Mainsoft announced that its latest release of Mainsoft products provide full support for Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft for Java EE, version 2.2, allows Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.NET 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and efficient client-server communications by adding a few server controls to their ASP.NET pages. Ported applications deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java as the original application delivers in .NET.

The Mono Web site has, in some cases, been downloading a very old version of Mono. It serves as a fine example of what can go wrong with software, even with the best of intentions, and without anyone really making a mistake. What happened was back in May 2005, the Mono team added accessibility features to its Web site, including the little yellow pop-up balloons for screen readers.

One of SCO's many critics, Al Petrosky, who was at the short 20-minute hearing, reminded us to tell you that Stephen Norris, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group and more recently Norris Capital Partners, the billionaire facilitator behind the deal, is himself a lawyer - and besides all the legal talent he can buy - should be able to appraise SCO's case himself.

Microsoft has given Yahoo! three weeks to come to terms or suffer a proxy fight for control of its board and a hostile takeover according to a Wall Street Journal report. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly sent Yahoo's board a letter today, a few days after Microsoft's second go-nowhere meeting with Yahoo since it publicized its $44.6 billion stock-and-cash bid for the company over two months ago.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

ASP.NET is part of the Microsoft .NET Framework. To build ASP.NET pages, you need to take advantage of its features. The .NET Framework consists of two parts: the Framework Class Library and the Common Language Runtime. The .NET Framework contains thousands of classes that you can use when building an application.

'We are very excited about this release and can't wait to see what you will build with it,' said WebORB's Mark Piller as he announced recently the release of WebORB 3.4 for .NET as a free product. 'You do not need any license keys and can use the product without extra license cost for development, staging and production purposes,' he added.

In what is a big mistake, in my opinion, Microsoft has chosen to only support Suse Linux in Hyper-V. If they want to truly compete with VMware and other virtualization companies they are going to have to open this up. This does not mean you can not run other distros, however it will not be supported by Microsoft. In today's corporate world that is a death nail for most companies.

In this article we're going to take a database and create our own mini version of an 'Amazon-like' item lookup. That is to say, any .NET or .NET-compatible client will be able to look up items in our database via the Web by simply providing a UPC. This article will show you how. To complete this project, you'll need a few items...

This is the second half of a two-part article on integrating a third-party product with SharePoint. It discusses how three developers integrated Microsoft Office Server (MOSS) 2007 with Confluence1, an enterprise wiki, in about two months time. It discusses work behind implementing the features2 for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence3...

How many times have you been working on a document, making a system change or trying to code a late-breaking change only to have it all go wrong. We've all had that sinking feeling where we have kicked off a series of events only to wish we could roll back time and make it undo itself. Unfortunately for all of us these things happen and it seems that the first thought that crosses our minds is 'Time to polish off the old resume.'

Codice announced Plastic SCM, a cross-platform software configuration management solution that streamlines how software applications are assembled. Application development teams use Plastic SCM to manage parallel development, where multiple developers work on building software at once, even from geographically dispersed locations.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

Apple's iPhone is a massive hit; the company has sold millions of handsets since the product's launch in June 2007. Within weeks of the iPhone hitting the market, the first of several highly publicized security exploits, a Trojan virus targeting the device, was identified. SMobile Systems has announced that it has ported its signature application suite, Security Shield, to the iPhone, utilizing the recently released Apple Software Development Kit (SDK).

JasperSoft, the open source business intelligence venture - which just last week was rattling off a bunch of numbers contending that it's 'the world's most widely deployed BI suite' - said from the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco the other day that it's 'working with Microsoft on a series of initiatives to optimize its suite on Windows Server 2008 and other key Microsoft technologies.'

Unless this is the first thing on technology you are reading in the last six months you will know that we are seeing a new server being launched by Microsoft. After the ups and downs of Vista (many love it and many hate it) I expect that Windows Server 2008 will be something we can all agree is a real bonus for .NET Developers. Whole issues can (and will) be done on the benefits that Internet Information Server 7.0 (IIS7) brings including really cool support for web farm (read highly scalable) and shared (read highly configurable) scenarios.

In traditional software development, companies were required to buy, build, and maintain their own IT infrastructure despite exponential costs. Even an SME needed an IT manager who was responsible for managing all type of IT-related work - installing applications, maintaining software and systems, backup management, patch management, disaster and recovery management, security systems, licensing issues, hardware procurement and upgrades. All this resulted in significant overhead for organizations of all sizes and needed a dedicated team.

The F2F meeting of OpenAjax Alliance at NYC on March 21st worked out really well in my oppinion. As a result of the last F2F meeting in October 2007, we formed a new task force called 'Runtime Advocacy Task Force' at OpenAjax. The goal of Runtime Task Force is to collect a 'wish list' from the Ajax community, get the communities involved, have active dialogs and engage browser vendors, with the goal of fixing the issues that have bugged down Ajax developers and help build a better web. So far we've collected a list of 29 issues, of which we hope to open up to the general public for review/comments/voting.

So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and not just a raw translation of your database schema into objects. One thing that I have noticed is that in a lot of sample code, a lot of utility functions end up being put in inefficient locations because people forget that the entity model is a partial class. This means that you can extend the model with your own properties and methods.

Val Morgan Cinema Network is a provider of screen advertising, with operations in Australia, New Zealand and a joint venture in the UAE. In Australia and New Zealand Val Morgan holds the advertising rights to virtually all cinemas, including those operated by the major cinema exhibition chains and independent operators. The company's attention is focused on the national advertising market with approximately 80 employees based in offices throughout Australia and New Zealand.

ComponentArt is pleased to announce the availability of Web.UI 2008.1, the premium suite of user interface controls for ASP.NET. The Web.UI release in 2008 expands the suite yet again by introducing a highly-demanded file upload control, while further extending the company's lead in the AJAX arena. ComponentArt Web.UI for ASP.NET now features a range of AJAX capabilities, including the new hyper-responsive client-side binding with ASP.NET 3.5 web services. This technique employs ComponentArt's rich client-side controls invoking web services directly, receiving JSON data and automatically updating all UI elements on the client.

Maybe some of you remember a time when we created a sprite on a piece of graph paper and afterwards hacked zeroes and ones in so we could see something eventually move on a TV screen. I have to admit that those days have been gone for a long time and a lot of things have happened in IT since I developed simple games on my C64. And one of these new things is XNA Game Studio (the current version is 2.0).

OPNET announced the availability of Release 5.0 of OPNET Panorama, its solution for real-time application monitoring and analytics across complex, multi-server infrastructures. This latest release extends Panorama's deep instrumentation to .NET applications, delivering full life-cycle application performance management for .NET and Java environments in a single solution.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is repeating history as it mimics the allure and pitfalls of Lotus Notes, according to research released by CMS Watch, an independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies. SharePoint exploits traditionally underserved collaboration needs for information workers laboring within Office tools, and fulfills a common desire to easily create disposable workspaces, CMS Watch found.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air together serve 92 cities through an expansive network throughout Alaska, the Lower 48, Hawaii, Canada and Mexico. Known for embracing innovative technology to improve the customer experience, Alaska Airlines has won numerous awards for its frequent flyer program and eCommerce Website.

During the Q&A period after one of my sessions at the iPhone Developer Summit last Thursday, there was someone there from Microsoft Competetive Intelligence. She asked myself and some other folks who were lingering nearby to describe, in our unbiased opinions, what we thought was wrong with Windows Mobile.

2007 was undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of the giga-merger, to beat the mere mega-mergers of 2007?

You can at long last go and download Vista SP1 from the Windows Update service, a fact that should signal an uptick in Vista adoption, the once-burned-twice-shy having learned to wait for such things from Microsoft. People who want Microsoft to start downloading SP1 automatically will have to wait until mid-April.

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear Microsoft's appeal of Novell's multibillion-dollar antitrust suit against it. The news hit just as Novell's annual BrainShare user conference was getting starting. Basically a private replay of the Justice Department's suit against Microsoft, the case involves Novell's claims that Microsoft targeted WordPerfect and QuattroPro to protect its operating system monopoly.

The other shoe has dropped - not that it's that unexpected - just that it could screw up some economic models. See, the general manager of Intel's emerging markets unit Lila Ibrahim told Reuters Wednesday that Intel was going to see to it that a second-generation version of the cheap Intel-designed Classmate PC, the widget Intel used to fight back the altruistic One Laptop Per Child effort, makes the great leap from the third world to the first.

Mortgage bankers now have a new tool to re-engineer their Microsoft technology based applications. Visionet's Enterprise Systems Framework (ESF.NET) enables re-engineering using built-in database and servicing system connections, single logon capability, SOA based architecture, and ready-to-use components. The platform provides all the needed utilities to manage the presentation, business, and database layers separately. ESF.NET extends its capabilities through tight integration with Microsoft BizTalk and SharePoint. Visionet has utilized this platform to develop a number of applications during the last year.

A reported tête-à-tête between Microsoft and Yahoo on March 10 at which Microsoft is supposed to have painted its picture of what a combined company would look like apparently hasn't advanced Microsoft's suit any - at least not at the price it's offering to pay. Yahoo Tuesday offered its rationale for rejecting Microsoft's $31-a-share bid as undervalued.

Sun and Microsoft, which have been toying with interoperability for years now with not that much to show for it, are going to open a full-fledged Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center in Redmond to optimize Microsoft applications on Sun's x86 storage and servers. This after Sun has had a smaller presence on the campus for the last three years in Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Center.

Brad Abrams, a popular keynote speaker at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in 2007, recently ran into an issue with using Silverlight 2 on a production web server. Basically the Silverlight 2 application worked great on his dev machine, but when hit from the production web server he found 'the page has the Silverlight control, but just a white canvas, nothing else.' He recently blogged about how to fix it.

To understand the potential impact of Microsoft's cloud strategy and SSDS service initiative on Oracle, IBM/DB2, Sun/MySQL, Ingres, Postgres and other relational or post-relational database management systems, it's important to note that SSDS has nothing to do with SQL. SQL Server Data Services is a dumb name because, while the service is apparently based at the storage level on Microsoft's SQL Server technology, it doesn't use SQL (Structured Query Language) or a variant of it to query the information in the database. It uses a new Microsoft language called LINQ.

Browser sniffing is a bad practice inspired by even worse practice. In browser sniffing, a program attempts to determine what sort of browser it is dealing with so that it can act accordingly. Sniffing can be done on the server, or by scripts in the browser.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

SCO filed a Chapter 11 Reorganization Plan and Disclosure Statement with the bankruptcy court in Delaware on Friday, a step on the company's path to emerging from the protective cover of bankruptcy, going private, and rejoining the fight over Linux. Pending court approval, the 63-page document says SCO is going to pay off all its qualified creditors in full on the plan's effective date - well, at least the ones that aren't counting on a windfall by way of litigation. It will also seat a new board and, possibly, enthrone a new CEO.

PreEmptive Solutions announced the availability of Dotfuscator Professional 4.3. This release includes enhanced application tamper defense and heuristics that automatically extend protection to applications that incorporate advanced Microsoft .NET Framework components and programming techniques.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Raymond Ozzie commented last week when asked about the likely trajectory of any Microsoft-Yahoo! integration, if the companies did indeed ever merge: 'Technology companies, if they dive in and just smash things together for smashing them together's sake, it's reckless, it's just simply reckless.'