InfoQ Homepage News
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Azul Systems To Open Source Significant Technology in Managed Runtime Initiative
Having just announced a record breaking quarter, Azul Systems are open sourcing a considerable part of their intellectual property under GPLV2, as part of a major new initiative to try and improve the performance of managed code on commodity platforms.
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The Decision to Refactor
Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that is does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. The idea of improving an already written code is appreciated in most Agile teams. Continuous improvement is is something that these teams strive for. However, improving the already existing code involves time and money. Is it worth it?
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Introducing Sun Yiyi’s Git Source Control Provider for Visual Studio 2008/2010
Many .NET developers have turned to distributed source control systems. The most popular one seems to be Git, which was originally created by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. One problem with Git is that it is predominately command-line based while .NET developers prefer to stay in the IDE. This is why Sun Yiyi’s Git Source Control Provider an important part of Git adoption.
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Creating Add-Ins for Expression Web 4
The hallmark of any good IDE is its extensibility. If developers can’t improve their own tools then they won’t see productivity improvements over time. The same goes for web designers, which is why Microsoft’s Expression Web 4 now offers an add-in model based on HTML+JavaScript.
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REST and versioning
The problem of how to version services in a REST-based environment is something that comes up time and again. This time Ganesh Prasad offers a proposed solution based not on modifications to the service URL but on the fundamental reason behind versioning in the first place.
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Agile Teams as Cohesive Communities
Agile projects are (should be?) highly collaborative team environments built on a foundation of trust and open, honest communication. Such collaborative environments don’t just happen, and they can be easily disrupted. There are many commentators who provide advice on how to establish and maintain collaborative teams. This article summarizes the advice from a few of them.
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Differences and Learning: the PMI-Agile Project Heats Up
The PMI-Agile project's mission is to bring agile knowledge and skills to all PMI practitioners. Yet what has emerged is much more interesting than that. The project's Yahoo group has evolved into a place where worlds collide. There is some "heat" developing as a result of the differences and diversity found in this forum. InfoQ explored this in detail, and spoke with Ron Jeffries to learn more.
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Microsoft Announced New Features for Windows Azure During TechEd 2010
Microsoft announced Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010) at TechEd 2010. Some of the most important features are: .NET 4 support, support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM, and IntelliTrace debugging. Microsoft also announced a billing plan for Azure CDN, and new options for SQL Azure.
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TestDriven.NET Has Reached a New Milestone
TestDriven.NET, a TDD add-in for Visual Studio, has reached version 3.0. Some of the new features are: support for MSTest, .NET Reflector 6 Pro, VS 2010, Silverlight 4, NUnit 2.5.3, using the project’s .NET framework and others.
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Microsoft’s HTML5 Compliance Test Results Are Disputed by Google, Mozilla, and Opera [UPDATED]
Microsoft has posted the results for 192 tests grouped in 8 categories for HTML5, SVG 1.1, CSS3, and DOM Level 2&3 showing that IE9 Preview passes all of them with flying colors while Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari have mixed results varying from 0% to 100% depending on the category. The conclusion, that IE9 is the most compliant with W3C standards, is contested by Google, Mozilla, Opera.
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Greystripe Transcodes ActionScript Bytecode to HTML 5, making Flash Ads Available on the iPhone/iPad
Greystripe has announced that they are collaborating with Adobe to provide rich media, interactive ad solutions across Android, iPhone, iPad and other mobile web platforms. Part of their offering will involve a technology that will convert Flash ads to HTML 5 that target mobile devices like the iPhone, where the Flash plugin is not available.
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Consistently Not Done, Done, Done at the End of Sprints?
Do you consistently have stories that don't meet your "definition of done" at the end of your sprints? Is the team tieing the hands of the product owner?
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Prism Prevents One Incomplete Feature from Derailing an Entire Release
Having modular code does not help when applications still have to be deployed in an all-or-nothing fashion. Prism addresses this by allowing you do deploy a WPF or Silverlight shell to the users separately from any specific functionality. Individual features are released out-of-band as modules that may be stored locally, on a corporate file share, or served up by a web site.
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Handling Team Changes
Change is constant, yet people fear change. It is mostly the fear of unknown and loss of comfort zones that makes the perception of a change painful. Though Agile teams are well prepared for change, however most of them are not comfortable when the change affects the team.
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Major UI Upgrade for Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio has received a major UI upgrade via the add-in Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools. In addition to finally fixing the Add References dialog, the major change is what they are calling “Document Well 2010 Plus”. This significantly alters the way tabs are handled in the document pane.