TechRepublic Live 2011
I am writing this the day after returning from TechRepublic Live 2011. The event was fantastic, as always. A lot of things gelled for me while I was there, and in the next couple of weeks I will be writing an in-depth post about what is happening on the IT side of the fence, and how you will need to adjust your skillset, learning plans, and development strategy to keep ahead of the ball.
Language/library updates
Appcelerator’s Open Marketplace
Appcelerator opened a new marketplace for developers to list various components and modules for use with its Titanium development system for making cross-platform mobile applications.
PHP 5.4 Beta released
PHP 5.4 has its first beta out now, with a large number of improvements over 5.3.
Jaspersoft 4.2 brings mobile business intelligence
Jaspersoft’s Business Intelligence Suite 4.2 now allows you to include business intelligence (BI) into your mobile applications.
Windows Phone 7.1 SDK
The Windows Phone 7 SDK has been updated to 7.1 to provide full support for Mango as well as new languages and markets.
BlackBerry Payment Service SDK 1.5
RIM released version 1.5 of the BlackBerry Payment SDK, which now allows subscription payments.
PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7 Mango
There is now a beta of PhoneGap, a cross-platform mobile development system for HTML5 available for Windows Phone 7 Mango.
Tools and products
Basho announces Riak 1.0
Basho announced the upcoming release of Riak 1.0, an open source, distributed database platform.
Xeround offers MySQL in the cloud
Xeround has announced the availability of its database-as-a-service offering of MySQL.
Engine Yard now supporting JRuby in their cloud offering
Engine Yard’s Engine Yard Cloud Ruby Platform-as-a-Service product now supports JRuby.
eXo Platform 3.5 beta opened
eXo opened the beta to its eXo 3.5 product, which allows developers to build websites and web applications that leverage cloud technologies.
Tips and tricks
Using Azure as a content delivery network
Brian Hitney has a nice tutorial demonstrating how you can use Microsoft Azure as an inexpensive content delivery network (CDN) to speed up the delivery of static site assets.
Extending .NET ASP.NET MVC
SimpleTalk’s Simone Chiaretta is starting a series on how to customize the way that ASP.NET MVC handles your applications.
Exceptions in Tasks in .NET 4.5
Stephen Toub has an in-depth look at how Exceptions are treated in Tasks in the upcoming .NET 4.5.
C++ AMP in C#
Igor Ostrovsky wrote an article demonstrating the use of C++ AMP (which lets you leverage GPUs for parallel computations) in C# code. This is useful stuff for algorithm work.
Web users still have short attention spans
Jakob Nielsen reports that Web users still have extremely short attention spans, reinforcing the idea that your Web apps and sites need to be lightning quick to be successful.
Events
National GiveCamp
National GiveCamp is an event for techies to donate their time to provide technology solutions for non-profit organizations. The event this year runs from October 21 - 23.
Web DevCon 2011
The big Web DevCon2011 conference in Hamburg Germany is from October 17 and 18. The focus is on Web development across a variety of technologies.
J.Ja
