I noticed this question in a comment to Rob Blackwell’s Reg article on Silverlight: …given that MS never does anything without a commercial reason … why Silverlight? What sales will it make? What competition will it kill? As far as I can see, there’s nothing that will tie SL exclusively to a particular MS product. … Continue reading Why Silverlight?
I’m sitting in a session at Adobe Max Europe listening to Senior Product Manager Laurel Reitman talking about what a great open platform Adobe is creating. She refers to the open sourcing of the Flex SDK; the open bug database for Flex; the ISO standardization programme for PDF; the donation of source code to Tamarin, … Continue reading Adobe: friend or enemy of open source, open standards?
Tim Anderson interviews Scott Guthrie, a General Manager within Microsoft’s Developer Division. Guthrie runs the development teams that build CLR, ASP.NET, WPF, WPF/e, Windows Forms, IIS 7.0, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, and the Visual Studio Web and Client Development Tools. The interview took place at the Mix07 conference in London in September 2007. Topics include … Continue reading Scott Guthrie on .NET futures
I attended two days of briefings on Adobe’s developer-focused products, especially the forthcoming AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). In essence, AIR is the Flash player supplemented by additional features to enable applications that are not browser-hosted, but installed as desktop applications. AIR is great for some scenarios, weak for others. Here’s 10 reasons to love it: 1. … Continue reading Adobe AIR: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it.
Ryan Stewart blogs about Why do tech journalists get Rich Internet Applications so wrong. I don’t agree with everything he says, especially this one: AIR is a difficult thing to grasp because running web apps on the desktop hasn’t been done before. I suppose there might be a way to define “web apps” that excludes … Continue reading Common misconceptions about Rich Internet Applications
Adobe’s Paul Robertson has a thoughtful response to my complaint about AIR security. The point I made is that any AIR application has the same access to the file system as the user. This includes local SQLite databases as well as other documents. Robertson’s response: In order for a user to access an AIR application, he … Continue reading Adobe AIR security concerns
During Google Developer Day I had the impression that Mozilla was right on board with Google Gears, the plug-in which which enables offline applications. Here’s Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson from the Gears team: We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry … Continue reading FireFox team not sure about Google Gears adoption
Google Gears is a browser plug-in to support running web applications offline. It has several components: A local server – not a complete web server, but a cache for web pages. One of its benefits is to solve versioning issues. For example, what if you had an application that retreived one page from the cache, … Continue reading Why Google Gears? Thoughts from Google Developer Day
I’ve had four successive emails of increasing urgency from someone using my simple sqlite wrapper. It’s sometimes difficult to handle such requests – the code is free and there is a limit to how much time you can give away – but in this case I’m unable to reply. The sender is using an email … Continue reading How not to get support
The new year beckons, so here’s a quick look back at my web stats. I’m surprised by the most popular search phrase. Believe it or not, it’s vb.net database. I wrote a short article on getting started with a vb.net database app. This was in .NET 1.1 days. My presumption was that when you fire … Continue reading What you’re reading