InfoQ Homepage News
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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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Hudson Moves Away From Oracle
The Hudson developer community has moved Hudson's source code away from Oracle controlled source infrastructure, and is considering a fork. Oracle is now pleading for this not to happen. How did relations sour, and what is the future of Hudson?
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Optimizing Pages with Google Website Optimizer
Google offers Website Optimizer, a free tool for Google Apps users allowing them to test and measure the success of different versions of web pages.
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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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OS Release: Pyxis 2 Beta 2
Last Wednesday, Thomas Holtq announced the release Pyxis 2 beta 2 of the Pyxis 2.0 operating system for .NET Micro Framework devices.
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Microsoft’s WebMatrix Now Shipping with PHP 5.3 and PEAR
The third beta of Microsoft’s WebMatrix IDE was released this month with significantly improved support for PHP. This round brings the option to choose between PHP 5.2 and 5.3 as well as support for PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository.
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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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LINQ to Z3, The World’s Fasted Theorem Prover
Microsoft Research claims that Z3 is the world’s fastest theorem prover. Z3 is designed to be a low-level tool for other applications, it is not meant to stand-alone. With its host of theorem provers, it is used by numerous projects including Spec#/Boogie, Pex, Yogi, Vigilante, SLAM, F7, SAGE, VS3, FORMULA, and HAVOC. With Bart De Smet’s LINQ to Z3, using this tool becomes embarrassingly easy.
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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.