InfoQ Homepage Architecture & Design Content on InfoQ
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Silverlight 5 Timeline And Lots of Questions
Yesterday Microsoft announced the timeline for Silverlight 5 in 2011 at the Silverlight FireStarter event. Silverlight 5 will be in beta the first half of 2011 and ship early in the second half of 2011. Developers quickly began posting impressions and many questions.
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Activiti 5.0 GA, the Apache 2 Licensed BPMN 2 Engine Released
Alfresco has just released version 5.0 GA of the Activiti engine, an Apache2 licensed BPMN 2.0 implementation. InfoQ talked with project lead Tom Baeyens on the new release. Tom is also the creator and former project lead for the jBPM project.
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NCBI BLAST for Windows Azure
Microsoft is now offering NCBI BLAST for the Windows Azure platform. NCBI BLAST was created by a group of researchers working for the National Institutes of Health, a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. NCBI describes BLAST as a tool that “finds regions of local similarity between sequences” of protein and DNA chains.
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HTML5 Labs Launched and WebSocket Update
Last week Microsoft launched HTML5 Labs where they intend to post early prototypes of applications running on unstable web standard specifications for .NET developers. Yet earlier this month, preliminary WebSocket implementations in FireFox 4 and Opera where disabled due to security concerns.
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Scalable System Design Patterns
Ricky Ho revisited his three year old post on that question and realized that a lot had changed since then.
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Announcement: Windows Phone 7 Opens to Visual Basic
On November 29th, the Visual Basic team announced the Release To Web version of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This is exciting news for the large number of Visual Basic developers to achieve almost parity with the C# developer community in regards to Windows Phone 7 development of applications.
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Prism 4 Final Released
Karl Shifflett released the final release of Prism 4 to MSDN on November 12. Simultaneously, Karl also published the first installment of a series of multimedia training that is consumed within Visual Studio 2010 called, In the Box.
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Business Benefits of OSGi
Many consider the cost of migration onto OSGi expensive, but frequently this is conflated with the cost of modularity itself. Modularising a large, complex and heavily intertwined library is an expense that has no immediate benefits to the maintainers. However, if left to rot, the system will become more complex, intertwined and larger over time and the maintenance cost will increase.
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Get Back To Work!
Hitting a kanban limit introduces slack into an organization by temporarily stopping the work that feeds into a bottleneck. So how can you convince management that introducing a kanban limit (i.e. stopping work) could actually be a good thing?
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SQL Azure Achitecture - Competitive Differentiation
Two weeks back Kalen Delaney published a whitepaper on SQL Azure internals focused on how SQL Azure achieves scalability and high availability. A foundation feature which differentiates SQL Azure from its competitors is the multi-tenant architecture upon which it has been built.
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IronPython/IronRuby have Decided on Github and CodePlex
Since Microsoft announced that it was giving up control of its Iron languages, there has been a quiet debate on where to host the project. The negotiations have finally been settled and the winner is Github for source control and CodePlex for issue tracking.
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Amazon Offers Cluster GPU Instances
Amazon has announced the availability of Cluster GPU instances for high performance applications starting with an instance of 2 NVidia Tesla GPUs and going up to a cluster of 128 or more instances, appealing to financial analysis, imaging, biology, simulation, and other domains.
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Simple IT: SOA Done Right
In his new post, Steve Jones proposes the notion of Simple IT – an IT that can be defined as a series of easily describable business aligned elements each of which can be independently maintained- in other words a properly designed SOA system.
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Named Resource Streams for WCF Data Services
Under the current version of WCF Data Services, developers can associate only one streaming resource with a given entity. With the October 2010 CTP, developers can now add additional named streams to an entity. For example, for images you may have streams named “Thumbnail”, “Small”, and “Full”.
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US Government: Proposed Assessment and Authorization for Cloud Computing
Two weeks back the US CIO's office released a 90 page proposal entitled, Proposed Security Assessment and Authorization for US Government Cloud Computing. The document is the result of 18 months of work among the NIST, GSA, ISIMC and the CIO Council to evaluate security controls and multiple Assessment and Authorization models for US Government Cloud Computing.