software development « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

Visual Studio software factories to emerge from Microsoft deep freeze

By tim, on March 17th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

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

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Microsoft playing HTML 5 standards game alongside Silverlight game

By tim, on March 16th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

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

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Martin Fowler on the ethics of software development – QCon report

By tim, on March 12th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks gave what seemed an important session at QCon London, exploring the ethical dimension of software development with a talk called What are we programming for?. The room was small, since the organisers figured that a track on IT with a a conscience would be a minority interest; but Fowler always attracts

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Functional programming, NOSQL themes at QCon London

By tim, on March 10th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

One reason I enjoy the QCon London software development conference is that it reflects programming trends. Organiser Floyd Marinescu described it as by practitioners for practitioners. In previous years I’ve seen themes like disillusionment with enterprise Java, the rise of Agile methodologies, the trend towards dynamic languages, and the benefits of REST.

So what’s hot this

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Why programmers should study Microsoft’s random failure and not trust Google search

By tim, on March 9th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

The bizarre story of the EU-mandated Windows browser choice screen took an unexpected twist recently when it was noticed that the order of the browsers was not truly random.

IBM’s Rob Weir was not the first to spot the problem, but did a great job in writing it up, both when initially observed and after it

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Microsoft maybe gets the cloud – maybe too late

By tim, on March 5th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a talk on the company’s cloud strategy at the University of Washington yesterday. Although a small event, the webcast was widely publicised and coincides with a leaked internal memo on “how cloud computing will change the way people and businesses use technology”, a new Cloud website, and a Cloud Computing

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Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere

By tim, on March 5th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has blogged about the Windows Phone 7 development platform.

As widely leaked, the new mobile device supports Silverlight and XNA; Kindel also mentions .NET, but since both Silverlight and XNA are .NET platforms, that might not mean anything additional.

The big story is about compatibility:

To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform

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Microsoft .NET gotchas revealed by Visual Studio team

By tim, on March 2nd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

The Visual Studio Blog makes great reading for .NET developers, and not only because of the product it describes. Visual Studio 2010 is one of the few Microsoft products that has made a transition from native C++ code to .NET managed code – the transition is partial, in that parts of Visual Studio remain in

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Nokia Maemo, Intel Moblin gives way to MeeGo

By tim, on February 15th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Nokia’s Maemo operating system, a Linux distribution for mobile devices, is being merged with the Intel-sponsored Moblin distribution to form MeeGo, under the direction of the Linux Foundation:

MeeGo combines Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo projects at the Linux Foundation to create one open source uber-platform for the next generation of computing devices: tablets, pocketable computers,

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