Adobe nukes mobile Flash, open sources Flex

Adobe has decided to discontinue development of mobile Flash. Kind of lost in the hoopla is that OEMs and other licensees (like RIM) will be allowed to continue to develop it for their systems. In addition, they have cut Flex loose and open sourced it. This effectively puts the nail in Flash’s coffin for all but specialized use scenarios. Who wants to develop for Flash and then have to replicate it or not have the content work on mobile devices?

Language/library updates

PHP 5.4 RC1

The first release candidate of PHP 5.4 is out. The feature set is locked at this point, and they are squishing bugs.

Async CTP Version 3

If you are using the CTP of the Async library from Microsoft, they’ve recently released a new version that brings it in line with updates in Silverlight 5 and WP7.5 (Mango).

Tools and products

Zend Studio 9

Zend Studio 9 is now publically available. The version includes support for the new phpcloud.com system, Git and GitHub, and makes improvements in editing JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

WebMatrix 2 Beta

Microsoft released a beta of the next version of its WebMatrix development tool.

Engine Yard adds high availability and databases

Engine Yard announced that it is adding more database capabilities and high availability options to its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.

Android source code released

Google released the source code for both the Honeycomb (3.X) and Ice Cream Sandwich (4.x) lines of the Android operating system. Many had been disappointed by the long delay in the release of the Honeycomb code.

Editorial and commentary

Students choose easier majors in college

An article in The Wall Street Journal shows that students are increasingly staying away from engineering degrees in favor of easier majors. This is bad news for the IT industry, because employers will eventually relocate overseas rather than competing domestically for talent. You know what was really sad about that article? Reading about a CS student who couldn’t program a soda machine to dispense the right change.

Tips and tricks

Hurricane Electric offers free programming tutorials

Hurricane Electric put up a new site that offers free tutorials on programming.

Visual Studio 2010 WebExtensions

Scott Hanselman wrote a piece that shows off the WebExtensions for Visual Studio 2010 that make it a bit more pleasant to work with Web apps.

HTML5 and Web Forms

Brandon Satrom has an article in MSDN Magazine that demonstrates some simple uses of the new type attribute of the input tag in HTML5, and how to use it with ASP.NET Web Forms.

Dealing with exceptions in dataflow blocks

Cristina Manu has put together a very comprehensive article on how to deal with exceptions that come up within a dataflow block.

Explaining parallel LINQ queries

If you use PLINQ, Igor Ostrovsky wrote a concise summary of some recent changes to the algorithm to determine if queries will be run in parallel.

Events

Fall and early winter 2011: Windows PhoneCamps

If you want to get a hands-on look at Windows Phone 7 development, check out the Windows PhoneCamps that are going on all over the United States this fall and early winter.

November 1-30, 2011: Eclipse’s 10th birthday

Eclipse is celebrating its 10 year anniversary at DemoCamps worldwide in November.

November 18, 2011: M3 Conference in Columbus, OH

The first M3 conference will be held November 18 in Columbus, OH. It will be all about mobile development.

January 27-28, 2012: PHPBenelux

The PHPBenelux 2012 conference in Antwerp will be held January 27 and 28.

March 26-29, 2012: Agile ALM Connect

If you’re interested in Agile methodologies and techniques, the Agile ALM Connect event will be put on by the Eclipse Foundation March 26 – 29, 2012 in Reston, VA.

J.Ja