Archive

Read the press release and testimonials, and visit the Device Independence home page.

"Taking place July 6-9th 2004, the themes of the conference are 'Convergence of Web Services, Grid Computing, e-Business and Autonomic Computing'. Abstract and Paper Submission due date is Feb 9th."

"According to a recent Jupiter Research report, 80 percent of companies surveyed has already deployed portals or planned to deploy them in the near future. Yet portal rollouts have been harder than the "simple, out-of-the-box dream that portals seemed to sell in the late '90s," says Nate Root, a senior analyst at Forrester Research."

"Microsoft is about to launch an anti-Linux advertising blitz. While the software giant says research shows that its operating system is actually cheaper, Linux companies say the campaign simply proves how good the open-source operating system is."

"Outsourcing is supposed to save companies money. That's why, whether locally or offshore, IT outsourcing has been garnering so much attention; and that's why a new AMR Research report (entitled "You Can't Outsource Outsourcing Management") is of particular interest.

The report found that, while IT outsourcing is either active or in consideration at a majority of companies, only 30 percent of all companies are pleased with their cost savings. Given that cost savings are the main business argument behind outsourcing, that's a very small number."

"Microsoft on Thursday said it would not, "for now, implement modifications" to Windows and Internet Explorer as demanded by the patent suit it lost to Eolas Technologies last August, because of many requests made by its corporate users and business partners."

" The latest version of SOAPtest offers support for WS-Security, MIME attachments, enhanced load testing features, and other features designed to help development teams prevent errors and accelerate time to market for their Web service initiatives."

"OASIS in mid-February anticipates a full-membership vote on the WS-Security specification, which is intended to provide critical security for Web services. If approved during a 30-day voting period, WS-Security becomes an OASIS standard."

"Enterprise applications company PeopleSoft has debuted a hosting model targeted at the mid-market segment, which PeopleSoft defines as companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues.

PeopleSoft has been interested in the mid-market for some years -- especially in the customer relationship management (CRM) application area, a hotbed of activity. PeopleSoft has also carried out hosting on behalf of a handful of companies (including Bio Rad, Bevcore, and Frank Russell) and had an eCenter (in partnership with HP) for enterprise hosting purposes."

"The UK Unix users' group is unhappy about Bill Gates receiving an honorary knighthood, saying that Microsoft's licence fees negate any contribution the company's chairman has made The UK Unix User Group is up in arms at the prospect of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates receiving an honorary knighthood.

Following the news that the Microsoft founder, who is the world's wealthiest man, will receive an honorary knighthood for 'services to global enterprise', the group said it 'had serious reservations at such an award'.

'Microsoft's use of unfair business practices to damage its competitors and to extend its de facto monopolies in desktop and consumer computing has been before the courts many times,' said the group.

'Microsoft's software has been written with scant regard for security, pushing the enormous cost of counteracting viruses/spam, and for repairing their damage, onto its own customers.' Other operating systems rarely suffer such problems, said UKUUG chairman Charles Curran, 'having been designed with security and robustness as goals rather than as afterthoughts.'"

TheServerSide.NET can – of course – be found at http://www.theserverside.net.

The alternative is to run as a normal user and launch a program with runas and admin credentials where required.

Developer Lifestyle: running as non-admin

"A friend of mine once said that there are problems and there are difficulties. A problem is something you savor. You say, "Well that's an interesting problem. Let me think about that problem a while." You enjoy thinking about it, because when you find the solution to the problem, it's enlightening.
And then there are difficulties. Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn't tell you a thing. It won't be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficulties.

The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity."

"Estimation just got easier: Dust off your statistical math and learn how the basic tenet of a decades-old technique can be used for smaller software projects."

"The transition from paper to electronic forms seems like a no-brainer. Who wouldn't want to abolish the anachronism of paper forms in capturing and relaying business-critical information? Of course, centuries of bureaucracy yield habits that are hard to break. In December, for example, the federal government ignored a $17 million grant application from New Hampshire because, according to a state official, %u201Csome pages had margins narrower than one inch."

"XAML becoming a new HOT wave in Microsoft Windows Longhorn programming model. XAML syntactically inherited from XML is a scripting programming language used to write applications that covers both Windows and Web worlds."

UrlScan is a security tool that screens all incoming requests to the server by filtering the requests based on rules that are set by the administrator. Filtering requests helps secure the server by ensuring that only valid requests are processed. UrlScan helps protect Web servers because most malicious attacks share a common characteristic — they involve the use of a request that is unusual in some way. For instance, the request might be extremely long, request an unusual action, be encoded using an alternate character set, or include character sequences that are rarely seen in legitimate requests. By filtering unusual requests, UrlScan helps prevent such requests from reaching the server and potentially causing damage.

For the download of version 2.5 and product details see Microsoft.com

• The latest generation of tools let service providers observe individual user activity
• Improved visibility makes it much easier to troubleshoot problems
• But it could also impinge on confidentiality and user privacy
• Providers must strike a careful balance
• A more granular approach to security helps enforce proper controls

Here’s how to try the ASP to ASP.NET Migration Assistant Alpha:

Visit http://www.asp.net/migrationassistants to learn more and download the tool.

“When creating a distributed system you frequently need to provide for communication between two entities that are not in sync. Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ) provides the kind of store-and-forward messaging in a pre-built infrastructure that can help you address these kinds of messaging needs. In the past, MSMQ was accessed using a COM wrapper. Now there's a .NET wrapper that lets you accomplish your messaging goals easily from your Framework-based code. To illustrate the use of the wrapper, the author builds a messaging application, sends MSMQ messages over the Web, and discusses messaging security.”

Source code included. See it at this page

"Let's take an old idea, like RPC, and wrap it with some new hype and nomenclature, and then mediate it with a completely orthogonal protocol! Yeah, lets!

I was just idly thinking today about Web Services. You know, the big hype item that some folks hoped would break through the IT economic doldrums after dotbomb and 9/11. There were articles, magazines, conferences, and the normal hoopla, all boiling around this old concept wrapped in new clothes.

The old concept, of course, is RPC -- Remote Procedure Call. A concept, by the way, that never really succeeded in a huge way. Apparently the industry decided that we needed to take this questionably successful technique and promote it to the whole web at large."

Web Services? What has the industry been smoking?