Timothy Dyck

Last week, Microsoft officially launched its Visual Studio .Net development tool and .Net Framework. The former is a major release, but it isnt a paradigm change. .Net Framework has the potential to be much more significant. We havent seen anything on the scale of .Net Framework and the new .Net virtual machine it introduces since […]

Last week in San Jose, Palms new operating system subsidiary, PalmSource, rolled out a Palm OS 5 beta. As a platform on which to build a new generation of handheld devices, the beta was underwhelming—a situation Ive come to expect from Palm. Promised to ship by midyear, Palm OS 5s biggest change architecturally will be […]

Its not often that a standard clause in software license agreements is created because of one person, but thats the history behind the benchmark result gag clause, also known as the DeWitt clause, in many software license agreements. In 1982, when relational databases were just getting started, David DeWitt, then an assistant professor (and now […]

JBuilder 6 Extends Its Reach”> Developers probably spend more time living in their development tools than in their own homes, which makes a comfortable fit really important. In Version 6 of its venerable JBuilder tool line, which is available now, Borland Software Corp. extends the tool in new areas to cover emerging Java technologies such […]

Comparing performance on server databases is a black art and is an issue that vendors discourage the press from examining too closely. To bring some light to the subject, eWeek Labs, along with PC Magazines PC Labs, is doing a large-scale server database test. Whats most important about this benchmark is that the database systems […]

The all-too-familiar struggle to satisfy time-to-market simplicity and final-feature-set criteria is in full swing in several key XML standards bodies, the results of which will affect all users of XML. The World Wide Web Consortium just finished one of its busiest periods ever, with 27 publications released last month. Several of these proposals were releases […]

With the shipment of Microsoft Corp.s .Net Framework run-time environment last week, Windows developers have a powerful new platform for developing secure applications in any .Net language. .Net is a radical rethinking of how Windows application security works and jumps Windows security forward several generations. In an all-day briefing with eWeek Labs, Brian LaMacchia, development […]

The first alpha releases of Samba 3.0 provide a preview of whats to come in the next major release of the open-source, Windows-compatible file and print server for Unix. The biggest changes are internal, including new native support for Unicode and NT-compatible error codes, which both improve compatibility with Windows servers. These steps are key […]

2001 was the year of the system administrator: Anti-virus protection, disaster recovery plans and client-side OS upgrades were all key IT tasks last year. 2002 will be the year of the developer: This year well see the start of a trend in enterprise applications away from dropping in packaged applications toward a more assemble-to-order approach. […]

Organizations looking for a branch-office database and software developers who want to store data in custom applications will find iAnywhere Solutions Inc.s SQL Anywhere Studio 8.0 database an excellent choice. (iAnywhere Solutions is a subsidiary of Sybase Inc.) SQL Anywhere is a mature, polished product and offers a lot of sophistication for a database that […]

One of the main benefits of the Microsoft .Net development platforms use of processor- independent byte code is easy program portability. The first fruits of this benefit are now available to Pocket PC developers, who can use a Technology Preview release of .Net Compact Framework to write .Net applications for Windows CE-based PDAs and phones. […]

If the U.S. Government were to seek to establish a national identity card, it would confront a rats nest of technical problems, despite recent advances. The big-three immediate technical issues are authentication, verification and encryption. The good news is that biometric-based authentication systems based on fingerprint scanning or visual face recognition are now relatively cheap […]