As a software vendor developing a Windows-based PowerBuilder application often competing with Web-based applications, we decided that we need to embrace as many Windows advantages as we can. As you know, the latest hot-ticket item in that arena is Windows Vista. When we decided to purs

In a decision that will distress OpenDocument Format (ODF) fans, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ODF's biggest booster, has gone ahead and as an acceptable format for state records alongside ODF. So now all those state office workers can go right on using Office.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA

BPEL or Business Process Execution Language is an XML and Web standards-based SOA (service-oriented architecture) standard that allows business people to combine services into automated processes. As described in this review, Active Endpoints' ActiveBPEL product family includes a visua

A seasoned Java professional has to know more than just the syntax of the Java language. Java EE offers a set of standardized technologies for enterprise development. A number of open-source frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate are widely used in a variety of Java applications. Famil

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a very powerful new technology coming to us with Visual Studio 2008. There is a great deal of innovation going on in the LINQ space, including innovative projects like LINQ-to-Flickr and LINQ-to-Amazon (among many others), in addition to the great th

I'll be running a new special interests group on Rich Internet Applications for New York Software Industry Association. We are going to cover Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo and more. I invite you to attend our first meeting on Oct 9,2007, where I

Linspire, one of Microsoft's new patent covenant buddies, has joined Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance, which already includes Novell, of course, and the purer, untainted Red Hat. This is after Microsoft amended its patent protection/interop erability pact with Linspire to exclude any

.NET lets us easily serialize an object into XML and deserialize XML into its corresponding object. This functionality has been available since .NET 1.0. The introduction of new data type called XML in SQL Server 2005 gives us even more advantages that come in handy with Stored Procedu

Xandros, one of Microsoft's new best friends, has acquired its own buddy Scalix, the Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging concern, a piece in Xandros' vision of having a complete Linux stack. No price was given but it's clear Scalix needed to team up to go any further despite its 2

The GVH, the competition police in Hungary, yes, Hungary, raided Microsoft's local offices from suspicions the company is abusing the dominance it gets from Office, Reuters reports. The GVH web site reportedly says that it 'sensed that [Microsoft] likely applied a system of conditions

Well, we know one thing about the next, post-Vista, desktop Windows. It's code named Windows 7 now, not Vienna, and Microsoft is taking another round of blood oaths about it not taking five years to see market although it already looks like it's been pushed back. Microsoft says it's 's

Microsoft told its annual financial analysts meeting Thursday that 60 million copies of Vista had been sold as of the end of June. That's 20 million more than the last insight Microsoft shared with anybody. In mid-May it said 40 million copies had been sold to date.

You might be tempted to say that once you enter the .NET world, you'll never look back. Nothing seems too easy for you at this moment, what with the brand-new .NET 3.0 that's just out, high tech and still unexplored in its entirety.

The first principle is fairly obvious. The application has to be useful for someone to want to use it. Not only should it be useful, but it should be compelling, interesting, and it couldn't hurt to follow some of the new design styles and ideas floating around in the Web 2.0 space, in

SYS-CON Media's .NET Developer's Journal author and columnist Dennis Hayes celebrated the 5th anniversary of his 'Monkey Business' monthly column. Hayes is a programmer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta Georgia where he writes software for the Adult Cognition Lab in the Psychology Department.

I was writing some code where I needed to create an instance of an object and then set some values for properties on that object. Seems like a pretty easy task, if you know the class type (and have a reference to it) at compile-time, but what do you do if all you have is a string repre

Ahh, it seems that Novell didn't know until two weeks before its infamous deal with Microsoft was announced that there was a sine qua non patent component to the thing. The poor little innocent thought Microsoft was negotiating interoperability for the sake of interoperability until Mi

The previous CTP of Acropolis felt bloated, slow, and the development was tedious. I kept telling myself that the suffering is for the greater good because a composited, loosely coupled, building-block style application will be easier to maintain and easier to upgrade and be more relia

Vista is getting some traction as a client OS now and that means developers are starting to see on the horizon that they should begin to support it. This is good and bad. Good because there are lots of cool things for developers in Vista, but bad because Vista changes the game quite a

As you probably know, Silverlight is Microsoft's new RIA technology platform. It purports to provide a single development platform that will allow you to deploy WPF-like rich applications to multiple operating systems through multiple browsers. For example, you can write your XAML and

Bloomberg reports being told by three knowledge albeit anonymous people that the European Commission has sent a second questionnaire to Microsoft's rivals asking for specific evidence of Microsoft abusing its monopoly in word processing and spreadsheets and withholding technical data a

Tools like Astoria are a fantastic tool by which we can expose data in a way that jives with the vision of the semantic web. The problem is that there are business concerns to exposing data on the web, not the least of which is of course -how do you charge people for that data? How do

The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg has confirmed that it will rule on Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's pricey 2004 antitrust decision on Monday September 17, the day before the head of the court Bo Vesterdorf retires. Reuters got the date early last month so this

Everex is taking a different tack with this open source stuff and is going to sell a $298 Vista Home Basic-based back-to-school PC at Wal-Mart's with OpenOffice 2.2, saving the user the cost of Office and letting him get used to the idea of running open source software in the protected

What I really like about Bonjour isn't that you can use it to discover nearby iTunes libraries for music sharing (that's how iTunes actually does use Bonjour) or that you can use Bonjour to discover nearby printers (also a legitimate use, that's how I discovered my HP scanner-fax-print

Three CIOs later, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was going to ditch Microsoft over its proprietary formats and gave the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) a lot of credibility, has in hand a draft proposal recognizing Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format as an open standar

Turbolinux CEO Koichi Yano is quoted as saying, 'We support the work the Sourceforge open source community has done to date and felt it was important to become a part of this amazing collaborative effort. Our hope in joining this project is to not only contribute our own expertise in w

Microsoft was pretty transparent when it called Longhorn Windows Server 2008. On Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver COO Kevin Turner said Windows Server 2008 would launch on February 27, 2008 at festivities in Los Angeles that reverberate worldwide and also c

Samba, the open source networked file and print project, and one of the biggest burrs under Microsoft's saddle, particularly with the European Commission, has adopted GPLv3 for all future versions of its code. It is the first major win for the Free Software Foundation outside FSF's ow

The rewritten GPL 3 license, modified to gut Microsoft's patent claims on open source, has been released and Microsoft's reaction has been to issue a statement saying it's not a party to it, has no legal obligations under it, and that the Free Software Foundation is on shaky legal grou

In justifying his deal with Microsoft in an open letter and explaining that there's market demand for functionality that can only be filled by proprietary widgetry, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that 'some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the 'moral high ground'

Mandriva says it won't follow Novell, Linspire and Xandros into Microsoft's lair and wants no part of any stinkin' Microsoft patent protection scheme. CEO Francois Bancilhon says he has seen 'no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagandists that Linux and open source applications are

The Reader's Choice Awards recognize the best tools, solutions, and education offerings in nine categories. The category Winners and Finalists were selected through reader-submitted nominations, followed by online voting at .NET Developer's Journal (http ://dotnet.sys-con.com), the worl

The controversial GPLv3 rewrite came into effect at noon New York time on Friday, putting key pieces of the GNU Linux operating system off-limits to friends of Microsoft like Xandros and Linspire if they ever want to upgrade. Novell's hackles-raising deal with Microsoft was grandfather

In short, unless my findings are incorrect, Silverlight, as it stands now, with no support for data binding, service consumption, or basic UI controls, is a worthless steamy pile. I just took a huge step in Flex's direction.

So I was watching a bunch of video clips from the Transformers movie the other day (pretty much what I do every evening...) and I got to thinking : it would be ridiculously cool to have a Transformers MMO. If you think hard about it, it could have everything that a gamer could ever wan

At this point, we should think about the permissions our component needs. We're creating our own code group and permission set, so we start from scratch: this means that we'll have no permissions at all to start with. So, in addition to the permission to call unmanaged code (which we n

StateMirror offers a technology solution that complements server-side storage mechanisms provided by Microsoft. The central tenant of StateMirror technology is the concept of ?mirrored state servers.? Each of the mirrored servers is implemented by a Windows service that can run on any

Having bowed to the Linux enthusiasts - at least in America - and having given them PCs with Ubuntu installed at the factory, Dell is now being pressured to sell the boxes worldwide, offer the same discounts as it does on Windows machines, make the Linux boxes cheaper than the same con