ITWriting Blog archives | Tim Anderson's IT Writing

In October 2006 the ITWriting blog was migrated to WordPress. Unfortunately most of the old entries were not copied into the new system. The archived entries still exist, but until now there were no links to them; they were part of the dark web. Now all is revealed. These are the entries from the beginning (October 2003) until the WordPress migration. For more recent entries, you’ll need to use the WordPress archive links in the left-hand column.

I have also appended links to old articles that are no longer linked elsewhere.

2006

Tuesday The 10^th October Google’s unsettling lack of direction

Tuesday The 10^th October Vista security: now prove it

Monday The 9^th October Vista: the search for drivers begins

Thursday The 5^th October Protecting the Windows kernel

Wednesday The 4^th October Stob gets her teeth into Word

Wednesday The 4^th October Times Reader memory shock

Monday The 2^nd October Who cares about W3C validation?

Thursday The 28^th September A handy guide to DRM on Nokia’s forums

Wednesday The 27^th September HD DVD vs Blu-Ray – and data-mining Web 2.0 style

Wednesday The 27^th September Times Reader vs Sony Reader

Monday The 25^th September Delphi 7, Winhelp: not compatible with Vista

Monday The 25^th September Vista is too good to dismiss

Friday The 22^nd September Help! Vista’s coming

Thursday The 21^st September Is this a bug in Vista RC1?

Wednesday The 20^th September Securing Windows: why Microsoft is fighting its third-party partners

Monday The 18^th September Heavy user praises Amazon S3

Tuesday The 12^th September AAC is not a proprietary format

Monday The 11^th September Hacking Turbo Delphi

Monday The 11^th September iTunes hassles for digital identity expert

Sunday The 10^th September How to get Visual Basic 6

Friday The 8^th September Microsoft – the elephant not in the room

Friday The 8^th September d.Construct 06 – Amazon says 800 million objects now stored in S3

Friday The 8^th September Sun scratches the dynamic language itch

Thursday The 7^th September IronPython is done

Thursday The 7^th September Why the Vista Release Candidate isn’t

Monday The 4^th September XNA hassles for 64-bit users

Sunday The 3^rd September Amazon S3 may be too cheap

Saturday The 2^nd September A new low for anti-virus software?

Saturday The 26^th August eBay’s indifference to fraud

Saturday The 26^th August Napster gets iPod compatibility

Thursday The 24^th August Amazon’s virtual computing revolution

Thursday The 24^th August A Delphi REST sample for Amazon S3

Wednesday The 23^rd August Performance of Amazon S3

Wednesday The 23^rd August XBox 360 vs The Rest

Wednesday The 23^rd August How do Microsoft developers find info?

Tuesday The 22^nd August Mac users – an influential 2.32%?

Monday The 21^st August Visual Basic for Mono gets a revamp

Wednesday The 16^th August Credit card fraud

Wednesday The 16^th August Does Microsoft promote the desktop at the expense of the web?

Monday The 14^th August Crisis at the W3C

Monday The 14^th August Who says Microsoft doesn’t use .NET?

Thursday The 10^th August Borland’s Turbo tools

Tuesday The 8^th August A ClickOnce HTML editor

Monday The 7^th August Help, I’m on Windows, where is my home?

Sunday The 6^th August DVD ripping and why the right to burn CDs from iTunes might not last

Friday The 4^th August Technorati tracking 50 million blogs

Friday The 4^th August You can’t trust email

Wednesday The 2^nd August Programming language trends: Java losing out to .NET?

Tuesday The 1^st August Tao of the Windows Installer

Sunday The 30^th July Java, security, and Lily Allen

Friday The 28^th July iPod/iTunes "a lethal recipe for anti-competitive lock-in"

Thursday The 27^th July Paint.net shows off .NET open source

Tuesday The 25^th July Charlie Calvert: another Borlander turns up at Microsoft

Tuesday The 25^th July Recursion with Youos

Monday The 24^th July Zune announced to hail of protest

Friday The 21^st July XBox 360 hits 5 million installed base

Thursday The 20^th July Phishing through Google

Thursday The 20^th July Microsoft’s .NET pitch

Tuesday The 18^th July Another way to hang Windows

Monday The 17^th July No escape from native code in Vista

Sunday The 16^th July The perils of dynamic data: NetBeans vs Eclipse

Saturday The 15^th July Windows backslash is IBM’s fault?

Thursday The 13^th July The purpose of testing is not to find bugs

Tuesday The 11^th July Don’t use Java Enterprise Edition

Tuesday The 11^th July Windows Forms 2.0 Programming

Friday The 7^th July Microsoft employee laments iPod distraction

Thursday The 6^th July Microsoft adds Open Document support to Office

Tuesday The 4^th July Fixing Visual Studio setup projects

Monday The 3^rd July ASP.NET author gets web standards

Saturday The 1^st July 45 million unlinked blogs

Saturday The 1^st July Another blog

Saturday The 1^st July Microsoft: we won’t kill your PC

Friday The 30^th June Abobe Flex 2.0 is out

Thursday The 29^th June Implications of Google checkout

Thursday The 29^th June Salesforce.com as a web services platform

Wednesday The 28^th June Dabble DB

Wednesday The 28^th June Code to create Office XML

Tuesday The 27^th June Google has the political power of a small state

Sunday The 25^th June No price drop for XBox 360

Sunday The 25^th June The two pillars of Longhorn

Friday The 23^rd June Visual Studio start page a missed opportunity

Friday The 23^rd June Is Blinq Microsoft’s answer to Rails?

Thursday The 22^nd June Can the Internet be fixed?

Thursday The 22^nd June Ruby and .NET

Wednesday The 21^st June 3D is not just eye-candy

Monday The 19^th June Abobe vs Microsoft: When two is fewer than one

Thursday The 15^th June Debugging Visual Studio design mode

Tuesday The 13^th June Ray Ozzie: talking the talk

Tuesday The 13^th June SQL Server Everywhere is up for download

Saturday The 10^th June WinFX is .NET Framework 3.0 – are you less confused?

Friday The 9^th June .NET 64-bit hassles

Friday The 9^th June MSDN Wiki – plaudits and questions

Thursday The 8^th June Microsoft, cross-platform and WPF/E

Thursday The 8^th June What’s coming in Dreamweaver 9

Wednesday The 7^th June Annoying documentation

Monday The 5^th June The new Netiquette: keep your comments clean

Saturday The 3^rd June New database role for Team System

Friday The 2^nd June Search as user interface

Wednesday The 31^st May The synchronized web: caching is magic

Wednesday The 31^st May Visual Studio porting hassles

Thursday The 25^th May I have seen Apollo

Tuesday The 23^rd May Targetting the JavaScript virtual machine

Friday The 19^th May Borland CEO: We won’t be JBuildered again

Friday The 19^th May An update to the HtmlEditor

Wednesday The 17^th May Visiting Amazon.com calls 100 services

Tuesday The 16^th May Memory use rockets with 64-bit .NET

Tuesday The 16^th May CodePlex is online

Sunday The 14^th May Ocado

Sunday The 14^th May Java, .NET and dynamic languages

Saturday The 13^th May When will Microsoft understand home media?

Saturday The 13^th May The cloud vs the LAN

Friday The 12^th May Team System reviewed

Friday The 12^th May Adobe Apollo: Flash beyond the browser

Tuesday The 9^th May Visual Studio Web Application Project is gold

Monday The 8^th May JBuilder Eclipse to be more like JBuilder

Monday The 8^th May Why web search always beats local help

Friday The 5^th May NetBeans in search of Rails magic

Wednesday The 3^rd May Borland’s IDE sale: progress report

Wednesday The 3^rd May Could you miss this?

Wednesday The 3^rd May Napster makes bold move while iTunes gets it wrong

Tuesday The 2^nd May WS-* versus REST

Monday The 1^st May Microsoft .Net most popular dev platform in the world?

Friday The 28^th April ASP.NET Web App Projects gets real-world approval

Wednesday The 26^th April Detailed study of cross-platform .NET

Wednesday The 26^th April Google is the F1 of our lives

Wednesday The 26^th April What’s coming in Windows Mobile

Monday The 24^th April EU vs Microsoft: gunning for the wrong target

Monday The 24^th April Visual Studio 2005 is unstable

Friday The 21^st April Oracle Express: free and huge

Thursday The 20^th April Why Microsoft released a buggy VB compiler

Wednesday The 19^th April Borland’s strange ‘DevCo’

Wednesday The 19^th April How to write fast software

Tuesday The 18^th April Will Wikipedia become Britannica?

Saturday The 15^th April In laptops, small is beautiful

Thursday The 13^th April Users, who needs ’em?

Tuesday The 11^th April Enterprise software: it’s maintenance, not platform choices

Tuesday The 11^th April Sun’s Java burden

Tuesday The 11^th April The Enterprise software debate

Friday The 7^th April Laterooms.com gives up on Mono

Friday The 7^th April More on Vista: Pretty vs Useful

Friday The 7^th April What’s your Vista rating?

Thursday The 6^th April Microsoft backtracks on ASP.NET app model

Tuesday The 4^th April MySpace, ColdFusion and ASP.NET

Monday The 3^rd April Who’s using Team System?

Friday The 31^st March Software contracts and agile methodology

Thursday The 30^th March Microsoft makes a grab for Borland developers

Wednesday The 29^th March How XAML gets compiled

Wednesday The 29^th March Microsoft should use Flash, says Adobe’s John Dowdell

Tuesday The 28^th March Delphi for .NET 2.0 now

Monday The 27^th March Drilldown into WPF/Everywhere

Saturday The 25^th March Microsoft: VBA supported "for the forseeable future"

Saturday The 25^th March Microsoft does cross-platform .NET with WPF/E

Thursday The 23^rd March Subversion vs Perforce

Tuesday The 21^st March Mix06 reflections

Monday The 20^th March Amazon: fee-based services are better

Monday The 20^th March Marc Canter on Vista: You won’t go back

Monday The 20^th March Networking at Mix06

Monday The 20^th March Not yet a geek friendly world

Friday The 17^th March Mix06

Friday The 17^th March Grimes on .Net (again)

Thursday The 16^th March Ruby on Rails will change the world

Wednesday The 15^th March Amazon gets Web Services

Tuesday The 14^th March Microsoft runs .NET on Xbox 360

Monday The 13^th March Google to sell online content

Sunday The 12^th March Gosling on Java vs other languages

Friday The 10^th March Writely in action

Friday The 10^th March Don’t trust Google with your data

Thursday The 9^th March Over 30 million blogs on Technorati

Thursday The 9^th March Bright ideas for post-Borland Delphi

Wednesday The 8^th March If languages are bicycles…

Wednesday The 8^th March Google deleted all my mail

Wednesday The 8^th March Amazon pays you to search the web

Wednesday The 8^th March Google clutter with IE7

Tuesday The 7^th March Speeding up Windows Forms

Monday The 6^th March Google: where did we go wrong with Google Maps?

Monday The 6^th March Mono vs Microsoft: can you tell the difference?

Sunday The 5^th March Eric Meyer says IE7 will be OK

Saturday The 4^th March Mix06 is full

Saturday The 4^th March IDE comparison: a very silly survey

Friday The 3^rd March Enthusiast buzz for Creative Vision:M

Thursday The 2^nd March Team System: you really need it all

Wednesday The 1^st March Which dynamic language will win the enterprise?

Tuesday The 28^th February Windows backup failure mystery

Tuesday The 28^th February Speeding up Delphi 2006

Monday The 27^th February Is it Mono vs WPF/Everywhere?

Monday The 27^th February Agitator and Team System compared

Sunday The 26^th February Pitfalls when handling COM events in managed code

Saturday The 25^th February The pain of private runtime libraries

Friday The 24^th February Installing Team System RC1

Thursday The 23^rd February Write your Google website now

Thursday The 23^rd February Where next for e-Books? Please Not YABDDTC

Wednesday The 22^nd February Downtime and its consequences

Tuesday The 21^st February Download the future of web apps

Tuesday The 21^st February Farewell to FrontPage

Tuesday The 21^st February Why all web sites look the same

Monday The 20^th February Developers tap to the beat

Saturday The 18^th February Microsoft’s dinosaur campaign

Saturday The 18^th February Buggy calculators

Friday The 17^th February David Heinemeier Hansson on Rails

Thursday The 16^th February Limitations of SSL exposed by phishing fraud

Thursday The 16^th February Then and Now: Sleepycat CEO on Oracle

Thursday The 16^th February Latest Gates tongue-twister: 2007 Microsoft Office System

Wednesday The 15^th February What’s wrong with Office Live

Wednesday The 15^th February Office Live a threat to Small Business Server

Tuesday The 14^th February Measuring authority

Tuesday The 14^th February WPF Everywhere: Not yet

Monday The 13^th February Delphi is dead rumours

Monday The 13^th February Mashups and the future of web apps

Sunday The 12^th February Rails a "fundamental restart in the thinking process"

Saturday The 11^th February PSP Pinball disappointment

Friday The 10^th February JBuilder and Delphi may be separated

Friday The 10^th February JBuilder 2006 not end of line, says Borland

Friday The 10^th February EFF says don’t use Google Desktop

Thursday The 9^th February Final notes on the "Future of web apps"

Wednesday The 8^th February Borland puts up Delphi for sale

Wednesday The 8^th February Flex enterprise services for .NET: maybe never

Wednesday The 8^th February David Heinemeier Hansson says be happy

Wednesday The 8^th February Add value to the aggregate web, says BBC/Yahoo developer

Wednesday The 8^th February SOAP is insane, says Del.icio.us founder

Tuesday The 7^th February Blogging Web 2.0

Tuesday The 7^th February Adobe’s agressive pricing for Flex 2: Free

Tuesday The 7^th February Who’s fastest: SQLite, SQL Server, MySQL, or what?

Monday The 6^th February NetBeans 5.0 challenges Eclipse

Sunday The 5^th February Don’t rewrite, refactor

Friday The 3^rd February Blogs are not reliable

Friday The 3^rd February Rant: Why does Microsoft delete KB articles?

Friday The 3^rd February Neat Windows GUI for SQLite – SQLite Spy

Thursday The 2^nd February Delphi 2006 and the .NET vs native debate

Wednesday The 1^st February Reflections on IE7

Tuesday The 31^st January Mainsoft’s test suite for Mono

Monday The 30^th January IBM gets into the free DBMS game

Sunday The 29^th January Robert Fripp’s music download store

Sunday The 29^th January Robert Fripp commends Vista

Saturday The 28^th January Reflecting on XBox 360 Live Arcade

Friday The 27^th January Who’s who at WhatWG, and why it matters

Friday The 27^th January First ever profit for Windows Mobile

Friday The 27^th January MSN Spaces to be Windows Live Spaces

Friday The 27^th January Microsoft Live claims to be disruptive

Thursday The 26^th January Tech-Ed Europe rebranded, moves to November

Thursday The 26^th January Microsoft’s "Application Blocks" counter quick and dirty coding

Wednesday The 25^th January Analyst: only RDBMS and Unix will last

Wednesday The 25^th January Google loves blogs

Tuesday The 24^th January .NET vs Objective-C and Cocoa

Tuesday The 24^th January Web 2.0 the Microsoft way – Mix 06

Monday The 23^rd January Crystal Quest is back

Monday The 23^rd January On Windows Vista and bad dialogs

Monday The 23^rd January SQLite gets CHECK constraints

Sunday The 22^nd January The observed life – depressing, or not?

Saturday The 21^st January You have no privacy part 99999

Friday The 20^th January Visual Studio Live – just get the docs right

Thursday The 19^th January The truth about SQL Server

Thursday The 19^th January It’s not just Google watching you

Wednesday The 18^th January Who will *really* support Team System?

Tuesday The 17^th January Team System just about up and running

Monday The 16^th January NCC weighs in on DRM debate

Monday The 16^th January BackgroundWorker exceptions in .NET 2.0

Monday The 16^th January Where are you reading this blog?

Friday The 13^th January Hosting Office documents in .NET forms

Friday The 13^th January No more Windows Media Player for the Mac

Thursday The 12^th January Mono 1.1 "stable for all users"

Wednesday The 11^th January Borland’s best Delphi release for years

Wednesday The 11^th January IntelliJ IDEA in an Eclipse world

Wednesday The 11^th January Will I run Windows on a Mac?

Tuesday The 10^th January Gosling is wrong, PHP is not a clone of JSP

Tuesday The 10^th January Google Pack is not what I want

Saturday The 7^th January Another reason not to buy from iTunes Music Store

Thursday The 5^th January C# now more in demand than VB in the UK?

Monday The 2^nd January The write-only web – what to do about old stuff?

Sunday The 1^st January Visual Studio 2005 DLL Hell

2005

Friday The 30^th December IT Support: too much kick and hope

Wednesday The 28^th December Who writes Amazon’s "reader reviews"?

Tuesday The 27^th December Bad caps rant

Friday The 23^rd December Microsoft dogfoods .NET – up to a point

Friday The 16^th December Outlook’s extraordinarily obscure UI

Thursday The 15^th December Impressed by Blogger Web Comments – the annotated web done right

Thursday The 15^th December One more step towards the Google workplace

Tuesday The 13^th December Ninja Gaiden on Xbox 360: nearly but not quite

Tuesday The 13^th December Connecting an Xbox 360 – too hard?

Thursday The 8^th December Live by the web; die by the web: Amazon’s Xbox 360 nightmare

Monday The 5^th December Flex 2 preview on The Register

Friday The 2^nd December Xbox 360 supply chaos as predicted

Thursday The 1^st December 10 days of XP 64-bit

Wednesday The 23^rd November JRE installs Google toolbar – how much do I hate this?

Monday The 21^st November Running on Windows x64

Monday The 21^st November Sony Rootkit is anti-virus failure

Saturday The 19^th November Scary Google dominance in my site stats

Friday The 18^th November Free Visual Basic 2005 eBook

Friday The 18^th November A detailed roadmap for Mono

Friday The 18^th November Delphi 2006 is done – apart from C++, that is

Monday The 14^th November Rediscovering the small developer

Monday The 14^th November New Borland CEO says … nothing much

Saturday The 12^th November Xbox 360 not all that compatible …. yet

Friday The 4^th November Common sense needed in Massachusetts Open Office debate

Friday The 4^th November Xbox 360 supply chaos looms

Wednesday The 2^nd November Making sense of Visual Studio 2005 editions

Monday The 31^st October Sony copy protection resembles malware, claims Windows expert

Monday The 31^st October Zend joins Eclipse – two IDEs will dominate software development

Sunday The 30^th October Clever blog marketing

Saturday The 29^th October David Berlind’s inDRMpendence campaign

Friday The 28^th October Visual Studio 2005 is finally released

Friday The 28^th October Forbes attacks bloggers

Friday The 28^th October DRM, Apple, and the future of digital downloads

Wednesday The 26^th October Can a computer play bridge?

Tuesday The 25^th October Sony PSP makes sense of portable video

Tuesday The 25^th October Putting Office online – has Sun got the vision?

Tuesday The 18^th October Web 2.0 is taking off though it is not really new

Tuesday The 18^th October Apple iPod and the perils of introductory pricing

Tuesday The 18^th October Wikipedia under fire

Wednesday The 12^th October Fixing Sophos and a rant against heavyweight solutions to simple problems

Wednesday The 12^th October Please Sun – Don’t infect Java with the Google toolbar

Wednesday The 5^th October Sun comes round to Microsoft’s point of view?

Thursday The 29^th September The iTunes DRM debate

Tuesday The 27^th September Sparkle is all Avalon, all .NET

Thursday The 22^nd September Hell freezes over

Wednesday The 21^st September Fixing Windows Server 2003

Tuesday The 20^th September The stupidity of Default Permit

Friday The 16^th September Will XAML be hated like Flash?

Monday The 12^th September Sceptical about XBox 360 compatibility

Monday The 12^th September Scoble at PDC

Friday The 9^th September HP’s heavyweight utility slugs home PC

Sunday The 4^th September Frustration for Microsoft employees

Friday The 2^nd September Office XML and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Tuesday The 30^th August Give your blog the right name

Monday The 29^th August Microsoft’s Mono problem

Wednesday The 24^th August Ways to use a wiki

Tuesday The 23^rd August BBC reports on legal music file sharing

Monday The 22^nd August What’s in your junk mailbox?

Monday The 22^nd August A must-read ASP.NET post

Monday The 22^nd August I have problems with iTunes

Friday The 19^th August XBox 360 already no 1 at Amazon uk

Thursday The 18^th August I’m running Windows Vista

Thursday The 18^th August Remembering Windows 95

Wednesday The 17^th August Analysing the latest virus attack

Wednesday The 17^th August More FoxPro tea leaves to read

Monday The 15^th August What is the future of COM?

Wednesday The 3^rd August X-develop – an alternative IDE for .NET, Java and Mono

Saturday The 30^th July HP sees sense over the iPod

Wednesday The 27^th July From Indigo to mumble mumble

Tuesday The 26^th July Indigo is like CORBA, says Miguel de Icaza

Monday The 25^th July Farewell Treo, hello Microsoft Smartphone

Thursday The 21^st July XML in SQL Server 2005

Wednesday The 20^th July Who reads IT Magazines?

Monday The 18^th July Mono and J2EE

Friday The 15^th July Apple says don’t use Java

Friday The 15^th July Simple Ajax – and a script tip

Tuesday The 12^th July Dear Microsoft, where is the macro language for Office 12?

Friday The 8^th July IIS 7 a bright spot at Tech-Ed Europe

Wednesday The 6^th July Visual Studio and Longhorn – unscrambling the tangle

Tuesday The 5^th July Motion Computing and the future of the Tablet

Friday The 1^st July Microsoft was right to freeze Visual Basic 6

Wednesday The 29^th June The catch behind free JDeveloper

Sunday The 26^th June Wizard inventor comes forward

Saturday The 25^th June Kent Beck slams troglodyte developers

Tuesday The 14^th June Microsoft copies BlueJ

Tuesday The 14^th June Subscription is the future for online music

Tuesday The 14^th June The paradox of search – why external is best

Monday The 13^th June Why CAPTCHA does not work

Wednesday The 8^th June London Geek Dinner – and why Scoble expects to get sued

Sunday The 5^th June Apple’s "catastrophic" server performance

Thursday The 2^nd June End of the road for FoxPro

Wednesday The 1^st June Chrome and cross-platform .NET

Wednesday The 1^st June Ajax and .NET

Wednesday The 25^th May Jade Empire XBox review

Sunday The 22^nd May Microsoft’s Office team has lost touch with the individual

Friday The 20^th May XBox 360 backwards compatible – no recompile required

Friday The 13^th May How many PCs have spyware?

Friday The 13^th May Just say no to intrusive applications – Yahoo Music, for example

Friday The 13^th May How long should a tech book be?

Tuesday The 10^th May Intel steals my memory

Sunday The 8^th May Blogging is changing Microsoft

Friday The 6^th May Building a 64-bit PC

Tuesday The 26^th April Microsoft and Apple take different paths to 64-bit

Tuesday The 26^th April Windows XP Pro x64 uses Server 2003 code base.

Thursday The 21^st April Wi-fi by the minute leads to excessive hotel bills

Tuesday The 19^th April Is Microsoft imploding?

Tuesday The 12^th April Microsoft has new forums – but where’s the Smart Client?

Saturday The 9^th April Opening a Mac Mini case

Friday The 1^st April Computerworld Developer Survey

Friday The 1^st April Borland, JBuilder and Eclipse

Thursday The 31^st March Do we want role-based development tools?

Saturday The 26^th March Using a wiki for documentation

Sunday The 20^th March Influences on Team System

Thursday The 10^th March How much memory does a .NET application use?

Monday The 7^th March Grimes on .NET

Thursday The 3^rd March How many IDEs can Borland support?

Thursday The 3^rd March C# skills in high demand in the UK

Sunday The 27^th February Is XBox 2 the answer to the iPod?

Saturday The 26^th February Old-school vs New-school at Microsoft

Saturday The 26^th February Robin Good’s Windows nightmare

Thursday The 24^th February Xbox power cord mystery

Tuesday The 22^nd February Slashdot on Mono

Tuesday The 15^th February The risks and rewards of open source software

Monday The 14^th February Welcome to LUA – developing for limited user accounts

Tuesday The 8^th February Is Microsoft Office XML an open standard?

Tuesday The 1^st February Borland’s quality problems and Delphi 2005

Thursday The 20^th January Are you using Visual Studio Tools for Office?

Wednesday The 19^th January iPod rivals need standards

Wednesday The 19^th January How good is the iPod?

Monday The 17^th January The .NET platform in Longhorn

Monday The 10^th January DRM: Customers are hurting.

Monday The 10^th January The CD sales boom will not last

Sunday The 9^th January The problem with COM add-ins

Wednesday The 5^th January Automating Windows Media Player

2004

Tuesday The 21^st December A simple Delphi wrapper for Sqlite 3.0

Thursday The 16^th December Not so sure about "Plays for Sure"

Friday The 10^th December Is downloadable music the end for high end audio?

Friday The 10^th December VS 2005 and .NET 2.0 – September 2005, but too long delayed?

Saturday The 4^th December Microsoft Access: my number one wish

Thursday The 2^nd December ITWriting XBox Game of the Year 2004

Wednesday The 1^st December Why C++ makes faster .NET apps

Tuesday The 30^th November Why Internet single sign-on has to happen

Wednesday The 24^th November Declining IE share – what difference does it make?

Thursday The 18^th November Microsoft runs with local admin rights

Wednesday The 17^th November Future Exchange API will be web services

Wednesday The 10^th November FSFS to replace Berkeley DB in Subversion?

Friday The 5^th November Where is the cross-platform tipping point?

Tuesday The 2^nd November Team System or Subversion?

Friday The 22^nd October Why I haven’t got a Mac

Friday The 15^th October What Borland is up to with Software Delivery Optimization

Wednesday The 13^th October monoForge offers free asp.net hosting on Linux

Tuesday The 12^th October Trials with a Treo

Wednesday The 6^th October A home needs a digital hub

Wednesday The 6^th October Why does ADO.NET make me grab ALL the data to the client?

Tuesday The 5^th October iPod users aren’t thieves

Wednesday The 29^th September Why the Palm doesn’t do .NET

Friday The 24^th September Middleware co. report on .NET vs WebSphere/Linux

Thursday The 23^rd September Oracle’s Java tools strategy

Thursday The 23^rd September .NET pros and cons – a new forum

Thursday The 23^rd September The future of Windows Forms

Tuesday The 14^th September 10 reasons Microsoft developers should look at SharpDevelop

Tuesday The 14^th September A glimmer of RAD Linux (Kylix) interest from Borland

Saturday The 11^th September A pure managed code database engine

Friday The 10^th September Wrestling with the Windows Installer

Monday The 6^th September Review of JDeveloper 10g

Sunday The 5^th September Borland’s Boz Elloy praises Eclipse

Sunday The 5^th September Eclipse now and in the future

Sunday The 5^th September ITWriting.com redesign

Friday The 3^rd September Chrome – a new language for .NET

Friday The 3^rd September Apple is lock-in too

Wednesday The 1^st September A Longhorn blog worth reading

Friday The 27^th August HP iPod a disappointment

Tuesday The 24^th August Does anyone use .NET?

Monday The 23^rd August New C# book for beginners

Saturday The 21^st August SP2 debate exposes deeper problems

Friday The 20^th August We need a standard for rechargeable batteries

Thursday The 19^th August Still waiting for the ideal mobile device

Wednesday The 18^th August In praise of Ninja Gaiden on XBox

Wednesday The 18^th August Can Windows culture be changed?

Wednesday The 18^th August SANS and securing Windows

Thursday The 5^th August A Delphi-like language for Visual Studio?

Monday The 2^nd August IBM’s Eclipse add-in links .NET and Java

Monday The 2^nd August Lookout a sign of .NET acceptance?

Monday The 2^nd August Code Complete 2

Friday The 30^th July Email via mobile phone

Thursday The 29^th July Apple, Real, iPod and iTunes

Wednesday The 28^th July Free UML 2.0 designer from Borland

Tuesday The 27^th July Vandalized Windows and a surprising discovery

Saturday The 24^th July HP and Windows Mobile 2003 SE

Tuesday The 20^th July No ActiveDocumentHost in Whidbey, or ever?

Tuesday The 20^th July Exchange Intelligent Message Filter outsmarted

Sunday The 11^th July Borland Together vs Microsoft Team System

Monday The 5^th July CVS for everyday work

Wednesday The 30^th June The hidden cost of spam

Wednesday The 30^th June Mono is released

Monday The 14^th June The hidden cost of viruses

Sunday The 6^th June Reflections on Tech-Ed 2004 San Diego

Sunday The 6^th June C# nullable types: null == null?

Tuesday The 1^st June UML 2.0 stencils for Visio

Tuesday The 1^st June So far so good with the Exchange IMF

Wednesday The 26^th May Yukon is good for the .NET Framework

Tuesday The 25^th May New Visual Studio Community Preview

Sunday The 23^rd May Are code snippets evil?

Sunday The 23^rd May It’s not piracy that killing CD sales

Thursday The 13^th May Visual Basic’s broken array dimensioning

Tuesday The 4^th May The Microsoft Installer is too complex

Tuesday The 27^th April Mono is set for June 30th

Tuesday The 20^th April Visual C++ Compiler is now free

Friday The 16^th April Microsoft .NET on Linux advances (Mono)

Friday The 16^th April More on XML in SQL Server 2005 (Yukon)

Tuesday The 13^th April Borland kills Codewright

Wednesday The 7^th April Lindows is just a bad name

Wednesday The 7^th April IBM on Web Services and SOA

Tuesday The 6^th April Sun, Microsoft, .Net and open source

Wednesday The 24^th March Microsoft and the EU remedies

Tuesday The 23^rd March Is the Microsoft platform too integrated?

Thursday The 18^th March Microsoft: improve Windows Media Player

Thursday The 18^th March IRiver, iPod, WMA, DRM

Wednesday The 17^th March SQLite gets blob support

Monday The 15^th March HP and iTunes a mistake?

Tuesday The 9^th March Delphi, JBuilder, DRM

Monday The 8^th March Google edits the Internet

Tuesday The 24^th February Xbox Live and ISA server

Sunday The 8^th February Tablet ad misses the mark

Monday The 2^nd February Who invented the Wizard?

Monday The 2^nd February ADA gets a blog

Monday The 2^nd February Too much integration in today’s IDEs?

Thursday The 29^th January Why many developers don’t get .Net

Monday The 26^th January Microsoft Mini PDC in London

Friday The 23^rd January .Net drawing in Delphi 8

Friday The 23^rd January Java IDE market share

Wednesday The 21^st January Java IDE market, Borland futures

Tuesday The 20^th January New articles on Itwriting.com

Sunday The 18^th January Sqlite performance conundrum

Sunday The 11^th January More fun with Sqlite

2003

Saturday The 6^th December Sqlite is small, fast and free

Wednesday The 19^th November Unicode in HTML Editor for dot net

Sunday The 16^th November Borland and Dot Net

Tuesday The 4^th November BDP.Net considered harmful?

Monday The 3^rd November From PDC to Borland Conference

Friday The 24^th October No PDC Birds of a feather for Mono

Tuesday The 21^st October Hosting mshtml

Monday The 20^th October Tablet PDC plan hits snag

Monday The 20^th October The year of the Tablet?

Archived articles

Camera, Flash, Action: LG Viewty review

The LG Viewty is a camera phone with a differnce. The UI is built with Adobe’s Flash, the camera is half-decent, and it plays DivX videos. Does that make it a good buy? Read this review.

Scott Guthrie on .NET futures

Scott Guthrie is a General Manager at Microsoft, responsible for most of the development teams working on .NET. In this interview, he talks about LINQ, new features in ASP.NET, and Silverlight, promising cross-platform compatibility on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Microsoft’s Jean Paoli on Office Open XML

Microsoft is seeking ISO standardisation for its XML Office document format, but running into opposition from advocates of the rival Open Document Format. This interview with Jean Paoli, General manager for interoperability and Office Open XML architecture at Microsoft, covers the rationale for ISO standardisation and reflects on the implications of its success or failure.

Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere

Microsoft is taking its next-generation user interface cross-platform, with a new runtime that lets .NET and XAML run on the Mac and elsewhere. Tim Anderson talks to Forest Key, Director of Developer Tools Product Management at Microsoft.

DRM and the future of digital downloads

Tim Anderson reports on a press briefing with Barney Wragg of Universal Music and Michael Bornhäuser of DRM provider SDC. On the agenda: Subscription vs individual download, Apple, and rogue download site allofmp3.com.

XML in SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005 includes deep XML integration, including a native, indexed XML datatype along with commands that accept or return XML. Tim Anderson interviews Dr Michael Rys about the thinking behind the new features along with guidance on when to use them.

Miguel de Icaza on Mono

Mono is the open-source implementation of Microsoft .NET. Tim Anderson interviews project leader Miguel de Icaza, asking why Mono is now partnering with Mainsoft to ease migration to J2EE.

Why Microsoft froze Visual Basic 6

Visual Basic was the most popular programming language in the world, yet Microsoft froze its development in favour of a new and different VB. Here’s why.

Borland, JBuilder and Eclipse

On February 28th 2005, Borland became a Strategic Developer in the Eclipse Foundation. What are the implications for JBuilder, Borland’s Java IDE? Tim Anderson gives his view, based on a recent interview with Raaj Shinde, Vice President product strategy and architecture at Borland’s Together business unit

How much memory does my .NET application use?

Evaluating the memory usage of a Windows application – many developers are surprised at the high mem usage figures Task Manager reports for their .NET application. But is Task Manager giving useful information?

Behlendorf on Open Source

An interview with Brian Behlendorf, founder and CTO of CollabNet, closely involved with Apache, and a leading member of the open source movement.

How good is the iPod?

Check out this detailed review of the high-end iPod photo, Apple’s market-leading portable music player.

A simple Delphi wrapper for Sqlite 3

Sqlite is a small, fast and free database library. This is a simple wrapper for Delphi 7, including access to some of the new features in Sqlite 3.

The iRiver H320 and H340

An earlier review of iRiver’s H140 MP3 player has been one of the most visited pages on this site. Here now is a review of the more recent H320 / H340 series, together with some thoughts on what it takes to make a successful portable music device in today’s market.

Version Control with Subversion

Subversion is a popular open-source version control system. Here’s my review of the official handbook together with some comments about my own early experience installing and using Subversion itself.

Borland’s Software Delivery Optimization

Talking about SDO, Borland’s chief scientist Danny Thorpe said "..It’s big. Big work. Big risk. Big reward." But what is SDO, and what does this mean for popular tools like JBuilder and Delphi? Tim Anderson quizzes CEO and President Dale Fuller and Nigel Brown, Vice President and General Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

What’s so good about Microsoft .NET?

Wondering whether to jump to .NET? This forum is dedicated to discussing the pros and cons, offering an at-a-glance view of key points with comments from the developer community.

Oracle’s Java Tools Strategy: An interview with Ted Farell

Ted Farrell is Architect and Director, Application Development Tools Division at Oracle Corporation.Here he talks about JDeveloper, both the current 10g and future versions. Topics include JDeveloper vs Eclipse, refactoring, MDA, and model-driven development.

Eclipse past present and future

An interview with Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, about the popular tools platform and Java IDE. I first wrote about Eclipse in July 2002, Of course that article is out-of-date now, but I referred to Eclipse as "a huge shake-up in the Java tools market" and said that "Eclipse has every prospect of becoming the standard Java IDE." Two years on, those comments still look reasonable.