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  • 50 Spots left for QConSF; Google’s Dart Keynote Added

    The 5th annual QCon San Francisco is taking place just 3 weeks from now, the chance to register is quickly approaching. Registration is double last year's at this time! We only have 50 tickets left so book early to make sure you get a spot.

  • Microsoft “Data Explorer” – Discover, Enrich, Publish Data

    Microsoft announced a new Cloud Service codenamed “Data Explorer”, to be available by November. With this service, you can manage related data from disparate data sources, combine and curate data and then share results with others. The service also works with Azure data market and Bing to make third party datasets available wherever relevant.

  • JetBrains releases AppCode, an IDE for Objective-C

    JetBrains has released AppCode 1.0, their first release of an Objective-C IDE. It requires Mac OSX 10.5 or above. It requires the Apple Developer Tools to be installed (in order to access the simulator and developer headers) but provides more advanced refactoring and code smell detection. AppCode has a free 30-day trial, and discounted licenses until December 31st.

  • Codify Development Environment runs on iPad

    Two Lives Left have released Codify, a platform that allows game development using the Lua scripting language, which runs directly on an Apple iPad. Games can be created and demonstrated on the iPad, with auto-completion and tight editing. Codify is availbale on the App Store for US$7.99.

  • Building Visual Studio Extensions with Roslyn

    Yesterday we talked about the Roslyn Compiler and Workspace APIs. Today we take a look at the Roslyn Service APIs and how they can be used to extend Visual Studio. The extensions we will look at today are Code Issue, Quick Fix, Code Refactoring, Completion Provider, and Outliner.

  • Microsoft Unveils its Compiler as a Service

    Early reports suggested that the Rosyln project would just be a better runtime-accessible compiler and REPL-style interpreter, but it turns out that it is much more ambitious. By opening up the entire compiler pipeline Microsoft hopes that developers will create a wide variety of tools at many levels.

  • Oracle Sets Out Two Year Plan for Client-side Java

    Given that Oracle is predominantly focused on enterprise software, it has been tempting to assume that the vendor would largely ignore client-side Java. It became clear at JavaOne this year, however, that Oracle is making a renewed push on the desktop, spearheaded by JavaFX. It will also be open-sourcing the entire JavaFX platform via OpenJDK.

  • 'Denali' No More: SQL Server 2012 Announced, Focuses on BI and Big Data

    Microsoft announced that the next version of SQL Server, known by the codename "Denali", will be called SQL Server 2012. It will feature the big data capabilities of Apache Hadoop and Power View, a touch-based business intelligence tool.

  • SQL Azure To Get Higher DB Size Limit, Federation

    At SQL PASS Summit 2011, Microsoft announced a number of upcoming improvements to SQL Azure including larger databases, Federation, improved management portal, better collation support and more; all to be available by the end of 2011.

  • Stop Thinking During Refactoring

    Refactoring is a technique for changing the internal structure of the program without changing its external behavior. On the face of it, refactoring seems to involve a good amount of thinking, however, too much thinking could be detrimental as well.

  • Mono 2.12 Roadmap

    In anticipation of the upcoming Mono 2.12 public beta, Miguel de Icaza has released the planned feature set including many of the .NET 4.5 APIs and C# 5’s Async support. There is also an improved garbage collector, support for the full table of Unicode surrogate characters, and a new backend for the C# compiler.

  • Android 4.0 Unifies Tablets and Phones with New Features

    Android 4.0 runs both on tablets and phones, having new features for UI, communication, sharing, media, connectivity, input types and enterprise.

  • Build Machines, Windows 7, and Classic ADO

    Imagine you are doing maintenance on an application from the late 90’s that uses the classic ADO libraries. The recompiled code works fine on any Windows 7 SP1 machine, but mysteriously crashes on the Windows XP machines that have been running the program for nearly a decade. This is the problem facing lots of maintenance developers.

  • The Story of Read-Only Collection Interfaces in .NET

    .NET 4.5 adds two new collection interfaces, IReadOnlyList and IReadOnlyDictionary. While these interfaces are quite humble on the surface, they expose the rather complex story of backwards compatibility, interoperability, and the role of covariance.

  • Moving Ops from black to white box

    During his talk at DevOps Days in Gothenburg Mitchell Hashimoto, co-author of Vagrant and system admin at Kiip, proposed an experience-based roadmap for moving organizations from a traditional black box ops culture to an (ideal) white box culture where developers are free to change the production environment.

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