Cape Clear(R) Software, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Platform leader delivering on the promise of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), will host a new series of interactive, instructional seminars on the most straightforward path to SOA. These SOA Architects' Forums will provide SOA best practices, in-depth case studies, and hands-on discussions to arm enterprise-level architects, project managers, and integration strategists with solid implementation strategies to take back to their organizations.

'Macrovision's enhanced AdminStudio offering enables our customers to prepare applications for distribution across the enterprise with more control and efficiency on Windows operating systems, including Windows Vista,' said Fred Amoroso, CEO of Macrovision Corporation, as the company today announced AdminStudio version 8.0, the latest version of its AdminStudio packaging solution.

Microsoft has announced that Maria Martinez has been named corporate vice president of Worldwide Services, effective Jan. 5, 2007. Martinez will continue in her role as corporate vice president of the Communications Sector at Microsoft through the remainder of the calendar year. Martinez will work with Rick Devenuti, who recently announced his plans to retire from his role as senior vice president of Worldwide Services, as she transitions into her new role.

What people should be striving for is the happy middle point, not one of the extremes. We shouldn't be throwing crap out the door and then hoping to just patch it later (what if your patcher is crap??), but on the other extreme, we shouldn't have 3-year development cycles that are so huge, they might as well have just thrown the crap out the door 2 years ago.

So, this fantastically modern new operating system that is designed to provide us all with the ultimate in gaming experiences isn't worth jack [censored] as it stands right now. I installed and attempted to run every game I have, and I ran them in compatibility mode, I ran them in forced 640x480 mode, I ran them in full-screen and in windowed mode, I ran them with Glass turned off, and I ran them as administrator.

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 objects, but in industry-wide practice OO itself hasn't delivered the results we hoped for.

'It is very hard for anyone that has tried Vista to actually go back to an older platform,' said Ali Faramawy, Microsoft VP for Europe, Middle East and Africa, as Microsoft surprised the world by launching Vista for business users today in the Arabian Gulf, at the GITEX trade show.

Fresh on the heels of its eyebrow-raising interoperability pact with Novell and Novell's brand of Linux, Microsoft Tuesday kicked off an Interop Vendor Alliance with two-dozen other companies in the name of making their products work better with Microsoft systems.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) provides tools and features that can be used in almost all areas of software development. As Microsoft VSTS has a broad spectrum of features and target areas, some of its core feature areas are still not well understood by many people working with the product. One of these feature areas is the methodology management system for software development lifecycles, which is built into the VSTS platform.

Every now and then a new development tool comes along that is so simple and elegant it leaves us wondering, why didn't we get this sooner? Introducing Intellisense Code Snippets, it's a new feature available in Visual Studio (VS) 2005 that makes inserting routine code much faster and easier.

In the past, Visual Basic (VB) upgrades were fairly painless and inexpensive because Microsoft made new versions of VB backward compatible, but things are different this time. An upgrade to .NET brings with it a radical shift in terms of architecture, design, deployment, features, and tools. The upgrade will be even more challenging if you decide to move from the forgiving VB compiler to the rigorous C# compiler.

You have probably seen applications that control their size and positions with greater fluidity than you can get with normal .NET Forms, such as maintaining an aspect ratio while resizing, or docking to the side of a screen. Thankfully there are ways of gaining access to the more powerful aspects of Windows, but they are a bit ugly. In this article, I want to help you write a subclass of Form, which has greater power over its position - namely, I would like to keep the form from ever leaving the screen, not even a part of the side. In the process, we will explore ways to find out about the messages that Windows sends to forms, and how to retrieve their extra data and process those messages in custom ways.

In the past, using open source databases meant running UNIX (or Linux) servers and open source development environments. Today however, the two most popular open source database packages - MySQL and PostgreSQL - have full featured Windows installations, and can be run on most Windows platforms. This allows Windows developers to easily utilize open source databases in their applications.

Microsoft has announced the availability of Microsoft Office Live in the United States at http://www.officelive.com after being in beta for nine months, and its free beta availability in Japan, France, the U.K. and Germany on Nov. 21. Customers can sign up for Office Live, a complete, affordable set of Internet-based software and services that help small businesses attract new customers, keep in touch with existing customers, generate repeat business, and easily manage their business while on the go.

Today at the BAI Retail Delivery Conference & Expo, the largest event targeting the retail banking industry, Microsoft made its case to banks on the virtues of the Windows Vista operating system and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, releasing a white paper that showcases how the offerings can help banking employees collaborate better.

Microsoft has announced a new initiative that provides prescriptive architecture guidance, tools and reference implementations aimed at achieving consistency in banking integration at the BAI Retail Delivery Conference & Expo.

Small-business owners who visit participating CompUSA stores nationwide will be able to purchase Windows Vista Business and Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 -products specifically designed for small businesses - through Microsoft's Small Business Value Program. The program includes volume licensing offers tailored to provide a simple, flexible and cost-effective way for small businesses to purchase and manage Microsoft technology across multiple PCs.

When a company as Java-centric as Wily Technology launches its first .NET solution, the software development world takes notice. Now as a part of CA, Wily has just GA'd its flagship Introscope tool for .NET, and one of the reasons it has done so is that worldwide .NET adoption among professional developers is up 10% from last year to 43% (Internal Microsoft DevTracker survey, FY2005).

Anyone who has ever been responsible for leading or managing a software development project knows that software isn't easy. Successfully coordinating and dealing with project sponsors, customers, unexpected risks, and changing scope challenges even the most experienced project leader.

The long march to Windows Vista is finally over. But only 14% of CIOs intend to upgrade to Vista next year, according to a Merrill Lynch CIO survey, 15% to Office 2007. The brokerage says 'There is some hesitation among respondents to upgrade in '08, with an increase in the percentage of CIOs waiting for clarity.'

The highlight of this release is the new MonoBASIC compiler and runtime. The availability of BASIC on Mono has waxed and waned over the years. During the early days of Mono, BASIC received little or no attention. The biggest reason was that all the effort was going into the C # compiler. In addition, the early Mono adopters were not very interested in VB; in fact at the time, there was much debate in the VB community in general about upgrading to VB.NET because of the complexity of VB.NET, and the lack of backwards compatibility with VB6. Also, unlike C# which was released as a ECMA and ISO standard, VB.NET was, and still is, a proprietary product with no publicly available definition (that has the details needed by a compiler writer).

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? Do you find, after two or three major releases, that it's impossible to create upgrade scripts for existing production databases? After experiencing these frustrations and more, I decided to address them.

'ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 is the next milestone in Microsoft web development. It allows for excellent client-side interactivity that provides developers with new paradigms for improving the user-experience,' says Tony Lombardo, Product Manager for NetAdvantage for ASP.NET. 'This technology, coupled with NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, takes the development possibilities to the next level.'

Infragistics, a publisher of reusable presentation layer development tools for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Tablet PC, and Java, has announced the upcoming release of support for ASP.NET AJAX (Codename ?Atlas?) Beta 1 and Beta 2 in its NetAdvantage for ASP.NET product.

Developer testing done early in the software's lifecycle is known to have a high positive impact on application quality, since this is the phase where finding and fixing bugs is cheapest, easiest, and fastest. Ideally, coding standard checking and unit testing would be done on every piece of code before it was added to a team's code base. However, this is not always practical. Many organizations don't give developers the time and resources needed for this testing. Moreover, most organizations don't develop applications 'from scratch' by writing new code for all required functionality. Rather, they typically make incremental enhancements to a large amount of functioning legacy code, or add their own code to extend third-party or Open Source packages.

Infragistics has released the NetAdvantage for .NET 2006 Volume 3, providing developers with the ability to create ASP.NET and Windows Forms applications with the new look and feel of Microsoft Office 2007, using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2003 or 2002.

Microsoft has unveiled new technologies that enable developers to build next-generation interactive applications for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and the Web. The new technologies are designed to help developers build Web services and connected, service-oriented applications that deliver the levels of security, reliability and differentiation that business and consumers expect.

Microsoft has announced the completion of the 2007 Microsoft Office system code and confirmed its release to manufacturing (RTM). This gold code milestone concludes the largest Microsoft Office beta program to date, with more than 3.5 million people downloading Beta 2. The unprecedented quantity of feedback from beta testers and customers helped the Office development team effectively validate product quality and optimize performance.

At Convergence 2006 EMEA, the first Convergence event in EMEA, Microsoft has announced an offering of new tools, services and role-based solutions to help simplify the deployment, management and support of IT infrastructure for midsize businesses.

In his keynote address at Convergence 2006 EMEA, the first Convergence event in EMEA, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates discussed a leading challenge facing organizations today: how to help companies maximize productivity by helping them bridge 'the last mile' between personal productivity software and their back-end business systems. Gates highlighted how Microsoft Dynamics business management solutions are combining Microsoft software and online services to make business applications more usable and businesses more productive.

Fall the network protocols missing from .NET 1.0 and 1.1, the most notable is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Manually implementing the protocol for software developers was an unreasonable expectation, especially considering the complexity of the protocol in comparison to such protocols as HTTP or TELNET. This led to a thriving third-party component industry that has been perfecting FTP implementations since VB3 (and has been an ideal example of the argument for buying versus building when FTP functionality was required, especially with a price point of around $250). With the coming of .NET 2.0, Microsoft has introduced a native FTP communications implementation, but with some very curious design decisions that may complicate programming sufficiently so as to make abandoning commercial FTP components ill-advisable for many users.

How often have you wanted to reuse some code you previously wrote but it didn't quite fit in your current project? Code reuse is an oft-touted benefit of modern object-oriented programming. With the advent of generic support in the C# language appearing in the .NET Framework 2.0 developers have new leverage for writing code that can be reused without compromising type safety.

Hanselminutes is a weekly 30-minute podcast with Web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. The following is a transcript from show number 29, entitled 'Dynamic vs. Compiled Languages'. You can listen online at www.hanselminutes.com.

I have been guilty of underestimating the power of Features. It wasn't really until I started digging deep into the bowels of the new Features and Solutions system in SharePoint 2007 that I finally started to realize how pervasive this stuff is. At first glance, it's extremely easy to make a sweeping generalization that Features are just a simple ability to add 'stuff' in a couple of different locations throughout SharePoint. SharePoint actually does a really good job of hiding its own use of Features, which makes this misunderstanding all the more easy to make.

If you have read enough of my blog entries, you know that when I encounter a new technology, the first thing I ask is, 'That's great, but can I game with it?'. The answer to WF is of course, yes.

Microsoft Game Studios is teaming up with the Georgia Aquarium to introduce an educational initiative that will help excite and inform students about the complexity of and caring for marine life. Microsoft, the Georgia Aquarium and AirTran Airways have announced a national essay contest on marine conservation and the importance of preserving aquatic life.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer, has announced the availability of Windows Embedded CE 6.0, the latest version of the company's industry-leading software toolkit used to build real-time operating systems for devices such as Internet protocol (IP) set-top-boxes, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), wireless projectors, and a variety of industrial automation, consumer electronics and medical devices.

'Interoperability continues to be an important requirement for our customers, particularly when it comes to open source applications that run on Windows,' said Bill Hilf, GM of Technical Platform Strategy at Microsoft, as Microsoft and Zend Technologies Inc. today announced a technical collaboration to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Office Live, a set of Internet-based services tailored to the needs of small businesses, will be coming out of beta in the United States Nov. 15. These services are expanding internationally as well and are also scheduled for free beta availability in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom on Nov. 15.

Microsoft and Zend Technologies have announced a technical collaboration to enhance the experience of running the PHP scripting language on Windows Server 2003. The parties expect to extend the collaboration to the next version of Windows Server, code-named 'Longhorn.' The resulting technology enhancements and ongoing interaction with the PHP community is expected to enable customers to take advantage of the Windows Server platform. The cooperative effort seeks to provide customers with richer functionality and better integration, resulting in improved performance and increased reliability.