devCatharsis

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Software Process Methodology

Back in 1998, my company made this short movie documenting the cycle of software development.This movie was presented on our yearly customer's meeting, and needless to say, it was a success.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

DeepFish - the solution for web browsing on mobile?

Checkout this promising browser for mobile.

[update] the mobile browser wars

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Microsoft airs Orcas, Rosario dev tools visions

in: infoworld

Microsoft not only plans to release Orcas, a major upgrade to its Visual Studio software development platform, by the end of the year but also plans to follow up Orcas with the Rosario release of the platform a year later, a Microsoft official said on Monday.

...
"We're building a bunch of tools to help you make sense out of everybody's work," Sridharan said. Testing tools and quality assurance capabilities will be focuses of Rosario, as will advanced code analysis, he said.

Rosario is being developed in parallel with Orcas, Sridharan said. Of particular importance to Rosario will be its inclusion of such groups as a user's IT personnel and business analysts in the application development mix.

"Rosario will help integrate the larger business," said Michael Leworthy, Microsoft Visual Studio product manager.

A community technology preview of Rosario is due around the same time as the general-release version of Orcas. A beta release of Orcas is planned for the May timeframe; a community technology preview shipped this month. Orcas features innovations like the additions of Language Integrated Query technology and the ability to use refactoring with Visual Basic for improved developer productivity.

...
LINQ brings data programming and data access closer to the programming, Sridharan said. "It makes it a lot easier to programmatically access data."

With the Orcas release of Team Foundation Server, developers can annotate code and share comments inside code with other developers, who can see who edited which code.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!

Microsoft is announcing the acquisition of DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. What does this mean? TeamPlain application for free!

Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser. The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also includes some valuable version control capabilities (like viewing history/change sets, diffing files, browsing the source base, etc.), some SharePoint integration, Reporting services integration, and some upcoming build support. TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use Visual Studio today and don’t want to install Visual Studio clients on their machines. It also improves reach by enabling some access from non-Windows clients.

TeamPlain has been in the market for about a year now and has been very successful. Many of our VSTS customers use TeamPlain today and are very satisfied with it. Our advisory council and other customers have been telling us for the past year that we need a web UI for VSTS and that TeamPlain would be a great solution for us. We’ve listened, looked very closely at the product and concluded that they are right. Today is the culmination of a long process and the beginning of another.

TeamPlain will become Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access. Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here. It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL. Support will continue to be provided by the current staff via the DevBiz online forums.

Over the next few months, we will be rebranding TeamPlain as a Microsoft product and running it through our release process. When that is complete, we will be releasing it as a VSTS Power Tool, transitioning support to the Microsoft forums and beginning CSS (phone) support. In the Orcas timeframe, we will be releasing Team System Web Access as an official, documented, localized, and officially supported component of Team Foundation Server.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Will databases be commodities?

There was a time when business payed for a file server. Not anymore. The same can be said about directory services, most of networking services or even web servers. Most of nowadays OSs just give them for free - you just pay for the OS, and use the services you need. The question is: will databases follow the same trend and get commodityzed?

I believe they will. Why:

For ages Microsoft and Oracle have given us versions for free of database products with some limitations.
Database systems seems to have stopped evolving.
Business and database vendors seem to recognize more value on applicational platforms.
The next generation of developing paradigm will take away visibility from the database. More, it will hide it them so well we can probably swap them whenever we want.

Give this, I think that the database systems like SQL Server and Oracle will be given away with the OSs in no more then 5 to 7 years. Ok, maybe some very very high-availability and scalable versions will still be sold, but that's it. Let's read this again in 7 years :)

Friday, March 23, 2007

Microsoft Listed as Most Secure OS

No surprise but here.

Microsoft is frequently dinged for having insecure products, with security holes and vulnerabilities. But Symantec (Quote), no friend of Microsoft, said in its latest research report that when it comes to widely-used operating systems, Microsoft is doing better overall than its leading commercial competitors.

...

"I think in a way that a culture of having been under attack for a decade or more has led to the company taking a very proactive approach to fixing those problems," he told internetnews.com.
"In the last 24 months, they've taken a very aggressive stance toward the security of their system. In review after review of Vista, despite its faults, the security of the system has been considerably better than XP."
By contrast, King said there have been complaints in the past about Apple's lack of response to security issues. But as the Mac and Linux gain marketshare, they will have to respond much quicker.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Developer E-Learnings available for a short time: For Free

For a short time only (April 15^th to be exact) you have the opportunity to register to receive up to 4 of our best developer focused training modules found at http://www.microsoftlearning.com.
Here are the steps to take advantage of this great opportunity…
1.) Go http://www.microsoft.com/learning/access
2.) Input your access code: (The code is case sensitive) ACCESS CODE: 6841-USDPEMW-5316
3.) You will be prompted to sign-in using a valid Microsoft Passport ID. If you already have a profile on microsoft.com, use that Passport ID. If you do not have a Passport ID click “Register” to create one.
4.) From the “Thank You” page, click on My Learning to see the list of available courses.
5.) For E-Learning, click on a course title to launch the offering.
a. You will then be presented with a description tab and a content tab. Read all the course requirements and description.
b. Please note: Review the “system requirements” tab to be sure your computer is properly configured to access virtual labs.
c. From the “Content Tab”, click on a lesson to begin training.
7.) When you return to the site, please click on the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mylearning and sign in using your Microsoft Passport ID. Then click on “My Learning” to access content and continue your learning path.

Jack Greenfield talks about software factories

Jack Greenfield talks about software factories, or software that builds software. The conceptual and practical aspects of the future of software development, and implications for developers are discussed.

Unmissable! Except for the final part, when Greenfield defends the industrialization of software won't generate unemployment, I'm totally signing bellow.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Microsoft joins OpenAjax

Ok, now I my fears of Ajax lack of (unified) support are (apparently) over - read all about it!

What a list:

The Alliance is also announcing that the following members have all been awarded OpenAjax Interoperability certificates: Apache XAP, Dojo Foundation, ICEsoft, ILOG, Isomorphic, IT Mill, Lightstreamer, Open Link, Open Spot, Nexaweb, Software AG and TIBCO. The interoperability certificates represent progress by both OpenAjax Alliance and its members towards defining and achieving industry support for OpenAjax Conformance.

[update] according to this, IBM, Sun, Bea Borland, Novell, Google are already there...

Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance

in: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/archive/2007/03/20/team-foundation-server-branching-guidance-now-available.aspx

The Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance whitepaper is now available! It's a comprehensive whitepaper that covers strategies, patterns and anti-patterns for branching and merging with TFS. You can view the branching guidance online or you can download the PDF version.

Branching Guidance Index
Introduction
Parallel Development
Branching Defined
Creating Isolation in Team Foundation Server
Isolation at Individual Level
Isolation for Collaboration
Branching Scenarios
General Branching Structure Guidance
Branching Checklist
Branching Strategies
Broad Areas of Branching Isolation
Creating Your Branching Strategy
Single Release Scenario
Multiple Release Scenario
Multiple Feature/Team Scenarios
Defining Your Code Promotion Model
Code Promotion Best Practices
Baseless Merges
Feature Crews: How Microsoft Does It
End-to-End Implementation Scenario
Step1 – Deciding on a Team Project structure
Step2 – Deciding on a branch structure
Step3- Following a release on paper
Step 4- Creating the physical structure
Appendix
Software Configuration Management
Branching and Merging Anti-Patterns
Branching in Team Foundation Server vs. Sharing in Visual SourceSafe
Labeling vs. Branching
Branching and Compliance
Identifying Environments
Virtual Build Labs

[update] And while you're there, VSTS Pattern & Practices section.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Who will Develop Software in 10 Years?

in: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/03/software-development-years

Watch: Who will Develop Software in 10 Years? (39:59 min).

Some interesting perspectives from the panelists initial responses:

Frank Buschmann - more business people coding alongside developers thanks to new higher level tools such as DSLs - more autonomic computing - greater need for skilled professional developers; sees more software being developed locally (not outsourced)

Steve Cook - more software about software. Platform will be more introspective and richer - more modelling, and modeling as part of the OS - 20% of GDP of the US today has to do with software; 30-40% of world GDP will be related to software - massive increase in software development will mean more jobs for software developers, no thread of outsourcing taking jobs - software development done as a supply chain

Jimmy Nilsson - more business experts involved in SW development - more software development will be done locally

Dave Thomas - todays platforms are very buggy, he is optimistic about future platforms getting better, infact it must get better because "technology is growing at a quadratic, but the value in business software is growing exponentially in terms of domain content", and unless it happens we will "die in the testing hell we have been in for a long time. 50% of any real successful product is testing, so I think shifting that is going to be very important.." - sees some radically different programming technologies (beyond "current kind of object stuff")and platforms being used, cites current specialized work in bioinformatics, finance

Following their initial responses, questions raised also discussed if Google will be the next MS?, multi-core & parallism, grid computing, software stacks of the future, and more.What do you think about how software will be developed in 10 years?

Monday, March 19, 2007

Database Unit Testing with Team Edition for Database Professionals

Summary: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals is the first toolset to deliver a comprehensive framework for performing database unit tests. This product brings to the data community the same first-class capabilities for performing unit tests that many application developers enjoy today. This paper explains exactly what database unit testing is, shows you how to develop database unit tests by using the framework, and walks you through how to leverage its rich capabilities to develop an effective strategy for performing database unit tests inside your organization. (21 printed pages)