Darryl K. Taft

Microsoft is looking to make it easier for disabled people to use technology. The software vendor is chartering an initiative called the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance. Announced Dec. 10, the AIA is an engineering collaboration between assistive technology vendors, IT companies and key nongovernmental organizations. The group’s goal is to enable developers to more easily create […]

Microsoft is releasing the beta 3 of its ADO.Net Entity Framework, along with a preview of ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions. The ADO.Net Entity Framework is designed to make it easier for developers to build data-centric applications and services regardless of the underlying data source. Microsoft announced beta 3 of the technology Dec. 6. Microsoft decided to […]

The third quarter was a good one for Iona Technologies, a player in the rapidly growing SOA [service-oriented architecture] field. The company saw revenue jump 19 percent over the same period last year, achieved Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Status and rolled out its Fuse open-source offerings. Eric Newcomer, Ionas chief technology officer, sat down with […]

IBM is introducing support for Microsoft’s Windows PowerShell scripting language in its WebSphere MQ technology. PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language designed to improve IT professionals’ productivity. It features an administration-focused scripting language, more than 130 standard command-line tools, as well as syntax and utilities to help users more easily control system administration […]

Contrary to speculation, Microsoft will hold its Professional Developers Conference next year. When the software giant postponed its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference to some point in the fall of 2008, some observers speculated that the PDC also might be postponed or canceled. However, Microsoft Dec. 6 announced it will hold the PDC 2008 Oct. […]

Microsoft is releasing its experimental tool to help democratize Web development as an early preview for developers. Microsoft announced Dec. 5 a Community Technology Preview of Volta, an experimental developer toolkit that enables developers to build multitier Web applications using the .Net libraries, tools and techniques they already know. Volta comes out of Microsoft’s Live […]

BOSTON—Novell will be delivering a Linux-based version of Microsoft’s Silverlight cross-browser, rich Internet application technology within six months. Miguel de Icaza, vice president of developer platforms at Novell, said at the XML conference here Dec. 5 that his team wanted to ensure that Linux would not be a second-class citizen should Silverlight take off. “If […]

Adobe Systems is rolling out the Adobe Flash Media Server 3 family of products, which offers streaming media and real-time communication capabilities. The new products, announced Dec. 4, offer industry standard H.264 video capabilities and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support. They also feature increased protection for streaming high-quality video and for the delivery of […]

BOSTON—The rise of mashups and similar technologies has given developers a way to build simple applications, but they’re also opening up a new world of security issues. The risks involved with mashups and SAAS (software as a service) come because of the amount of sensitive data that can be exposed on the Internet. However, Jeremy […]

BOSTON—The U.S. Department of Defense is looking to mashups and something called microformats to help bring the Web to the modern day soldier and battlefield operative. Microformats are lightweight, non-invasive metadata used to mark up Web pages easily, and mashups are Web services to aggregate information contained in unrelated Web pages in a wide variety […]

When I think about agile development, rightly or wrongly, I tend to think about athleticism and cat-like responsiveness. Also listening to some practitioners of agile methodologies brings to mind one of the chants my son’s Pop Warner football team sometimes used to get themselves revved up. They’d start the chant describing what they planned to […]

Serena Software is shipping its business mashup solution—Serena Mashup Composer and the Mashup Server for on-premise deployment—enabling users to build and deploy simple software applications aimed at business problems. Serena has committed to deliver its mashup solution as a SAAS (software-as-a-service) offering, but decided to release the on-premise offering Dec. 3 and will introduce the […]