Canonical's billionaire CEO Mark Shuttleworth took to his blog to squelch speculation that Canonical and Ubuntu would be next to follow in the steps of Novell, Xandros and Linspire and cut a patent deal with Microsoft, deals he calls 'trinkets in exchange for air kisses.' That of cours

Microsoft has cut a deal with the US government and is going modify Vista to hush Google's complaints that it discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own desktop 'Instant Search.' The move comes after Google charged Microsoft with violating its

I have been poking around inside Acropolis for a little while now and have been attempting to make it work for some sample, proof-of-concept style apps. Basically whenever I get a new technology in my grubby little hands, I don't stick to 'Hello World' apps, I try and simulate a real-w

Recursion Software a provider of intelligent middleware and distributed computing solutions, has announced a powerful, mobile application development and .NET interoperability for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Building on its partnership with Red Hat?s JBoss Division, Recu

You think that everything is going your way today, but you're wrong. Happily listening to your music- noise-cancelling headphones blotting out the screeching whine of nearby co-workers- you are unaware of the impending doom. You're kicking ass and taking names, the code is compiling, p

A reported 150 Penguinistas gathered last week at Google at a three-day first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that ended last Friday and, according to Reuters, after they emerge from their closed-door meetings they're supposed to 'issue a consensus statement this week on wha

In case you've been living under a rock, or you don't spend all day hitting Refresh on Microsoft sites waiting for new stuff to come out, Acropolis is a new framework currently in CTP (Community Technology Preview) from Microsoft. Basically Acropolis is a framework providing support fo

Recently, I posted an article that basically pointed out that online journalist Mary Jo Foley had posted an article that was really a bunch of sensationalist clickbaiting, claiming that Leopard was ripping off Vista. Anybody that uses 'Cupertino, Start your Photocopies' and 'Leopard lo

The crazy people are far more interactive in SF than they are in NYC. Most of the crazy folks in NYC just kind of talk to themselves and generally mind their own business. Their San Francisco counterparts actually step in front of you and attempt to engage you in conversation about the

OK. Bottom line here is I'm dissapointed. I've considered Mary Jo's articles to be unbiased and relatively objective in the past. What I'm looking at in her article is basically a piece of imflammatory nonsense. If she had taken the time to do some more digging, she would have found th

My goodness, they're starting to fall like nine pins. Linux distributor Linspire has followed Novell and Xandros into a patent protection deal with Microsoft despite the fire-breathing, contract-scorching wrath of the Free Software Foundation and its GPL 3 spoiler. Microsoft might have

Parasoft Corporation announced the upcoming release of Parasoft .TEST 4.0, an integrated solution for automating a broad range of best practices proven to increase software development team productivity and software quality. Parasoft .TEST ensures developers that their .NET code works

Intel is working with Taiwan-based Asustek Computer on a counter to One Laptop Per Child's AMD-based currently $175 XO notebooks. The full-fledged Intel-Asustek PC will start at $199 and go to $299. Other than a low-end Intel chip, the widgets will have a seven- or 10-inch screen, Wi-F

At this point, it feels as though Acropolis is a layer of abstraction on top of WPF itself. Basically when you build an Acropolis (I'm going to call it AFX , since that's a crapload easier to type, and all the controls are prefixed as 'AFX') you get an Application and a main window. In

Microsoft has bought a little privately held Cincinnati firm called Engyro. A Microsoft partner, Engyro extends the interoperability of System Center Operations Manager 2007. Its Product Connector Suite lets Operations Manager share alert/event information with different enterprise man

Mono version 1.2.4 has just been released. Typically source code for a release is branched off for final clean up and bug fixing, with the release coming a few days to a week later; for this version, there were almost 25 days between branch and release. This may have been due in part t

'We consistently hear from customers that they spend too much time and budget maintaining the systems they have, which leaves limited resources to focus on innovative solutions,' Muglia said. 'With Dynamic IT, we are bringing together the capabilities of the core infrastructure and the

A quick thought for a Friday afternoon. Mary Jo Foley reports at ZDNet that Microsoft is starting work on the Kitchen Client version of windows. Among the features Microsoft is planning to make part of its forthcoming kitchen computing environment are a family calendar, recipe center,

Microsoft has signed still another of those patent cross-license that will set the open source community off because it claims to indemnify the licensees' use of Linux. This one is with LG Electronics (LGE) and Microsoft's announcement says 'through this agreement, LGE will be able to

I found the entire event to be surreal, like an out of body experience. I'd never been in a make-up chair before, and I'm really an 'in the trenches' kind of developer - I've never much aspired to be on TV, but I also won't turn down the chance to discuss things that I am passionate ab

Most of the applications we software developers build need to interact somehow with data from a database. The .NET Framework defined by Microsoft provides a rich set of objects to manage database interaction; these classes are collectively referred to as ADO.NET and the latest versions

If you just add the name 'Kevin Hoffman' to the list of people who will be on that panel, the article will read correctly. I am going to be discussing Silverlight during the panel. Keep in mind that I don't think any of us are there to shoot down or laud any one particular technology,

Now that its long but ultimately uneventful backdating investigation is finally over and it's filed all its missing statements, Novell has returned to making conventional SEC submissions and posting its results. On Wednesday it posted its April quarter. OK, so let's cut right to what e

So I have decided to retire my Sprint PPC 6700, a device that runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and has simultaneous access to voice networks, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Sprint's broadband (EVDO). I frequently used this phone as a wireless modem and connected my laptop to the internet on the train. T

Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted Web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds (www.hanselminutes.com/).

The prize for the gargantuan deal of the holiday-shortened week goes to private equity house Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, which is buying CDW, which sells computer gear to companies and the government over the web, for $7.3 billion, less the half-a-billion CDW has in the bank. The pr

As both a .NET programmer and ColdFusion developer, I always wondered how I could leverage the world of .NET in ColdFusion. Both platforms come with powerful features and using them together might be a wonderful friendship, if one could only make them cooperate. There are two worlds ou

Anyway, I think this is a pretty slick idea. A company new to the whole 'Web 2.0' thing can simply go to Intel, get their shiny 'Web 2.0' box, and get off the ground. At least that's the partyline. The key to Web 2.0 isn't the technology enabling it, its the people using it. If your or

Many requirements tools focus on accessibility and convenience features but fail to address fully the main issue that made use case analysis so successful: managing functional requirements and tracing them through the project development lifecycle. Functional requirements are often ign

Having forsaken the software business for media and ad sales a few weeks ago, VA Software thought it best to change its name. It's calling itself SourceForge Inc after its good neighborly SourceForge.net open source development hosting property, which last we looked doesn't bring in an

With the release of a major new version of SQL Server, it's incumbent on developers to take time to refresh and enhance their knowledge of this new version of T-SQL (Transact SQL) and stored procedure programming. The challenge is to find a good book that will cover the highlights but

As soon as ASP.NET systems grow to the point that more than a single Web server needs to be deployed, decisions need to be mode about where the session state will be held. By default, ASP.NET session state lives in the memory of the server hosting the application. The problem with this

Armed with an Intel government presentation critical of the One Laptop Per Child box, OLTC dream spinner Nicholas Negroponte accused Intel on '60 Minutes' of dumping ~$200 Classmate PC laptops on the third-world markets where he's trying to sell his $176 AMD-based widgets - currently i

This month, I want to talk about Windows Workflow and what it means for the state of .NET development (in my experience and, of course, in my opinion). Before the release of Window Workflow (WF for short because WWF means something else entirely already), there were several avenues ope

Consumer complaints have spurred New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to sue Dell, charging Dell and its finance arm of fraud, false advertising and using deceptive terms and interest rates to boost sales. Cuomo wants such practices enjoined and unspecified damages to recompens

Portable.NET has released PNET 0.8, its first packaged release in more than a year. There were many improvements over the course of the year, but the biggest were associated with the upgrade to the new Libjit JIT engine. The source code is at http://downloa d.savannah.gnu.org/releas es/d

Novell is taking a new tack with respect to rehabilitating its image with the Penguinistas. See, it's been between a rock and hard place ever since that deal with Microsoft so loathed by the open source community was announced in November. It has been forced to repeatedly disavow the p

It's 8:15 in the morning, and as you walk by the main conference room you overhear an animated exchange between the leaders of your IT organization including the directors of application development, production support, testing, and QA. Besides your applications team, you also see your

Oracle is reportedly leading the charge aiming to exploit the Japanese government's latest procurement guidelines set by the country's Communications Ministry in March favoring Linux on bids starting this July. Hence the June deadline on forming the consortium. Like any number of other

I'm sure that there are times when you visit your favorite bookstore to look at new books on your favorite .NET topics and you cringe at the weighty tomes sitting on the shelves. You open these books and page upon page of continuous print swims before your eyes, but you figure it's imp