InfoQ Homepage News
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Apache POI 3.5 Released with OOXML Support
Apache have released version 3.5 of the POI library for working with Microsoft Office documents. The latest version adds support for the OOXML format used by Office 2007 and higher. InfoQ spoke to Apache's Yegor Kozlov, release manager for POI 3.5, POI project founder Andrew Oliver, and Robert Duffner and Vijay Rajagopalan of Microsoft to find out more about the project.
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Agile's "One Essential Ingredient"
There has been plenty of debate on what skills a developer needs, or what practices an organization must adopt for agile to be successful. But while undeniably important, is this really what's at the heart of agile success? Mark Schumann suggests that agile's "one essential ingredient" is not ground-level agile technique, but rather is the agile mindset within management ranks.
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Microsoft Builds Tools for Eclipse Developers
Microsoft has announced the release of a number of tools for Eclipse: Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, Windows Azure SDK for Java, Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, plus a facelift for Eclipse to look-and-feel like Windows 7.
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Amazon Offers MySQL as a Service
Amazon has announced a new service, Amazon Relational Database Service or RDS, a solution for creating and accessing a relational database in the cloud. The hosted database is MySQL 5.1 and the announcement precedes PDC 2009 by 3 weeks when Microsoft will announce the availability of SQL Azure, a cloud solution based on its relational DB.
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26 Hints for Successful Agile Development
Keith Swenson, recently compiled a list of 26 hints for Agile software development. Keith suggested that he frequently collects nuggets of wisdom on various topics and the list is a distilled set of hints which really matter for Agile software development.
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BCL Changes in .NET 4
The BCL or Base Class Library represents the core of the .NET framework. Regardless of what type of application one is developing, the BCL represents the starting point upon which all other functionality is built. This is why changes to the BCL are significant to all .NET developers.
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IronScheme Nears Final Release
IronScheme, the R6RS implementation of Scheme for DLR, has reached RC1 after one year of being in beta.
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XP or Scrum, Either, Both, or Neither?
Which is better? Scrum or XP? Is there one that is more applicable than the other or is there another alternative?
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RubyForge To Be Phased Out, RubyGems.org Takes Over Gem Hosting
The maintainers of GemCutter and RubyForge announced plans for phasing out RubyForge. The Gem hosting will, more or less seamlessly, move to RubyGems.org (currently GemCutter), while project hosting will have to move to other existing sites such as GitHub.
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SOA Manifesto Released
After several days of intense effort, the SOA Manifesto has been released. As could be expected, the feedback so far is mixed, but is that because the Manifesto is flawed or because the message has not been understood (or communicated) correctly?
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Collection and Array Initializers in VB 10
Visual Basic 10, to be released with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 10, is adding support for collection and array initializers. While these are similar to what we already have in C#, there are minor enhancements such as support for extension methods and improved type inference.
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Where has the innovation gone?
Some commentators are questioning the level of innovation happening in the Agile space. Does iterative and incremental development lead us away from innovation towards reusing old solutions, building on what we already know rather than creating truly "out of the box" solutions. Adding an R&D stream is suggested as a way to bring innovation into Agile projects.
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Quickly Migrate from SQL Server to SQL Azure
In order to make migrating from SQL Server to SQL Azure easier, Microsoft is releasing a migration tool on CodePlex. The SQL Azure Migration Wizard will detect, and if possible, correct incompatibilities between SQL Server 2005/2008 and SQL Azure. In addition to generating scripts for deploying the migrated schema on SQL Azure, this tool will also allow you to migrate table data using BCP.
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A .NET Security Vulnerability Has Affected Firefox
A security vulnerability that has hit Internet Explorer through .NET has also hit Firefox. The culprit for Firefox, a .NET add-on, has been put on Mozilla’s blocked list.
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SQL Azure is Feature Complete, but You Need to Move to the New CTP by December
Microsoft has released a feature-complete version of SQL Azure. CTP 2 includes everything that the final version is expected to have and is currently deployed on Microsoft’s production clusters. This gives CTP 2 an automatic upgrade path to the final release, but users of previous CTPs will need to migrate their data before the older servers are shutdown.