InfoQ Homepage News
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PowerMockup, A New Tool for Low Fidelity Mockups
Agile teams seeking to deliver a high quality user experience often create mockups of varying fidelity to hone in on an appropriate design prior to coding (e.g. prior to sprint/iteration planning). PowerMockup is a new product for those seeking to create low fidelity mockups using a tool they are already familiar with, PowerPoint.
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Nailing Down Non-Functional Requirements
Non-Functional requirements are often associated with the state of the system and not with the functionality that the system has to offer. General 'ilities' of the system such as scalability, interoperability, maintainability, portability, performance and security fall under this umbrella. Agile teams usually struggle with defining and estimating the non-functional requirements in their projects.
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GitHub Releases OSX Client
GitHub have launched a desktop client for Mac OS X called simply GitHub for Mac.
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Xtext 2.0 Released
Xtext 2.0 was released today as part of the Eclipse Indigo release. If offers a new refactoring framework, a new expression language, and a new statically typed template language. InfoQ spoke with Sven Efftinge, creator and lead architect of Xtext.
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Eclipse Indigo Released
The Eclipse Foundation has announced the release of Eclipse Indigo, a combination of 62 projects with a combined total of 46 million lines of code between them. Eclipse has followed an annual release train of the last week or two of June since Callisto in 2006, although the Eclipse platform has been released annually since 2001.
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Multi-casting Messages to Twitter, Jabber, IRC, etc. with .NET and Ruby
Customers use a wide variety of technologies for communication and expect the companies they deal with to do the same. This means the same message may need to be sent to a mailing list, a Twitter account, an IRC channel, and a Facebook page. To make this easier, developers can use the Broadcast library for Ruby or its .NET clone, nBroadcast.
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PetaPoco: Micro ORM For .NET
PetaPoco is a thin Object Relational Mapper (ORM) for .NET applications. Unlike full-fledged ORMs like NHibernate or Entity Framework, the emphasis is on simplicity of use and performance rather than richness of features. PetaPoco comes in a single C# file, works with strongly typed POCOs, supports class generation with T4 templates and more.
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LiveRebel 1.0: No-Downtime Production Updates
ZeroTurnaround's LiveRebel 1.0 aims to alleviate downtime and lost sessions in server deployment automation. In this Q&A with Zero Turnaround, InfoQ discusses tooling support and how to improve processes that are largely manual and partially scripted.
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Sending Richly Formatted Emails with .NET
Richly formatted emails can require quite a bit of CSS, but since email clients don’t always handle CSS well the styles need to be inlined. With Ruby this is easily handled with the Alex Dunae’s Premailer library, but calling it from .NET isn’t palatable to most developers. So Martin H. Normark built a .NET version called PreMailer.NET.
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Commercial Interests Censoring Failures
Philippe Kruchten described the Agile movement as "The agile movement is in some ways a bit like a teenager: very self-conscious, checking constantly its appearance in a mirror, accepting few criticisms..." and shared a list of twenty elephants in the room - uncomfortable issues that are ignored on purpose. The first of these unmentionables is that commercial interests are censoring failures.
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Introducing the MVC Mini Profiler from Stack Exchange
Stack Exchange has released the ASP.NET MVC profiler that is used by Stack Overflow and its sister sites. MVC Mini Profiler is an internal profiler specially designed to support database-backed websites.
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VMware vFabric SQLFire Is Both an SQL Distributed Cache and a Datastore
VMware vFabric SQLFire is an in-memory distributed SQL-based cache which can work with a traditional database to persist data to disk.
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Can Earned Value Leverage Agile Methods?
The debate over the value of Earned Value Management (EVM) and integrating it into agile rages heavy as agile penetrates into more large scale IT projects that require EVM. Opinions vary but some believe that not only can agile projects apply EVM; EVM with agile is better than EVM without agile.
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Debugger Canvas Brings Code Bubbles To Visual Studio
Developers can finally get their hands on the Debugger Canvas, a new Power Tool for Visual Studio that gives Code Bubbles like experience for navigating contextual code snippets. It displays the code of each of the methods you step into on a canvas with call lines between them, helping to keep track of the bigger picture as well as the details.
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A New Library and Tooling Package for Open XML
Open XML SDK 2.0 offers a moderately high level API for manipulating Open XML documents using strongly typed classes. It includes the Open XML SDK v2.0 Productivity Tool, which can reverse engineer a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document and display the C# code needed to recreate it.