Web Development News
To celebrate the release of Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft are making the express versions of their development tools free for a year (until Nov 6, 2006)
Cynics will probably suggest this is to steal customers from Sun, Borland etc. but who cares. Love or hate Microsoft they sure know how to make a good development IDE.
More details here
...More14:20:42 - admin - No comments
Computer Associates have taken on Zope(an open source content management application) and will provide integration with Ingres, their own RDBMS.
They're also developing a new open source licence for Ingres on Linux that will be free.
It may matter to some, but some people think this is all a bit too much of a niche market issue to be of interest to the rest of us, but I decided to tell you anyway.
...More07:59:00 - Spanner - 2 comments
Well, it looks like the release date for Yukon has gone back again, but in the meantime Microsoft have released the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition for download.
...More15:49:22 - Spanner - No comments
I've often read articles about why I should put lots of effort into writing good, clean html. I'm swayed by their arguments and agree wholeheartedly with what they're saying but I only ever do a quarter of what they suggest.
Fortunately, I've now found my justification.
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For anyone who's got an interest in development using ASP.NET, or who's a windows sysadmin, there are some promising seminars coming up at the Microsoft Technet Roadshow being held in Edinburgh, Birmingham and London.
...More16:15:12 - Spanner - No comments
Zend has released PHP5. Amongst it's new features is includes SQLite, an open-source SQL library.
There's a handy intro to it on DevShed, and an interesting article on Techweb that asks whether PHP is ready for large-scale projects.
09:32:35 - Spanner - No comments
If you want to scare yourself silly about web server security, ihackstuff (as featured on the Reg last week) is a pretty interesting read. It's very detailed and well layed out. Or you could just read SANS' Top 20 critical internet security vulnerabilities. Or you could just go to the pub.
...More10:17:12 - Spanner - No comments
Open all Hours
Open Office 1.1.1 has been launched. Interesting article on The Register which quotes some research suggesting that 8% of large US firms have installed it, and that Microsoft have started advising salespeople on how to sell against it. Strange that the link doesn't work...
...More09:55:50 - Spanner - No comments
There's a handy white paper that's been produced by Ashton Court IT consultants. It gives a brief overview of the reasons for using portals and the main principles behind them. Next time you're in a meeting you can hand it out to people who use the word 'portal' when they actually mean 'browser' or 'webpage'...
...More07:59:00 - Spanner - 2 comments
Plone, an open source content management system, has just reached version 2.0. It now allows user data to come from many different sources, such as LDAP, ActiveDirectory, or relational databases.
I haven't looked at the new user interface, but the old one was very easy to set up and use. Plone seems to be gathering a fairly substantial portfolio of business users. And it sits on lots of different platforms, so no need to have that linux/windows argument again.
...More09:13:55 - Spanner - No comments
The launch of Yukon, the next version of MS SQL Server has been put back again to 2005. Barbara Darrow on CRN thinks that this will help open source alternatives.
...More13:53:20 - Spanner - 2 comments
Researchers at a university in Toulouse have being studying ants' travel patterns to try and improve the way packets travel through networks.
Full story over at the The Register
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My gran always told me to learn from other people's mistakes. If you follow that philosophy, you'll appreciate this article.
It's a first hand account from Eric Sink of some of the problems encountered by small software start-ups. For the less entreprenurial types amongst us, it also raises some interesting points about the difficult balance between the needs of business and technology.
...More08:15:00 - Spanner - No comments
Taking a hint from last week's post, I've decided to expand my development horizons a bit, starting with Python. Python is portable and easy to learn, apparently, which is music to my idle ears.
Two immediate uses for it are for automating things in Open Office, which I use, and for the back-end stuff on Plone, a fairly substantial open-source content management tool that's worth having a look at.
...More11:27:17 - Spanner - No comments
Existentialism and webdev collide in this article over at RTFM, asking Is ASP dead?
It has some interesting things to say about the future of .NET and concludes by musing on the mortality of all technologies:
"ASP is destined for the scrap heap, but so is everything".
An ideal read for a monday morning, then.
09:21:33 - Spanner - 1 comment