The struggle to integrate business assets across the .NET - J2EE technology divide is legendary. So it should come as no surprise that the emergence of portal applications as an enabler of Service Oriented Architecture is forcing enterprises to revisit interoperability challenges in a user-centric environment.

NCR said Monday that it's going to spin its Teradata data warehousing business off into a publicly traded company. When exactly depends on board authorization, an IRS ruling, SEC filings and the usual IPO preparations, but it won't be for another six-nine months. During a short conference call, NCR, which came close to ruination when it was acquired by AT&T 15 years ago, said it has been teasing with the idea for 'many, many, many quarters' but was hamstrung by the fact that the unit wasn't making any money. That situation apparently brightened a year ago. NCR said Teradata earned $309 million on $1.5 billion in revenues, up 9%, in 2005.

There are a few things to think about when using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in ASP.NET and this article is going to cover creating a simple wizard application using lessons learned from a large-scale application using these technologies. The basis of this article and the companion code is a wizard used to enter employee expenses and relies on WF to control what page to display and to provide data for the page. Before we get into the code, let me explain the application in a little more detail.

Predicate is a new feature introduced in .NET 2.0 in conjunction with Generic collections. Generics are also new in .NET 2.0; Generic collections are by nature strong-typed. What that means is that if we declare a generic list of Address objects, we can only insert an Address type of object. If you try to insert an object that's not an Address type of object or a derived class of it, you'd get a compilation error. So using Generic collections ensures type-safety. In .NET 1.1, we'd have to use an ArrayList (which is a list of 'object'-type items).

ComponentArt announced the immediate availability of Web.UI version 2006.2. This new release features Web.UI for ASP.NET AJAX the first suite of controls designed specifically for the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX development framework (formerly code-named Atlas), currently in Beta and scheduled for full release by year-end.

Even though I write for SYS-CON, I've never publicly complimented them. But this time they really deserve a credit. SYS-CON will present the AJAXWorld 2007 Conference & Expo 2007 East in March. Usually, attendees have very limited access to speakers during conferences, and SYS-CON Events came out with a simple but smart idea - yesterday they have created an Ask The Faculty Forum, where anyone can post questions to the conference speakers and faculty. And you do not even have to attend the conference to participate in this forum. It's a very nice idea, or rather 'Idea 2.0' Speakers should visit the forum and answer the questions to promote their sessions, and software developers will have a chance to correspond with well known people in the industry. Yours truly will run Adobe Flex Hands-on Workshop during this event, so feel free to post relevant questions - it does not matter if you are planning to be there or not. I'm sure, other event organizers will start copycatting SYS-CON, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

XML is becoming the standard for data exchange. More and more software products and technologies are being built on top of it. Even the newest buzz word in Internet programming- AJAX - is related to XML. The good news is that .NET framework provides a very powerful API for manipulating XML, and you, as a PowerBuilder developer, can leverage on that API through the .NET interoperability feature released in PowerBuilder 11.

We are on the cusp of the next giant step in software applications. It's a new frontier that is there for the bold of mind to embrace. This new caliber of applications will be hugely beneficial to mankind, the quality of our lives, and the safety and security of our nation. These applications will be pervasive and impact every aspect of our lives?how we work, learn, communicate, get medical care, travel, shop, and play.

The capabilities and advantages of using the Microsoft .NET Framework are undeniable. It provides the ability to rapidly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions with Web Services, enabling businesses to integrate their systems more rapidly and agilely and helping them realize the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.

I am often struck by how good some ideas are and often wonder whether they are happened upon by accident (dumb luck), like the discovery of Teflon and penicillin, or whether there was just a really good idea that made it happen. I think what we are seeing in the evolution of .NET is a bit of both. .NET has arrived in my opinion. I base this on the really powerful community I see surrounding it, especially from where I sit here in the North East just north of Boston.

Ensim, the leading supplier of serviceenablement and automation software for hosted IP and application services,today announced that it will offer Ensim Pro X for Windows, the industry'spremier server management and automation control panel, free of charge aspart of a promotion with Microsoft. The Ensim Pro X for Windows Promotionbegins immediately.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

telerik, the leading vendor of UI components for .NET development, today announces the immediate availability of radControls Q4 2006 for ASP.NET and Windows Forms - bringing the first ever Vista-style controls for Windows Forms.

American universities - well, some of them anyway - make a lot of money off IP thanks in part to laws that let them hold patents on federally funded research and license the widgetry. Whether it's liberal guilt or not, seven of them, nudged by IBM Research, will foreswear their property rights and open source some long-term research projects they do with IBM under so-called Open Collaboration Research Principles.

IBM counted noses and says there are now nearly 1,000 Linux applications that run on its mainframes, a 100% jump over this time last year, a fact it attributes to virtualization and basic mainframe performance. IBM recently reported a 390% jump in mainframe sites running Linux. It says more than 60% of its mainframe revenue is now coming from new workloads, with approximately 20% of the revenue and 30% of the MIPS coming from Linux customers, which is what has the ISVs interested.

In its first indication of how its six-week old frontal assault on Red Hat has been going, Oracle said Monday during its Q2 conference call that people downloaded 9,000 copies of its freebie indemnified Unbreakable Linux Red Hat replacement in the first 30 days.

Microsoft Tuesday gave security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, who two months ago very publicly complained of being locked out of Vista because of Microsoft's new 'you-can't get-to-the-64-bit kernel' PatchGuard widgetry, draft APIs that are supposed to let them access the operating system enough to create products.

The long-awaited third major release of Mono, version 1.2 is now out. The main delay was getting System.Windows.Forms (SWF) to work cross platform. This has been accomplished for the most part. There are a few of the rarely used methods still being worked on, but the vast majority of Windows applications should work: just copy the .exe file to a Linux box or a MAC with Mono installed. The Mono implementation of Winforms supports themes with several included in the current version. Mono even supports WinProc, so many third-party controls that rely on Windows messages will run correctly.

and foreclosed opportunities for AMD to sell America-made MPUs at home and abroad and foreign-made chips to domestic clients - and that that would include foreign discovery considering 68% of the market is overseas.

Novell claims Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies, part of the big insurance company, are taking advantage of the infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability pact. Microsoft is supposed to provide them with SUSE subscription certificates, the bulk of the 16,000 SLES certificates Microsoft has activated so far.

Lead Samba developer Jeremy Allison is the new open source folk hero. He has quit Novell because of the patent clause in the company's controversial seven-week-old alliance with Microsoft under which Novell pays Microsoft royalties and in turn gets SUSE Linux and with it Samba users indemnified. Do not weep for him. He's heading for Google, where he will work exclusively on Samba. Google, in appears, is very interested in Samba and has plans.

After years of nearly every tradeshow, magazine, and technologist saying how wonderful unit tests are, developers know that they're supposed to write unit tests. But it's not always that easy. For example, while most developers can write tests for a trivial class library, it's much harder to write tests for the database.

Anyone who develops applications for devices can vouch for the importance of having a powerful emulator that can help accelerate the overall development and debugging process. This articles talks about the new Microsoft Device Emulator and how you can exploit some of its capabilities and make yourself a more productive Windows Mobile and Embedded developer.

In the February issue of .NET Developers Journal, I described how implicit operations such as the boxing of value types can dramatically increase the amount of memory your .NET Compact Framework application uses. At the time, the tools available to help you get a picture of how your application uses memory were very limited. While version 2 of the Compact Framework did report performance statistics, it did so only when your application closed. The static nature of these counters made it very hard to locate memory usage trends in your application.

Visual Studio project templates and item templates are reusable and customizable stubs that can simplify the development process. They provide pre-defined starting points for the project or the project items, thus removing the need to create new projects and items from scratch every time.

Anyway, the survey, whose results were released by Novell, is supposed to show that 80%-90% of the 201 people surveyed back the idea of improving the interoperability between Windows Server and SUSE and having tools that make managing mixed environments easier. Novell and Microsoft say the research confirms what they've been hearing from customers all along.

HP is going to be the first Silicon Valley to bust through the $100 billion barrier, according to what HP told its analyst meeting Tuesday morning, which is not to say that it doesn't need to find the next laser printer to boost revenues - it does. HP CFO Bob Wayman, who'll retire at the New Year, forecast revenues of between $100.9 billion and $102.8 billion next year, with earnings per share of $2.78-$2.98, up from $91.7 billion the last fiscal year and roughly in line with consensus though Wall Street wishes it had shot higher.

Microsoft released VB6 at the start of 1999, which is almost 8 years ago. It's hard to imagine that there are developers who are still actively using VB6, but from the blogs and letters to the editors of many .NET magazines that I have read, it seems that this is truly the case.

Sun has released its downloadable next-generation Java Platform Standard Edition 6 and no it's not open source, even if it's the first Java developed closer to the open source way, a process of supposedly open review, weekly builds and the input of a reported 330 outside developers and 160 companies interested in testing their applications before the code was locked down.

HP has apparently dropped an expected shoe. In a widely picked-up story the New York Times said Thursday that HP has sent the highest of high-powered Silicon Valley lawyers, Larry Sonsini, packing, severing his long-standing advisory ties with its board. He was the board's outside counsel and the guy who, after the fact, mind you, sanctioned the company's pretexting caper as 'within legal limits' without cracking a law book.

Google is going to try to make itself stickier as far as employee recruitment and retention goes. It is currently hiring or trying to hire a reported 1,500 people a quarter. Anyway, beginning in April it will have an internal market where its non-executive staff can auction off their vested stock options. They call these things transferable stock options or TSOs and unidentified financial institutions are supposed to buy the options presumably at a premium to the spread - even if they're underwater - as a hedge - or as a short.

People have been wondering lately: How does Java software work on Windows Vista? The short answer is: Java software works great on Vista. In fact, the entire Sun engineering team working on Java Platform Standard Edition has been tuned into Vista and making Java software work on it since it was named after a breed of cattle.

Infragistics Inc. today announces the release of NetAdvantage for JSF 2006 Volume 2, the first AJAX-enabled JavaServer Faces product to introduce a hierarchical grid! NetAdvantage for JSF is a comprehensive set of AJAX- enabled JavaServer(TM) Faces (JSF) components for building commercial class user interfaces for J2EE applications. The toolset contains the most essential interface controls including a hierarchical grid, fixed columns, navigation, menu, tree, tab, explorer bar and editors. All components are AJAX-enabled with a fully customizable look and feel, providing the ability for teams to build high performing and scalable J2EE web applications.

In a cross-platform world where software giants nevertheless continue to vie with each other for developer mindshare, it is significant that only one major company has managed to synch up its release numbers with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Microsoft is not resting on its laurels though, and the .NET Framework 2.0 is now going to be subsumed into the renamed WinFX, now dubbed the .NET Framework 3.0. So clearly the intention is to stay ahead of the curve.

Following the recent launch of VOYAGER Edge 6.0, Recursion Software announced the availability of Voyager Edge 6.0.1 Community Edition. This community license provides developers free access to the complete VOYAGER Edge framework for developing and extending applications to wireless and embedded systems, and is specifically reserved for development and modeling purposes only.

Infragistics Inc. has released TestAdvantage for Windows Forms 2006 Volume 3, a collection of custom libraries built using Mercury Interactive QuickTest Professional .NET add-in extensibility, for use with Windows Forms applications built using NetAdvantage for Windows Forms controls.

A business integration and optimization software company, today announced it was named IT Supplier of the Year in the enabling software category by Woolworths Limited, an Australian retailer. This honor recognizes the contributions made by webMethods in advancing Woolworths? business objectives and is based on the quantitative results of the retailer?s quarterly vendor performance assessments.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the first'iTVcon Internet TV Conference & Expo 2007' (www.itvcon.com) will takeplace in New York City. Calls for papers for the conference, sponsorshipand exhibit opportunities were made available today at the conferencewebsite. Delegate registration information can also be obtained at the conference website, www.itvcon.com.

IBM has announced new provisioning software that will help accelerate the deployment time for Microsoft Windows Vista customers. The new IBM software reduces the time it takes to manually deploy or upgrade a computer, including an operating system deployment, to less than a minute.