Microsoft developers taking their work home with them
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The Seattle P-I has an interesting look at Redmond's program that has 'Softies taking home the latest in home gear in an effort to better understand how the company's digital living room products perform in actual living rooms.
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2005 Standard Edition targets developers working in small organizations.
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One of Microsoft's most ambitious new projects is taking off more rapidly than many expected, perhaps due to popular demand. Windows Home Server -- one of the stars of WinHEC last month and a surprise standout at TechEd last week -- has officially moved to Release Candidate 1 status.
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Compuware on Tuesday will announce tools providing fault simulation and security analysis for developers building applications on the Microsoft platform.ADVERTISEMENTReducing the Total Cost of OwnershipLearn how to reduce the total coast of ownership in enterprise data management in this case study.
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As organizations consolidate their systems and prepare for new versions of key software such as Windows Server 2008, major server-related projects are getting put on the front burner.
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Microsoft yesterday took the wraps off a new set-top box aimed at tying together the living room, the PC, and the company&#39;s MSN network and content.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has built a tool to track the daily progress of Scrum-based software development projects.
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Microsoft, IBM and Borland are upgrading their software and offering users new workflow features, support for multiple languages and tools to manage the lifecycle of in-house applications.
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A new report sees growing opportunity for the open-source operating system to displace Windows in small offices.
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The tools, part of an upcoming Visual Studio update, are focused on making it easier to create customized Web applications.
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That's not all. Microsoft also has new tools geared to help cut costs of managing corporate data.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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This week you'll learn about solid software design practices, many of them borrowed from working with Windows applications. The result is the development of a Web based drawing package. By Guyon Roche. 0802
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As a new year begins, the titan of Redmond is tinkering away at applications from years gone by.
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Updated OS includes software applications designed for business users.
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A new product from Microsoft Corp.&#39;s hardware group aims to eliminate the need for that not-so-secret list of user names and passwords hidden in the typical desk drawer.
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Matt Stephens gets to grip with people issues and team building  âThat it is people who write software is terribly obvious . . . and ignored.â So quotes Alistair Cockburn, himself quoting Gerald Weinberg, in his book Agile Software Development - catch our review of the Second Edition here. Itâs easy to see the people in your project as mere commodities â not helped by MS Projectâs insistence on labelling them as âresourcesâ â hot-swappable units that may be switched in and out of different roles or different projects, with no loss in productivity, creativity or morale.â¦