Stories by: Martin Heller

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Preview: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 impresses 16 December, 2009 02:24

In beta 2, Visual Studio 2010 is beginning to show the rather attractive shape of things to come.
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First look: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 beta 24 November, 2009 22:14

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a major upgrade from SharePoint 2007 in several areas. It has a much improved user interface, especially for online editing. It supports more browsers. It does a better job of integrating with Microsoft Office. It provides more opportunities to developers and designers, as well as to shops that might want to consolidate other products (such as blogs and wikis and business applications) with SharePoint.
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Microsoft Silverlight 3 15 June, 2009 16:10

Redmond's much-enhanced rich Internet application platform also runs on Windows or Mac desktops, online or offline
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 15 June, 2009 12:35

Although not without problems, Microsoft Visual Studio is the premier IDE for developing applications with the Microsoft .Net Framework and at least a contender for the best Windows-hosted C/C++ IDE.
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First look: gDoc Fusion 19 May, 2009 10:23

If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said that the PDF software category was completely bracketed and saturated, between Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended at the high end, Adobe Reader for free, and numerous cheap third-party Acrobat clones in between.
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Microsoft Exchange 2010 beta 20 April, 2009 13:25

Flexibility, reliability, client-side improvements, and ease of administration mark this major upgrade
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Rich Internet apps that double as desktop apps 03 February, 2009 09:15

Finding a single development environment for all purposes has so far proven an unattainable goal. But with the advent of rich Internet applications (RIA), development nirvana gets a bit closer.
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Windows Azure Services Platform gives wings to .Net 17 December, 2008 09:26

Microsoft intends its new Windows Azure Services Platform to be a serious cloud computing platform for a broad range of developers and scenarios, from lone developers starting up a new Web-based company on a shoestring to large teams of enterprise developers looking for high-performance, highly available, and scalable Web sites, computing, and storage. A few years out, Microsoft wants Azure to be seen as the preferred location for enterprise data, not as a business risk. It's off to a good start.
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Silverlight, for real this time 19 November, 2008 08:58

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA (rich Internet application) and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.
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Who needs an enterprise AJAX solution? 30 October, 2008 08:42

One thing that the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development community has aplenty is choice. Want a free, open source AJAX framework? We have (alphabetically) Dojo, Ext, Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, MooTools, OpenRico, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and the Yahoo User Interface Library, and frankly they're all pretty good. There are hundreds more, but unfortunately I can't keep up with them all.
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Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is icing, and more cake 26 August, 2008 09:16

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (VS08) Service Pack 1 (SP1) took eight months to arrive. Considering the capabilities that have been added, eight months might not seem so long. In some ways, SP1 feels like the completion of what Visual Studio 2008 was supposed to be. It's certainly not just the collection of bug fixes that you'd expect from the term "service pack."