InfoQ Homepage News
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Presentation: Joshua Kerievsky Presents 10 Important Points for Agile Transitions
Joshua Kerievsky has distilled his company's years of experience helping their clients transition to Agile software development into 10 points. This presentation puts this advice in context with war stories and a Q&A session.
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Article: Staying Safe and Sound Thanks to MDSD
In this article, Andreas Kaltenbach explains how Model-Driven Software Development (MSDS) can help solving backward compatibility problems when creating a newer version of a software which can mean a new API or a new database schema that old clients cannot use. MSDS is used to negotiate the differences between versions to ease the upgrading process.
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Building a Better Thread-safe Collection
Jared Parsons proposes a better thread-safe collection. By using a design pattern that strongly encourages, but not enforces, thread-safety, his API is both easy to use and easy to understand.
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Citrix Changes the Virtualization Market by Giving XenServer for Free
After buying XenSource 18 months ago for half a billion USD, Citrix offers their last version of the XenServer “free of charge to any user for unlimited production deployment”. This move will certainly have a significant impact on the virtualization market in the cloud computing era that has begun.
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IronPython Performance Improvements
A new version IronPython, an implementation of Python running on .NET, has been released. IronPython 2.0.1 focuses on performance improvements, while keeping complete backwards compatibility.
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SOA & The Tarpit of Irrelevancy
A new three-part post by Neil Ford discusses both the rationale behind SOA implementations and the role large vendors play in distracting them.
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How to Ensure Early Death of a Distributed Agile Project?
Challenges of Agile adoption and execution get amplified when working in a distributed mode. Distributed Agile brings its own share of challenges in terms of geographical separation, varied timezone, cultural differences etc. Killing a distributed Agile project is not very difficult.
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Moneta: An Interface to Key-Value Stores like Tokyo Cabinet, Memcache
Key-value stores are a viable alternative to relational databases. We take a look at Tokyo Cabinet and how different key-value stores can be unified behind a common interface with Moneta.
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Code Contracts for .NET Is Available for Download
Code Contracts is the .NET implementation of the Design by Contract concept. While it was supposed to be delivered with .NET 4.0, Code Contracts is already available for download from DevLabs. Contracts impose certain restrictions on using APIs, making programming safer, having more validations and resulting in fewer unexpected errors during runtime.
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Ruby 1.8.8 and the Road to Ruby 1.9.1
Which Ruby to choose - 1.8.x or 1.9.1? What's the best migration path? We take a look at some recent ruby-core discussions and the plan for Ruby 1.8.8 which will help moving to 1.9.1. Also: Fibers are now also available in Ruby 1.8.6/1.8.7.
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Opinion: It is Time for a New Paradigm Shift in Business-IT Alignment
Fred Cummins, an EDS fellow, offers his vision on how SOA is changing business-IT alignment. He dismisses some proposal which recommend fusing and diffusing IT with and within the business and explains how Services boundaries offer a natural boundary to foster collaboration between the business and IT.
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Visual Basic 6.0 Still Widely Used
A recent Microsoft UK survey found that 87% of Windows developers work for companies that are actively maintaining applications written in Visual Basic 6.0. The survey asks a variety of follow-up questions to gain insight into why companies are still using VB6 eight full years after the release the .NET Framework.
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Skyway Builder Community Edition Supports Code Generation For Spring Applications
The latest version of Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE) offers an open-source code generation framework for Spring based web applications. The community edition can be used to generate the code required in data, service and web layers of a Spring application. Skyway Software recently announced the general availability (GA) of Skyway Builder 6.1 version.
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Article: Why Do We Need Distributed OSGi?
Recently, an early release draft of a Distributed OSGi requirements and design document has been published, along with a reference implementation as part of Apache CXF. In a new article, Eric Newcomer writes about the current status of distributed OSGi and explains the reasons for standardizing it in the first place, and its significance to the OSGi specification and community.
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Information Radiators: Is low tech really better?
The Extreme Programming Yahoo Group has been discussing the pros and cons of low tech information radiators, such as task boards, compared to high tech tools. The original poster preferred a physical task board to a spreadsheet, but found himself unable to explain why to his boss. The ensuing discussion uncovered a variety of reasons to choose simple physical means of reporting information.