My latest SD Times column is now available online.

Michi Henning's article on the history of CORBA in the latest Queue is very good indeed. Henning has biases (he's got his own middleware solution) but the article never strays too far. It's opinionated, but accurate. Some of the timeline discussion is a little overblown but not too much (CORBA's …

The Jolt Awards are the major industry award for software development tools (compilers, libraries, etc.). One problem we face every year is proper classification of tools. Traditionally, we try to refine / fine tune the previous year's categories (Development Environments; Libraries, Frameworks, and Components; etc.). Problems arise frequently balancing the number …

Vista has built-in voice recognition capabilities. One of the things that really jumped out in the Tablet PC was that the correction interface makes all the difference when it comes to using alternative input techniques: a service pack released for the Tablet a year or so after the initial launch …

"[Wayne Kelly is] pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a Ruby Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler. The compiler can be used to statically compile a Ruby source file …

I take it as a given that every stock touted via spam is, in fact, the subject of some sort of pump-and-dump scheme. That is, someone currently owning significant amounts of the stock (or options) is praising it, with the intent of causing upward motion, at which time they will …

The blog is too cluttered with marketing-speak, but the accompanying 22-minute video is very good in conveying what "Project Glidepath" is about: guidance (including, but not just code templates) for "MicroISVs" (1-10 person SD teams), integrated into the IDE. Too much "software factory" talk has been very rarified; it's nice …

Apropos of yesterday's blog entries (XML: Unix Pipe or ASM? and WS-* vs. REST/POX: Revenge of Worse is Better): the always interesting Peter Coffee paints a picture of how WS-* approaches to SOA lead to success. Contrast with Brian Marick's \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id …

If we're to have any defense against the zombie hordes, it will be by the innovative work of a generation of master roboticists. This vanguard of humanity will, perhaps, learn their skills using the new Microsoft Robotics Studio, available for free download . The only excuse to not check this out …

I recently talked to a former client for whom I'd architected a system 4-5 years ago. When I left, they had a technical staff of about 10 and 2 clients using the back-end system we developed. Today, they have the same size technical staff and 900 clients using the system …