Improving Microsoft's CodePlex by contributing Microsoft's own dog food
113966
Blog: Microsoft's CodePlex is not a bastion of great code, says eWeek.  That's a problem, but one that Microsoft can solve by contributing its own code.
756876
The first article for this new monthly column looks at eric3, a GUI-based IDE for Python.
146149
An introduction to using refactoring, unit testing and ZenTest on existing code.
588152
Russ asks: Where's the OpenSocial container API? I love Russ because he cuts through all the BS and gets right to the core, most basic question, and he doesn't care who he pisses off. That's my kind of developer. You can't lie to the compiler, when the bits hit the road, you gotta know what garbage goes in and what garbage comes out.  (Ahh programmer's humor!) In other words, suppose I wanted to compete with Google, MySpace, Plaxo and LinkedIn, well, where's the spec that shows me how to do that? Well, of course I don't know, they aren't communicating with riffraff like me, but I have some experience with this kind of stuff, so I can hazard a guess. If they publish a spec,all kinds of projects will likely get started to enable the API in (just for the sake of argument): Drupal, WordPress, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Scripting News (why not add widgets to a random blog), CNN, The New York Times, well you get the idea. There might be lots of implementations very quickly. And that would be it for changes. It would be frozen de facto, they'd have to live with what they have, which given how quickly it was thrown together, probably isn't very good. Not the kind of stuff you'd like to support for the next decade or two. Or maybe they would break everyone, something guaranteed to make them a lot of enemies, much the way Microsoft did, and they were good at migration of APIs.  Google is good at doing AJAXy web UIs, they make users happy, but they're not very good at APIs. This one is a loser, for sure. That's the answer to Russ's question. It's probably not malice that keeps them from releasing details to everyone outside their club, it's pragmatism. They have to try to hold on to it to keep it from becoming even more of a mess than it already is. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. I've been wrong many times before.
653168
Among the factors sited: the ability to customize the software and avoid vendor lock-in.
37251
If you weren't able to make it to this year's just passed php|works conference in Atlanta, you missed out on the keynote that Marco Tabini, founder of php|architect gave at the start of the conference. Fortunately, he's posted the video of it on his blog:   What they didn't tell me, however, is that they had arranged for a simple (but, as you will see, very effective) web-based system that allowed members of the audience to submit "captions" to the screen as I was speaking. The results were, of course, hilarious - mostly because they "forgot" to tell me about the idea until a few days after.   Be sure to check out the video of the video for some great one-liners.
502297
Krugle shipped on Tuesday an upgrade of its enterprise code search appliance for software development teams that is designed to offer improved scalability and search accuracy.Krugle is also now offering prospective customers the ability to evaluate the product on VMware before purchasing it.Krugle Enterprise 2.0 is sold as an appliance and can be configured to work with a variety of software change management systems, including ClearCase, Perforce, Microsoft&#39;s Team Foundation Server, Subversion, and others, according to Krugle. It also can crawl flat-file systems and code archives, according to the company, based in Menlo Park, California.Results can be viewed through a Web browser, but Krugle also offers support for searching directly from the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment). There is an application programming interface for creating other integrations as well. &quot;We have a first-class integration with Eclipse, and the next cab off the ramp will be [Microsoft&#39;s] Visual Studio,&quot; said Matt Graney, senior director of product management.Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk, said Tuesday that it is important for software like Krugle to be tightly linked with a developer&#39;s core environment.&quot;If it can&#39;t be crammed into the IDE, the experience that&#39;s in front of the software developer every hour of the day, I think it won&#39;t get the face time it needs to be worth it,&quot; Cot&#233; said. &quot;As an example, project management software that doesn&#39;t have a touch-point in IDEs tends to only be looked at by managers, and then developers have no idea about the overall project status.&quot;However, it may in fact be easier to scan code results in a browser window, according to Graney. &quot;From a real-estate point of view, Eclipse is a busy sort of environment,&quot; he said.Users can use Krugle to search code repositories in a variety of ways, such as for a specific project, or solely for the comments that developers place with code upon check-in. The engine can also recognize various code features, such as function calls and class definitions.It supports more than 40 languages, according to the company. There is also some reporting capability built into the product, such as a &quot;heat map&quot; function that provides a snapshot of activity levels among various projects.&quot;We&#39;ve been really impressed with it,&quot; said Patrick Hendry, CEO of Thuridion, a software consulting company and early beta user of the 2.0 release. &quot;It definitely saves us time. We haven&#39;t sat down and quantified how much we&#39;re saving into dollars, but clearly that&#39;s happened.&quot;Hendry&#39;s company is aligned with Visual Studio, not Eclipse. It hasn&#39;t yet built an integration with Krugle, but may down the road if it becomes a paying customer, Hendry said. &quot;We&#39;ll probably take a look at that. It&#39;s not a must-have, but it would probably be nice to have.&quot;The Scotts Valley, California, company mostly creates software for publishers who then sell it, Hendry said. Thuridion has &quot;a large body of code&quot; at any given time -- some three million to four million lines of code, excluding comment documents, he said.Thuridion &quot;very briefly&quot; considered other vendors but felt Krugle returned better results, he said.Subscription pricing typically begins at about $25,000 per year and scales up depending on the size of the code base, the number of users and how often the code base is crawled.Krugle was formed in October 2005. Its competitors include Koders and Google. The company also runs a free site, www.krugle.org, which can be used to search more than two billion lines of open-source code. The krugle.org index can also be accessed through the enterprise product.
108829
Recently , Google has released a new service for their search engine, the Google Code Search. It allows for developers to look through and locate items in public source code through the simple Google interface we're all used to. Fortunately, there's also a few security problems the site can help with as well, and Chris Shiflett shares some of these in his latest post.   Stephen de Vries sent an email to SecurityFocus's web application security mailing list earlier today to comment on the new Google Code Search: "Google's code search provides an easy way to find obvious software flaws in open source and example applications."   Chris talks about cross-site scripting problems, issues with the superglobals, SQL injection problems, and even a misplaced trust of the $_SERVER superglobal. Each of the items is linked to is search terms on the Code Search to make it easy to locate.
403472
Reinhold Weber has put together a list of signs (40 in all on his "programming list of shame") that you're a lousy PHP programmer. Here's a sampling:   don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT have never used some form of version control like Subclipse don't use a consistent methodology don't use test-driven development don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes return HTML, not data, strings, or objects. don't allow intelligent error handling you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP   Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.
300638
SableVM is a robust, extremely portable, efficient, and specifications-compliant Java Virtual Machine that aims to be easy to maintain and to extend. It features a state-of-the-art and efficient interpreter engine. Its source code is very accessible and easy to understand. It also has many robustness features that have been the object of careful design.     SableVM is a clean-room implementation of the publicly available specifications.    In this version, we added an experimental generational garbage collector, we imported a new GNU Classpath snapshot, we added handling of Jar/Zip files on boot classpath, we added user-friendly failure messages for bootstrap problems, we added added a profiling switch, we made sablevm-classpath install its files in standard locations, we made jikes and gcc be less verbose by default, and we made several important bugfixes and improvements.  You can download the SableVM from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5523&release_id=281502
436539
Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
297850
Google is in the online ad-service business. Why does it lavish attention on software developers and open-source projects? Kicking offline Web apps into gear
412475
Microsoft said this week that it is now allowing developers to examine source code for .Net Framework libraries as a way to help developers build better software. But developers first will need to upgrade to the newly released Visual Studio 2008 software development platform.Through the .Net Reference Source project, developers will be able to view and debug the source code with the .Net Framework Reference license in a read-only format. Among the software projects covered by the arrangement are: The .Net Base Class Libraries, including System, System.CodeDom and System.ComponentModel; ASP.Net, including System.Web.Extensions; Windows Forms; and Windows Presentation Foundation. Also offered are ADO.Net and XML.The plan first was revealed last October."We think that enabling source code access and debugger integration of the .Net Framework libraries is going to be really valuable for .Net developers," said Scott Guthrie, general manager of the Microsoft developer division, in his blog. "Being able to step through and review the source should provide much better insight into how the .Net Framework libraries are implemented and in turn enable you to build better applications and make even better use of them."Additional framework libraries are to be added in coming weeks and months, including LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and Windows Communication Foundation. Instructions on accessing the code can be found in a blog entry by Shawn Burke, a director in the Microsoft developer division.Access to the code originally was expected to happen by last month. But Microsoft decided to keep taking feedback from developers and postponed the release until this month, a Microsoft representative said. When Microsoft first revealed its code access plans, it was characterized by analyst Greg DeMichillie, of Directions on Microsoft, as not an earth-shattering move now that open source is so prevalent.?Visual Studio 2008 became available at the end of November. Microsoft did not yet have current figures on shipment volumes for the platform this week.
323110
Code that exploits a weakness in the way many Microsoft applications process JPEG images has been published on the internet. Microsoft only discovered the security flaw, which could allow software viewing
99948
Web services are becoming increasingly popular for linking software programs. Now, Microsoft and some other big companies are pitching the technology as a way to manage everything from big corporate servers to mobile phones.
97618
Code that claims to partially exploit a weakness in Microsoft software&#39;s handling of image files has been published on the Internet.
583590
The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.