Windows 7 Code Pack released

If you are writing .NET applications and want to take advantage of the new items in Windows 7, Microsoft has released version 1.0 of the Windows 7 Code Pack.

The “IE 6 No More” campaign

We all know the issues around IE 6. The problem is its install base is still huge. There is now a grassroots “IE 6 No More” campaign, and it is easy to join. Note: This is not an anti-IE campaign; it’s just an anti-IE 6 campaign.

Update on the LAMP/WIMP/ASP.NET shootout

Last week, I mentioned what has become a highly controversial topic: Joe Stagner’s test of LAMP, WIMP, and ASP.NET performance. Joe has published a follow up, in which opcode caching is enabled. The performance boost PHP saw from that was much less than he expected.

Embarcadero RAD Studio to be released next week

I spoke with Mike Rozoog, the Senior Director of Delphi Solutions at Embarcadero last week, about the impending release of RAD Studio. RAD Studio packages C++ Builder, Delphi, and Delphi Prism into one neat package. This gives developers supreme flexibility to develop native code applications and .NET applications. The feature set we discussed had a lot of innovative ideas, including “IDE Insight,” a system for providing something like IntelliSense to the functionality of the IDE itself. This description does not do it justice. After speaking with Mr. Rozoog, I decided to take a closer look at RAD Studio when it ships, and I plan to give an in-depth review of it then.

Roundup of tools for parallel debugging

Somasegar has details on various tools for debugging parallel applications, including a new, free one for Visual Studio 2008 from Microsoft. If you do any kind of multithreaded work, you’ll want to read his post.

Yahoo!’s Doug Cutting moves to Cloudera

Doug Cutting has left Yahoo! and will be working with Cloudera. He is known for being a cofounder of the Hadoop project at Apache and the creator of Nutch and Lucene. This is another in a long string of highly public, high-level defections from Yahoo!

Silverlight 3 broadens networking options

Previous versions of Silverlight used the browser to perform networking connections; however, browsers have limited networking capabilities in some ways. Silverlight 3 addresses this issue by allowing developers to specify connectivity with the OS’s networking capabilities. This is particularly useful for developers consuming RESTful services within Silverlight.

Ruby performance on Windows is closely tied to the compiler

In a very revealing article on InfoQ, it looks like the Ruby for Windows installation uses the VC 6 compiler, which is ancient. As a result, Ruby for Windows is much slower than necessary. One person is working hard to change that and start compiling and packaging Ruby with a modern compiler.

What is Microsoft’s Seahorse project?

Mary Jo Foley has a few sparse details on the Microsoft Seahorse project. It’s definitely something rich client and probably something involving images, but it’s anyone’s guess past that!

How to install Silverlight apps out-of-browser

For a variety of reasons, some developers want their Silverlight apps to be installed as desktop apps. Tim Heuer has full details on how to do just this.

JetBrains shows off new Web IDE

JetBrains (the Resharper folks) are working on a new application for working on Web sites, Web IDE. It looks like it does HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the standard edition, and PHP and SQL in the more upscale version. It is currently in beta, and you can apply to take it for a spin.

J.Ja

Disclosure of Justin’s industry affiliations: Justin James has a working arrangement with Microsoft to write an article for MSDN Magazine. He also has a contract with Spiceworks to write product buying guides.

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