it is really no surprise that at the company's TechEd 2010 event in New Orleans, the software giant reprised the same theme. Bob Muglia, Microsoft's president of...
When the beta for PB.NET (PowerBuilder 12) started I was pretty excited to get my hands on it. This version comes with a whole new IDE and with it many new features. As a result, we now get to take advantage of things like better intellisense, script navigation functions, and a WPF edi...
Visual Studio 2010 is almost here – Microsoft just released the first Release Candidate which looks pretty solid and good. Microsoft added new interfaces for performance management solutions like dynaTrace to extend the Web- and Load-Testing capabilities (check out Ed Glas’s blog on wh...
ACPI or Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is an industry power management specification. It enables an operating system to control the amount of power required to be given to each device that is connected to the computer system. Thus, it eliminates device management responsibi...
In 2006 Microsoft began releasing a series of designer focused tools. The big question was: Why? Adobe has the best tools, doesn’t it? There is no doubt that Adobe’s tools are very good, what is clear, however, is that Microsoft is taking design seriously for this to be accomplished Mi...
Nowadays .NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be inline with PowerBuilder’s .NET deployment and .NET development strategy, the PowerScript language will be enhanced to be a true CLS-compliant .NET language in PowerBuilder 12. Users will be able to consume and extend an...
Lots of people have been asking about how to get started with Silverlight, and what they need to do to get up and running with Silverlight quickly. Inspired by blog posts such as Jesse Liberty's, I'm going to take this from first principles, with no prior knowledge assumed. So let's ge...
For more than 20 years the software development industry has regarded reuse as the Holy Grail of software development. Programming language-based object-oriented features promised to deliver the significant benefits of increased productivity and cost-effectiveness by creating reusable ...
Have you ever been on a project where software development worked beautifully but developing and maintaining the database always caused unexpected problems and bugs? Do your changes constantly get overwritten by other developers, or is only one person at a time allowed to make changes?...
Developing custom applications using Microsoft's .NET Framework is a growing trend. According to Forrester Research, 56% of enterprises are choosing .NET versus 44% opting for J2EE, while IDC reports that 35.7% of large corporations use .NET for their most important applications compar...
In application development, one should consider an effective way of creating a standard rule for coding and debugging. For all the information provided in the application code, there's a better way for developers to track down a problem and find a solution.
As the World Wide Web's landscape has evolved from the days of multimedia-void static HMTL pages, the need for a dynamic interactive medium for Web applications has become apparent. Adobe Flash, as many developers know, is the most widely distributed, capable technology for achieving t...
This document describes an application currently being constructed with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (OSS) that will enable collaboration between cancer researchers called the C-ME project (Collaborative Molecular Modeling Environment). Office...
Creative Modeler is a full-featured diagramming environment that can be extended to create any type of diagram. It includes a data translation engine that facilitates the editing and conversion of data in any structured file format into any other structured file format (XML or non-XML)...
If you are developer who writes code to test software, you might want to consider using Spec Explorer. Spec Explorer is a model-based testing tool available for free through Microsoft Research that you use to model the software you're testing and create test harnesses and test case sui...
One of the most important and yet overlooked aspects of a software development project is the concept of regression testing during implementation. Regression testing is the practice of running tests for previously tested code following modification to ensure that faults have not been i...
When open source software is mentioned, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python). While these products are not generally associated with Windows development, at least one of them is certainly well suited for Windows deve...
This article is the first in a three-part series on the use of CruiseControl.NET, a very popular and important tool for any development house interested in implementing continuous integration and other agile programming concepts. In this first installment we'll briefly cover the defini...
I differentiate what I like to call 'pragmatic unit testing' from the two alternate approaches to unit testing that I have seen at organizations. The first 'alternate approach,' which I have seen at 95 percent of .NET organizations, is best referred to as 'no time for quality.' The oth...
As software development teams and solutions become more distributed, visibility into systems has given way to isolated pockets of component knowledge. This 'silo' approach to application development, where different teams work in isolation from each other, means that developers may no ...
I have used Microsoft Visual Studio at various companies over the years, starting with Visual Basic 3 to create simple, stand-alone Windows applications, then later using Visual Basic 5 and 6 for multitiered development. More recently, I've used Visual C++ to create a commercial applic...
Why are contract outsourcing and offshore development failing to deliver the expected benefit of lower costs and increased end-user satisfaction to enterprise software development users? It seems that lower rates per hour and better management of human resources are not enough to overc...
If you've spent more than two months developing any form of software, chances are you've had to program against a database. Unfortunately, despite the rapid gains in software sophistication over the past decade, few well-recognized tools are available to deal with the problem of object...
