Technical news and comment

Welcome to ITWriting.com. This site is where I post news and comment on the IT industry, with a focus on software development.

Tech writing blog

The ITWriting blog is where you will find all the content – news, reviews, and comment from an independent viewpoint. There are also thousands of comments from readers, in some cases (I freely admit) of higher quality or greater interest than the original post. The latest posts are shown under Recent Posts below.

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Forthcoming events

Forthcoming events are listed here. This is not a comprehensive directory of events; rather it is a select list of events of interest to software developers.

Software projects

Along with occasional code samples, there are a couple of software projects hosted here.

The HTMLEditor is a .NET control for displaying and editing HTML text.

The Simple Wrapper for SQLite is for Delphi 7 and higher, enabling use of this fast open source database engine without using data binding or any other database framework.

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Contact

Contact me by emailing tim(at)itwriting.com.

Recent posts

Visual Studio software factories to emerge from Microsoft deep freeze

Last night at the Microsoft Mix party in Las Vegas I happened across Michael Lehman, a senior architect, who told me he had been working for the last six years on a Visual Studio add-on called Feature Builder. This turns out to be the evolution of the very same project which Microsoft’s Jack Greenfield told

…continue reading Visual Studio software factories to emerge from Microsoft deep freeze

Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game

I’m at Mix10 in Las Vegas where Microsoft has been showing off the latest preview of IE9 – you can try it here, provided you have Vista SP2, Windows 2008 or Windows 7.

The two themes are performance, with GPU-accelerated HTML and graphics and a new Javascript engine that compiles code in the background, and standards

…continue reading Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game

No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash?

Windows Phone 7 is a managed code platform, we’ve been told at Mix10 in Las Vegas. Development is via Silverlight or XNA; there is no native API.

Of course there is a native API; the question is more about what code is allowed to access it. Still, in the press briefing the spokesman was clear that

…continue reading No native code development on Windows Phone 7 says Microsoft – so what about Flash?

Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in?

I’m reading the documentation for Windows Phone development. Here’s what it says:

A set of tools will help the developer to submit and certify their applications for the Windows Phone Marketplace. Applications are submitted in a .XAP file format, which is essentially one compressed file that contains all the files that are needed by the application.

…continue reading Microsoft copies Apple with Windows Phone app lock-in?