InfoQ Homepage News
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Performance Reviews Banished
In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Culbert argues that annual performance and pay reviews are at best dysfunctional. He sees their primary purpose as "intimidation aimed at preserving the boss's authority and power advantage". Jeff Sutherland, Mary Poppendieck, ... offer alterantives
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Presentation: An Introduction to M
During PDC 2008, David Langworthy, Architect at Microsoft, and Don Box, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, held a presentation about Oslo, focusing especially on the modeling language M, explaining what is and what is not, and also demonstrating using M to create a data model.
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Ruby SDK for the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform Released
The DotNetServicesRuby team, a partnership between Microsoft and Thoughtworks, announced the launch of Milestone 1 - Technology Preview of Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services, a key component in Azure, the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform.
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Testing: What Developers Are Expected To Do Versus What They Actually Do
The recent PDC underscored a major disconnect in the testing community. There is a fundamental misconception that developers only need to write "unit testers" and all other forms of testing are someone else's problem.
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X2O Framework for Flex Server Integration
As RIA technologies maturing, there are increasing needs for the integration between RIAs and server side technologies. X2O Framework from We Are Mammoth is one such integration solution for Flex. InfoQ spoke with Ka Wai Cheung, a partner of the We Are Mammoth, to learn how X2O Framework fits into Flex based RIA development.
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Working Group Formed to Produce Reusable Agile Contracts
Traditional software contracts have often pitted the customer and vendor against each other. Several Agilists in the past have taken a stab at defining an Agile contract which improves the relationship between the customer and the vendor. A working group is collaborating on OpenPlans taking a step further in this direction and coming up with a reusable Agile contract.
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Performance Monitoring Roundup: Rails Core and New Relic Cooperate, FiveRuns TuneUp Supports Merb
NewRelic announced a cooperation with the Rails Core team to improve Rails performance. An opt-in feature allows to make performance data available to the Rails Core team, which can use it to figure out Rails bottlenecks in real world Rails apps. Also: FiveRuns' TuneUp performance monitoring tools now supports Merb.
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Can a Spoonful of Governance help SOA?
Does SOA Governance means to you "visions of endless meetings and committee reviews"? Steve Stefanovich argues that "You might already practice governance and don’t even know it" and that "a reorientation and formalization of many of the things good software architects have been doing all along" might help your SOA initiative.
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Ruby VM Roundup: Ruby 1.9.1 Preview 1, Rubinius Moves To C++ VM
Ruby 1.9.1 Preview 1 is now out, which marks a freeze on language features and most other items, with a final release of 1.9.1 scheduled for late January 2009. Ruby 1.9.1 is planned to be the first stable 1.9.x release. Also: the C++ branch of Rubinius has been promoted as the default branch.
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Java GUI Testing With JRuby
GUI testing is a hard and often neglected task. We take a look at two open source solutions for writing SWT and Swing tests, SWTBot and Marathon, and how they can be used from JRuby. We talked to Ketan Padegaonkar (SWTBot) and Dakshinamurthy Karra (Marathon).
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Presentation: Rockstar Memcaching
In this presentation from RubyFringe, Tobias Lütke talks about memcached, the widely used caching solution. Tobias explains how to use it and gives some practical tips on what not to do.
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A VPN for Cloud Computing
Security is the gating factor for preventing Enterprise Cloud adoption, argues CohesiveFT's CTO, Patrick Kerpan. His company just released the first VPN for the Cloud to enable Enterprise customers to secure three kinds of topologies: Cloud, Cloud-to-Cloud and Enterprise-to-Cloud.
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.NET 4.0 CTP, Visual Studio 2010 CTP and Azure Tools CTP Are Available
Microsoft has announced the availability of the next generation of .NET Framework 4.0 CTP, Visual Studio 2010 CTP and the new Windows Azure Tools for VS CTP during PDC 2008.
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C# Feature Focus: Co- and Contra-variance
With .NET 4, C# 4 will be able to support co- and contra-variance in generic interfaces. If you are not familiar with them, think of it as the reason why you can't pass an IEnumerable<Apple> to a function expecting an IEnumerable<Fruit>.
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C# Feature Focus: Optional and Named Parameters, COM Interoperability
Believe it or not, C# is going to have full support for optional and named parameters. This, and other features intended for COM support, will be included in C# 4. There was also a rumor about parameterized properties.