Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Jan. 8, 2012 11:38 AM EST
Back in 2002, Sybase announced their four-phase approach toward adding .NET support to PowerBuilder. Phase 1 was the implementation of web services in PB9 and Phase 2 was the release of DataWindow.NET, which was packaged with PB 10. Phases 3 and 4 were the more significant phases. In P...
"Mass psychology" scientists study this kind of phenomena and the "mass psychology of fascism" is of course the most famous lab case. The extraordinary experience SYS-CON Media lived through became part of a Forbes Magazine investigative cover story called "Attack of the Blogs" that fo...
Someone once said, "You can never be too rich or too thin." I've been thinking a lot about this statement lately, but possibly not in the sense in which it was intended. Specifically, I – like many of you – have been watching the stream of announcements coming out of Microsoft’s recent...
SOA and Virtualization are viewed today as the ultimate IT power couple. They've been called two of today's hottest technologies: virtualization provides cost savings and flexibility, while a service-oriented architecture (SOA) affords application reuse and fast response to business ne...
Unless this is the first thing on technology you are reading in the last six months you will know that we are seeing a new server being launched by Microsoft. After the ups and downs of Vista (many love it and many hate it) I expect that Windows Server 2008 will be something we can al...
Developers are increasingly working on systems that abstract the underlying mechanisms they depend upon. SharePoint was the catalyst for this observation as I increasingly see development implementations that just don't seem to work out as hoped, with misunderstandings or in some cases...
Another version of Visual Studio is here and while there are many cool features, we can conclude a lot from the fact that it isn't a staggering release. The first Visual Studio that wore the .NET moniker was a paradigm shift and threw in many features such as Web services, which though...
When .NET first came on the scene, there was fighting over whether it was a platform or not. As I have said here in the past, those debates are over as .NET has proven itself a very useful and valuable platform, expanding into areas that people assumed it wouldn't and even couldn't in ...
I feel as if there is a calm on the .NET waters at the moment and it's a rare and somewhat uneasy sensation. Most of the developers I know are playing with Blend and Silverlight and all the cool WPF stuff, even if their specialty is back-end database work. We all know there is another ...
Vista is getting some traction as a client OS now and that means developers are starting to see on the horizon that they should begin to support it. This is good and bad. Good because there are lots of cool things for developers in Vista, but bad because Vista changes the game quite a ...
This month, I want to talk about Windows Workflow and what it means for the state of .NET development (in my experience and, of course, in my opinion). Before the release of Window Workflow (WF for short because WWF means something else entirely already), there were several avenues ope...
With the Microsoft MIX conference just ending last week and product announcements happening with greater and greater regularity, it's sometimes discouraging when you think of how much work it will be to just keep up with it all.
When Microsoft announced the technology that is now known as WCF, there was a lot of expectation and some skepticism. Expectation because it sounded great and would help us solve so many problems and realize so many things that were then very hard to make happen. Skepticism because it ...
Usually in this space I like to summarize the contents of the issue and point out anything bearing in particular on our theme, but if you will indulge me, I would like to talk more long term and big picture this month. I am thinking specifically about security. Not a big surprise for ...
A lot is changing in .NET this year, but it all feels like progress. Now that Vista is released, we get to stop using Community Technical Previews (mostly) of things like WPF, WF, and WCF. The ASP.NET group has been busy bringing us AJAX tools that take a wild technology and pretty muc...
I am often struck by how good some ideas are and often wonder whether they are happened upon by accident (dumb luck), like the discovery of Teflon and penicillin, or whether there was just a really good idea that made it happen. I think what we are seeing in the evolution of .NET is a ...
In a cross-platform world where software giants nevertheless continue to vie with each other for developer mindshare, it is significant that only one major company has managed to synch up its release numbers with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Microsoft is not resting on its laurels though, a...
'Ease-of-use' is one of those buzz terms that software marketeers routinely inject into their promotional copy to describe their product. The term is one of those unarguable concepts; after all, who's not in favor of ease-of-use?
Last month, we addressed platonic concepts in this space, albeit in as surface-level a way as possible. Just added a little pretentiousness to what could have otherwise been a deadly dull column. The topic of hand was 'ease-of-use' and the practical reality of achieving such a thing in...
If you don't like change, stay away from the software development world. But if you embrace change, then these are among the most exciting, if volatile, times in years.
When newsstands throughout America on Monday, March 27, started displaying the April 3 issue of Newsweek with its cover story about Web 2.0 - 'Putting the 'We' in Web' - it seems to me that we have reached one of Malcolm Gladwell's now-famous Tipping Points.
As I listened to Bill Gates speak at the Office Developer's Conference in Redmond last week, I couldn't help but think how far Microsoft has come in terms of developer access to the Office Suite of products and how the Smart Client Revolution was in full force.
We're not even at the end of the first quarter yet, and 2006 seems already to have brought with it as much change in the world of Internet technologies as all four quarters of 2005 combined. Despite the headline-grabbing mega-deals of '05, in '06 the mid-market is still the engine room...
When I was a kid, I remember someone saying, 'If you like where you're sitting, you had better stay there!' They were referring to a prediction that the Earth's population was going to increase to the point that there wouldn't be enough room for everyone to sit, so we'd all have to sta...
I've been doing a lot of coding lately. This has been a bit of a departure from my usual work as a technology evangelist or a development manager, but - as you might imagine - it has been quite a lot of fun! Having said this, the process of actually sitting down and coding for 12 hours...
What would it take for your organization to move to all the latest-and-greatest Microsoft tools - Visual Studio 2005, Team System, etc.? This is a question that I have been more interested in since my move from being principal consultant at Magenic Technologies, a premier provider of M...
I am writing this on the morning of the day on which Microsoft will officially launch Visual Studio 2005, along with SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006. I think that it is fair to say that this is the most important technology launch in the history of Microsoft - and I'll tell you why!
I have been redoing our 'family computer' this week, as I am changing jobs and have needed to use a computer in between the end of my work at Magenic and the start of my work at my soon-to-be employer (more details on that shortly). As a part of overhauling our family computer, I moved...
From time to time, I find myself lassoing a sacred cow in this Editorial space, dragging it over to the slaughterhouse of rhetoric, and ultimately barbecuing its falsehood over the stainless-steel, six-burner, propane-powered grill of real-world experience. To wit, the current industry...
As I write this, I am simultaneously preparing to present on ASP.NET 2.0 at three local MSDN Events (www.msdnevents.com), building an advanced ASP.NET 2.0 Web site for my client at Magenic, and pulling together the last bits of the magazine that you now hold in your hands - our ASP.NET...
Web applications suck! Well, perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement. Let me rephrase: Web applications are not appropriate for all situations. In my case, I have spent the last few months working on a series of ASP.NET applications that should really have been done as Smart Client a...
I'm constantly impressed by the imaginative uses to which people put Microsoft's .NET technology. As I reviewed the articles for this month's issue of .NET Developer's Journal, it occurred to me that the microcosm of applications presented in our magazine this time around are just abou...
