InfoQ Homepage News
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Support For Mercurial At CodePlex
Sara Ford, Program Manager at CodePlex, announced on Friday that CodePlex has added support for Mercurial, a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) similar to Git. Currently this feature is only available for new projects, but CodePlex advice current project owners to contact CodePlex Support if they want to switch from Team Foundation Server to Mercurial.
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Three Weeks Left to Submit Proposals to Agile 2010
The Agile 2010 conference is taking place in Nashville this year and is gearing up and ready to go. This year the submission process is different, with a cap on the number of submissions and a shorter time window. The last day for submitting proposals for next year's conference is Friday, February 19.
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Dynamic Language Roundup: Python's GIL Gets Overhauled but not Removed, Squeak Comes to Android
The Unladen Swallow project that aims to speed up Python has proposed to be merged into mainstream Python. One of Unladen Swallow's goals was to remove the GIL; a new implementation of Python's GIL by Antoine Pitrou will be fairer and less intrusive on multicore CPUs. Also: Squeak Smalltalk has been ported to Android.
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jQuery 1.4 Released with Improved Performance and New API Documentation and Support Forums
In celebration of jQuery’s 4th birthday, the jQuery team has announced the release of the jQuery 1.4. This release features performance improvements in the most commonly used jQuery methods.
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SQL Server Express Shipping with Limited .NET 4.0 Support
A new build of Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 Express has enabled some support for .NET 4.0. But with a large list of limitations one has to wonder what’s the point.
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ConcurrentDictionary, .NET 4.0’s New Thread-Safe Hashtable
The ConcurrentDictionary is a cornerstone in .NET 4.0’s greatly increased emphasis on parallel and concurrent programming. But while vastly superior to what we have seen in the past, it isn’t a panacea and developers need to study its semantics carefully.
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Lua: Embeddable Scripting Engine, LuaJIT 2.0 Includes New High-Performance VM
Lua is a scripting language that can be embedded in any application that can provide hooks for its C API. Version 2.0 of its JIT compiler is in Beta and includes a completely re-written VM based on a trace compiler and an interpreter written in assembler.
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How Pair Programming Really Works
Stuart Wray wrote a paper analysing how pair programming actually works in team environments and identifies four mechanisms that can be applied to improve the effectiveness of pair programming, and why it results in better quality products.
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Visual Studio/SQL Server Reporting Services Continue to be Incompatible
Despite years of complaining from developers and the mockery of vendors such as IBM, Microsoft is continuing its policy of shipping components of Visual Studio that are incompatible with the current version SQL Server Reporting Services.
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YouTube announces HTML5 demo, but not for FireFox 3.6
YouTube announces an HTML5 video beta, which allows playback without resorting to using a Flash plugin. Videos are only available in the H.264 format, which leads to greater performance on some hardware devices, but leaves out the new FireFox 3.6 which only supports the Ogg video format.
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Brussels approves $7.4bn Oracle-Sun deal, Oracle to Outline Strategy Next Week
The EU has now approved Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. Oracle will be outlining their strategy for Sun via a webcast on January 27th, the company has announced.
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Windows Workflow 4 – A New Product with an Old Name
Windows Workflow 4 is a major rewrite of the library. While it has the same goal, to provide a modeling language for long-running tasks, there are some significant differences coming out of what is essentially a complete rewrite.
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Lean + Real Options = Reduced Complexity and Risk
Real Options, a decision-making process based on Financial Option mathematics, was mentioned by Kent Beck in his 1999 "white book," Extreme Progamming Explained. More recently, Agilists have been exploring how Real Options intersects with Agile. Now Chris Matts and Olav Maassen specifically address the Lean Software community, proposing that application of Real Options improves Lean Development.
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Windows Domain to Amazon EC2 Single Sign-On Access Solutions
David Chappell, the Principal of Chappell & Associates, US, has written a whitepaper proposing several solutions for Single Sign-on (SSO) access to applications deployed on Amazon EC2 from a Windows domain. InfoQ explored these solutions to understand what the benefits and tradeoffs each one presented.
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Bundle.update: The Year of Modularity
A lot has happened since the last Bundle.update. SpringSource dm Server becomes an EPL project at Eclipse; a new book on OSGi and Equinox has been published; the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group is nearing completion; WebSphere has released an alpha based on Apache Aries; Maven Tycho is being used at Eclipse; Nimble facilitates OSGi runtimes, and ECF Remote Services are now complete.