ColdFusion Warms to .Net
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Adobe updates its Web development tool with support for Microsoft .Net.
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New virtual-machine technology can be used to test software patches and migrate aging Windows NT applications. By John Foley, Paula Rooney, CRN.
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Mike Potter has posted about an event happening this Thursday (June 28th) - a webcast to help developers learn more about integrating Flex and PHP.   Are you interested in building rich Internet applications with PHP as the backend data service? Join me this Thursday as I present at an Adobe online e-seminar. The session is scheduled for July 28th, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time.   You'll need to register for the event to attend and you'll get info on "why rich internet applications" and some examples of companies using it in their web-based applications.
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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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Alchemi is a software framework that allows you to painlessly aggregate the computing power of networked machines into a virtual supercomputer (computational grid) and to develop applications to run on enterprise grids.      We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.6. The major changes since 1.0.5 are a LUA (Least Privileged User Account) operation for both Manager, Executor in normal and service mode and an option for executing user's GThreads in a secure sandbox (experimental)  Please note that this is a developer release intended for enthusiasts and early adopters as documentation is not up to date.     Go here for downloading the files in this release:     http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66729&package_id=186776&release_id=456163
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Prism, a new Windows-only beta release from Mozilla Labs, lets users run web applications in separate, stripped-down browser windows, making them look and act more like desktop applications. Compiler has a first look.
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Dr. Internet recommends using IKVM tools to convert Java files into .Net applications or libraries.
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MinGW: A native Win32 port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), with freely distributable import libraries and header files for building native Windows applications; includes extensions to the MSVC runtime to support C99 functionality.   Test version 4.0 beta2 is now available for download, please read this first:      This version is fully compatible with v4.0 beta1.          As with 4.0 beta1, this version should correctly read virtuawin.cfg file of v3.2 and earlier releases but will generate a virtuawin.cfg file which will not be correctly read by these earlier versions.      Please backup your virtuawin.cfg file so you can roll back to an earlier release.      This version does not load your existing tricky.cfg, sticky.cfg, assignment.cfg or userlist.cfg as these files and concepts have been merged into one - Window Types stored in the new window.cfg file. You will need to recreate these configurations using the new Window Type setup dialog.  This version has:      * 1886979 Fixed flag problem which left windows being 'sticky'.     * 1887127 Automatically change window-list menu to compact.     * 1843056 WinList: Removed error dialog if taskbar not found.     * Also see change log for 4.0 beta1  See HISTORY.TXT for a full list of changes and our main support page (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/support.php) for more information on test versions.
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NetEase gets a timely upgrade after early success with a new title.
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Real Software is adding an object-oriented introspection capability to its RealBasic rapid application development tool Tuesday and has set sights on tuning the product for Web development.Supported on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, RealBasic gives Visual Basic developers a familiar environment. "It's similar enough to Visual Basic that a Visual Basic developer could switch to RealBasic [very] quickly," said Geoff Perlman, Real Software CEO.RealBasic is an object-oriented, compiled version of Basic. With RealBasic 2008 Release 1, available Tuesday, an introspection capability allows a program to get information about itself, such as in an object-oriented system with classes. Introspection would allow a program to find out what a class has in terms of properties and methods at runtime. This aids developers by allowing them to write code to make it easier to assess properties. Developers can write code that is more generic.A software developer using RealBasic, Charles Yeomans, a contractor working for Dakim, said the addition of introspection is "huge.""Introspection makes it much easier," to do database-related work, Yeomans said. He has used RealBasic to develop applications for Dakim, which makes cognitive fitness solutions, and also has used it to build front-end software for his wife's law firm.RealBasic's cross-platform capabilities have been beneficial, said Yeomans. He said he can develop on the Macintosh and test on Linux.RealBasic has been used for building various systems, including vertical market and government applications. Yeomans said the product now is not suitable for Web application development. But Real Software does plan to outfit the product with Web development capabilities."Our goal with RealBasic is to allow a Web application [to be developed] in the same way [developers] build a desktop application," using such capabilities as a form generator, said Perlman.Under Real Software's plan, RealBasic could become a bit more like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). No timeframe has been set yet for adapting RealBasic to Web development.RealBasic 2008 Release 1 is being announced at the MacWorld conference in San Francisco. The professional version of the product, featuring cross-platform capabilities, costs $500.
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Not content with eating into Microsoft&#39;s share of the browser market with Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has released an open-source email client to rival Outlook.
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A new concept - part of Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.5 - called the Dynamic Language Runtime is gaining popularity, not only among Web developers but also business program developers who see this as a possibility to build dynamic and flexible functionality that Java hasn't provided yet.  BetaNews spoke with one of the new technology's chief evangelists last week at TechEd.
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All for one A community driven project for Ruby source code to run natively on Microsoft's .NET framework has shut down, faced by progress from an official Microsoft effort.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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Ziff Davis - Vulnerabilities in LibTIFF and Xpdf could allow remote system compromise.
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This release fixes a number of minor bugs and inconsistencies. There are also several minor improvements throughout, and the provider libraries have been updated to recent versions. Gentle.NET is an RDBMS independent object persistence framework written in C# for .NET and Mono. It features automatic SQL generation and object construction, an SQL factory for creating custom queries, and much more. It has excellent performance and reasonably complete documentation.     Download the latest release from the project home page at: http://sf.net/projects/gopf   or visit the project community site for documentation and other related material at:  http://www.mertner.com/confluence
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Macromedia is currently alpha testing an upgrade to its ColdFusion MX 6.1 product code-named "Blackstone." Based upon consumer feedback, Macromedia focused on improving three areas: data entry, printing and reporting. A public beta of Blackstone will be available this fall with a final release on tap for early 2005. ColdFusion MX is a product family designed to develop and deploy Web applications and services.
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Elizabeth Smith has a new post to her blog today covering some of the fun she's been having with compiling things like Gtk+ and PHP-Gtk2.   So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.   She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)