Basically Volta's tier splitting feature is designed to make it so that you can build your application early and then figure out where the services need to go when you're done. This allows you to profile your entire application on a per-method-call basis all in a tight integrated system without having to deal with complicated distributed deployments. Once you've done your profiling you will be able to see what communications are chatty, which ones are chunky. Further, you can then decide whether you want Service A to be in the 'secure' server type and whether you need Service B to be running on the 'high availability' server type, etc.

SpringSource, formerly known as Interface21, has announced the final release of Spring.NET 1.1, an application framework for the development and deployment of enterprise .NET applications. With roots in the widely used Spring Framework programming model for Java, Spring.NET extends the features of the Spring Framework to the .NET environment.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show keynote by Bill Gates has become an annual tradition, but his 11th CES opening keynote is likely to be his last. During the keynote, Gates talked about the ongoing transformation of the personal computer and he shared sales figures for Windows Vista: Microsoft has sold more than 100 million Windows Vista licenses to date.

Since I'm in the middle of moving to a new city and need to get organized, I thought I'd roll a little application using SQL Anywhere, PowerBuilder, and Amazon Web Services to help organize my media collection. In doing so, I'm going to check out some cool features in SQL Anywhere, in particular, consuming Web Services.

It will take months for this week's fusillade, the results of Microsoft's Virtualization Deployment Summit in Redmond, to clear enough to see if any of the mortars scored a direct hit because Microsoft's repeatedly delayed retort to VMware, the free, catch-up, first-generation Widows Server 2008 hypervisor widgetry called Hyper-V still won't be out until at least August, according to Microsoft, six months after the also delayed Windows Server 2008 is finally released in February.

In the midst of Microsoft's initial assault wave on virtualization leader VMware this week, VMware announced the public beta of its Stage Manager management software, stuff that's supposed to accelerate the delivery of new or updated applications from staging to production. Microsoft claims its management capabilities are a lot better and broad-based than VMware's - or will be. Ditto Sun. Stage Manager proposes that you use virtual rather than real servers to roll out software. For one thing it's cheaper and safer.

In part because of MoMA, the Mono analyzer, there were 1,907 new methods implemented in this release, System.Data is 99% compatible with .NET 2.0, and about 150 bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms alone. This was the first version released after Novell hired a full-time QA person for Mono, and Mono set up a new release procedure.

Telerik has released RadControls Q3 2007. The latest volume includes updates for all product lines for Web and desktop presentation layer development, as well as a new release of Telerik Reporting and a preview of Telerik's RIA controls for Silverlight 1.1/2.0. Q3 introduces new controls and features across all product lines. Along with functional updates, the Q3 release introduces Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 compatibility.

Shipped as a part of Microsoft Visual Studio, SourceSafe sells more than $40 million (US) per year (Source: IDC) and is a very popular version control program for Windows developers. As the teams go distributed and cross-platform, the limitations of SourceSafe rise to the surface. In fact, there has been a lot of negative press about the drawbacks of SourceSafe.

The evolution of Web sites to dynamic rich interactive applications is a true revolution for users. But for ASP.NET developers tasked with building high-performing scalable applications, it presents major challenges. The features that characterize blogs, wikis, personalized pages, and other data-driven Web 2.0 applications fundamentally change processing, transmission, and rendering workloads, and require new approaches and solutions. In Web 2.0 applications:

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers. One thing that surfaced was that device developers needed more help when it came to testing their applications efficiently. Whether that meant testing on multiple devices or under varying conditions or simply being able to write unit tests, they clearly needed help getting applications to market faster by reducing the testing time.

In response to the commercial release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, the latest version of the most popular Integrated Development Environment for Microsoft .NET Developers, Software FX announced that it has updated and changed the name of its Chart FX for Visual Studio 2005 product to a more simplified Chart FX 7. 'Not only is the name more appropriate now that we have two versions of Visual Studio in the market, but it is more in-line with future product announcements coming from Software FX,' said Rene Garcia, president of Software FX. 'As with any new version of a major development tool like Visual Studio, the adoption curve will take some time and we wanted to prevent unnecessary confusion from customers looking for a solution for Visual Studio 2008.' Mr. Garcia concluded.

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich interactive experiences over the web. The Chart FX Silverlight Add-On extends Chart FX 7 and allows developers to add Chart FX functionality to their Silverlight-based web applications. Software FX will be providing the Chart FX Silverlight Add-On as a free download to Chart FX 7 customers. The Chart FX Silverlight Add-On combines the most complete and robust charting functionality provided by Chart FX 7 through a client/server architecture with the visual richness of Microsoft Silverlight.

With the European Commission basically holding a gun to its head, Microsoft has signed a five-year accord with the Samba Team that will give the open source project access to the documentation for the Microsoft protocols that should make Samba fully interoperable with Windows workgroup server products. Samba will be paying a one-time fee of 10,000 EUR for the privilege. It already has that nominal sum in the kitty and there will be no per-copy royalties, something it couldn't have abided. What Samba wasn't able to finesse from Microsoft - compliments of the EC - was patent immunity, leaving it still strung on a tightrope that could - conceivably - snap. It has to use the documentation without treading on Microsoft's IP.

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-fidelity experiences in Windows Vista, blending together application UI, documents, and media content. WPF contains two data sources for XML and objects. To enhance productivity and include WPF applications in lines of business, you need to employ best practices and guidelines in reusing existing internal frameworks through WPF data binding capabilities. That way enterprises will benefit from advanced accessibility, data-driven UIs, and the highly stylized data visualization inherent to the WPF platform.

SI International (www.si-intl.com) is a provider of information technology and network solutions, primarily to the United States government, But due to its continued success in defining, designing, building, deploying, and operating mission-critical solutions for the Department of Defense and several federal civilian agencies, business at SI International (SI) has been strong and growing.

Another version of Visual Studio is here and while there are many cool features, we can conclude a lot from the fact that it isn't a staggering release. The first Visual Studio that wore the .NET moniker was a paradigm shift and threw in many features such as Web services, which though immature was definitely a killer feature. Now we have interesting upgrades and improvements. I won't say that Visual Studio has jumped the shark because I do think it is on track and still relevant, but this is a sign that the platform has matured. Most of the cool technology is manipulatable in Visual Studio 2008, but isn't baked in as most of it was released earlier.

'Our adoption of MSN SideGuide expands the strategic relationship we have enjoyed with Microsoft and MSN since November 2006,' said MetroFi President and CEO, Chuck Haas, as MetroFi yesterday announced its planned introduction of MSN SideGuide as an advertising delivery platform for its free, ad-supported municipal Wi-Fi service, MetroFi-Free.

After suddenly canceling its earnings release last week because - come to find out - the SEC has been poring over last year's 10-K and this year's Q2 10-Q since this summer, whatever mysterious 'accounting matters' provoked the agency's review just as suddenly got resolved and Novell posted its Q4 results after the market closed Thursday. Novell hinted the SEC's concerns might have had something to do with Novell's admittedly complicated arrangement with Microsoft, which at the end of year one was said to have realized $122 million, 51% of their bogie. Anyway, Novell lost $17.9 million, or five cents a share, on revenues up 5% to $244.9 million, a figure that excludes $6 million in revenue from its Swiss-based breakeven consulting unit, which it agreed to sell during the quarter, costing it three cents a share.

Microsoft is opening up its ad-supported 'software-plus-services' Office Live Workspace answer to Google Apps to public beta for feedback, it says, starting with those who pre-registered for the thing. The way it works Office users can post Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDFD files to an online collaborative workspace on Microsoft's servers directly from their Office programs with a click of a mouse and share their work or simply access it from someplace other than their PC. It's supposed to be a saner approach than sending a document off to collaborators on a version-uncontrolled e-mail round robin. Five versions are preserved.

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software ASA has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system and hindering interoperability by not following accepted Web standards. It wants IE unbundled or Windows to preinstall competitive browsers on the desktop. And - and this seems extraordinary even for Europeans - it wants the EC to compel Microsoft to support open web standards 'accepted by the web-authoring communities.'

As a part of a move to streamline patient records and deliver health solutions across incompatible software platforms, IBM and business partner Mainsoft Corporation announced that Healthways has crossed the .NET-Java EE software standards divide to deploy a multimillion patient health and wellness portal.

'This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally,' said Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft, as it was anounced yesterday that Microsoft had acquired Multimap, one of the United Kingdom's top 100 technology companies and one of the leading online mapping services in the world.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

Microsoft put out its second Windows Server 2008 release candidate (RC1) Wednesday for anyone, it appears, to download and poke around ahead of the thing's long-awaited launch at the end of February at an event now dubbed 'Heroes happen here.' To take you back, Microsoft had to pull virtualization code out of the operating system just to make that belated date. You might remember that for a while there Long Horn was due at the end of this year. Anyway, Microsoft said some 1.8 million people have gotten evaluation code.

My seven-year-old daughter thinks that there is a knowledge genie that her teacher 'Googles' for answers. While cute, the anecdote also exemplifies how much Google's obsession with simplicity has helped build brand awareness, making their name literally synonymous with search. I can foresee generations X and Y being followed by generation S - one that will rely on search to accomplish almost any task.

DNK Web Solutions, Inc announced the launch of .NET 3.5 hosting. DNK Web Solutions production web servers are installed side-by-side with .NET Framework 3.5 and earlier versions. Customers can choose which ASP.NET version they desire to develop against using a real-time ASP.NET Version Chooser tool available in the DNK Web Solutions hosting control panel. Customers have the freedom to switch to different versions of ASP.NET without the assistance of DNK Web Solutions staff, and do not have to experience service disruption due to server migration.

Microsoft, which is often cast as the evil stepsister, has advanced its rival-limiting designs on One Laptop Per Child's novel XO machine to the point that its so-called 'Unlimited Potential' people are openly talking about running 'limited field trials' on a XP/Office version of the thing next month, even though the port's not done yet. If successful, it says the operating system could be released in '08 at the earliest. But Microsoft is making no promises. It has to squeeze the hard drive-based XP into the XO's 1GB Flash memory - a dicey proposition Microsoft allowed may not work since it's half the space it needs. It's asked OLPC for an internal SD card with an extra 2GB of memory and has designed a new BIOS that boots off the card.

'Please don't mistake silence for inaction,' requested IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch this week, as he revealed the none too astonishing news that the version after IE7 is to be called...IE8. His team looked at a host of alternative names, Hachamovitch said - including IE for Web 2.0. But Bill Gates has already let the cat out of the bag: IE8 it is!

Xceed has announced that Microsoft is using Xceed Zip for .NET and Xceed Chart for .NET to implement client-side and server-side portions of its upcoming Windows Home Server product. Windows Home Server helps centralize and connect digital experiences, providing a familiar and reliable way to store, share, and automatically protect digital photos, music, videos, and documents.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Software virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same computer. The basic premise is that for most of the day your server is basically idle and the CPU and memory are not tasked with processes all day long, the server has excess capacity and virtualization allows you to maximize your investment by installing another full version of an operating system on your hardware at the same time.

Since Ed Zander led Sun into the valley of the shadow of death back, what? over five years ago now, it has never recovered. And there's a good chance the same thing may happen to Motorola. With a year left to run on his contract, Zander quit yesterday and clearly not a moment too soon given the events of the last year or so. There are people who would have gladly ridden him out of town on a rail months ago and it's assumed he's resigning now to avoid getting fired. Zander, whose telecom experience consisted of answering the phone, was brought in four years ago to narrow the lead in phones between a first-place Nokia and a second-place Motorola. Motorola is now in third place, losing ground to both Nokia and Samsung, its market share sheered from 20.7% a year ago to 13.1% now.

The .NET Framework 3.5 release last week was a big one for .NET, and delivered what Scott Guthrie summarized as 'a ton of new capabilities and improvements for web, client, office and mobile development.' Guthrie additionally shared with developers a road-map of some of the upcoming initiatives and releases for .NET web development that his team is currently working on for the months ahead.

VS 2008 can also be used to build AJAX-based web apps. It can be used to target multiple versions of software like existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 programs and continue to deploy them on .NET 2.0 machines. .NET Framework 3.5 supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It can handle SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications.

See, IBM refuses to allow z/OS to run on PSI's Open Mainframes and so PSI is suing IBM for antitrust, hitting it with both barrels of the Sherman and Clinton Antitrust Acts in a plethora of monopoly charges that include tying the z/OS software to mainframe hardware, a serious antitrust no-no and something IBM is specifically forbidden to do under the lingering terms of its now dissolved 1956 consent decree with the Justice Department. It is also suing IBM for coming between it and its acquisition by HP and for threatening PSI customers with 'being drawn into the lawsuit,' PSI says. It claims damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the loss of its acquisition alone and is in 'dialogue' with the Justice Department.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

Lots of people have been asking about how to get started with Silverlight, and what they need to do to get up and running with Silverlight quickly. Inspired by blog posts such as Jesse Liberty's, I'm going to take this from first principles, with no prior knowledge assumed. So let's get started with the first and most simple application - a 'Hello World' in Silverlight. You need no special tools for this. Just notepad will do...

There's a couple of things that I like about his sample, and a couple of things that worry me. First, I like the idea that there's an Ajax controller. I hope in the final bits it's simply called Controller and they don't make you distinguish between an Ajax controller and a regular controller - you should be able to pick and choose the functionality you want, and, well, quite frankly, I'm just sick and tired of seeing the word Ajax embedded in code. The Ajax controller should give you, as he demonstrates, the ability to render small bits of HTML. What I dislike about the Ajax nomenclature is that this functionality is useful even outside the realm of Ajax rendering and I think it should be included in the default controller.

Whoops! This one almost got by us. Microsoft last week said it signed a patent cross-license with Kyocera Mita that's supposed to protect the Japanese firm's multifunction products (MFPs), printers, copiers and 'certain Linux-based embedded devices.' No talk of terms. Kyocera Mita said something about the deal 'offering reassurances and increased satisfaction for all our customers. Since starting its IP licensing scheme four years ago, Microsoft has cut more than 200 licensing deals but only a few of them like the Novell and Turbolinux deals are known to cover its claims that Linux treads on its patents.