Posts by EddieC

With its release on Monday of the first public beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 RC2, Microsoft also was touting features introduced in the second beta of Visual Studio 2010. Expected in March, Redmond's next IDE will simplify development of new applications and modification of existing ones to take advantage of its high performance computing platform, according to claims. Windows Server HPC 2008 is currently scheduled for release late summer, 2010.

"The topic of making serial code into parallel code continues to be very complex," said Ryan Waite, product unit manager for High Performance Computing at Microsoft in a phone interview yesterday. He said there are two new tools in the product for doing that, one for code that uses the Messaging Passing Interface standard on many HPC systems, and another for SOA. "We provide support for both tightly coupled computing code that uses MPI and MPI-like communications patterns, and a lot of these parallel types of codes that use more of a service-oriented programming model."

The second VS2010 beta is packaged with the forthcoming .NET Framework 4 beta 2, which Waite said also provides HPC support. "The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is that we've abstracted some of the concepts for writing parallel code. So instead of you having to have to have a PhD in computer science to make sense of writing parallel apps, We've made it so that a lot of the concepts that are difficult for developers …

Microsoft this week acquired Teamprise, a division of SourceGear that built tools to give developers access to Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server from systems running Linux, Mac OS X and Unix.SourceGear's flagship SourceOffSite provides remote access to Visual SouceSafe, Microsoft's version control system.

Teamprise comes in three forms. The Plug-in for Eclipse allows developers source control, bug tracking, build and reporting operations from within their current Eclipse environment or Eclipse-based IDE. Teamprise Explorer does the same but can can stand alone. There's also the Command-Line Client automated builds and other scripting situations.

Updated to version 3.2 in March, Teamprise was given a complete command-line feature set, support for building projects with Maven and a single sign-on for Linux and Mac OS X with Kerberos authentication. All three modules at that time also gained support for HP-UX on IA64. Teamprise is now at version 3.3, which according to release notes, is a maintenance release.

Microsoft said in a statement that Teamprise functionality will be integrated into the Visual Studio product line beginning with Visual Studio 2010.

The BlackBerry Developer Conference concluded yesterday, but not before Research in Motion had the chance to unveil enhancements to its BlackBerry Application Platform, which now supports OpenGL ES, a subset of the desktop graphics API specification for embedded systems. Useful for development of 3D games development and other graphics, it's standard equipment on phones based on Android and Symbian OS, and is among several of iPhone's graphics libraries.

RIM also announced the release of BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, a free suite of tools it says simplify the design of custom interfaces, illustrations and animations for devices running BlackBerry OS 4.2.2 or higher. The suite, which replaces the Plazmic Content Developer’s Kit, can import Photoshop files and includes access to a home screen layout, fonts, icons, message list colors, cursors and dialog boxes, the company said.SVG graphics can be created using BlackBerry Composer, for adding illustration and animation to buttons, backgrounds, web sites and BlackBerry apps. On devices running BlackBerry OS 5.0 and higher, developers also can add ringtones and transition between screens by zooming, sliding, wiping and fading.

Also this week in separate announcements, Research in Motion said it will add a Java GUI builder to its Eclipse-based development environment, announced the ability to use Adobe Flash and Creative Suite authoring tools to target BlackBerry devices, and unveiled new services slated for 2010 that will let applications be aware of their geographic location and push content …

At the risk of coming off like TV's "Mad Men," Amazon Web Services really are New and Improved. The company today announced the addition of Amazon Relational Database Service, giving users of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) access to a virtual instance of MySQL. That's the New part. Improvements include a family of high-memory instances and a price reduction of Linux-based EC2 compute time to 8.5 cents per hour from 10 cents. The 15 percent price drop takes effect Nov. 1.

"Many customers have told us that their applications require a relational database," said Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services, in a statement. "That’s why we built Amazon RDS, which combines a familiar relational database with automated management and the instant scalability of the AWS cloud." Existing MySQL applications can be "work seamlessly with Amazon RDS," according to claims, while the cloud automates common administrative tasks such as setup and provisioning, patch management and data backups, which are stored for a user-definable period. Database scaling--such as adding add more storage or changing to a larger or smaller DB Instance class-- can be executed with a single API call, the company said. Developers retain control of schema, indices and controls for performance tuning.

For less complex database needs, Amazon also offers SimpleDB, with which applications can store and retrieve data using simple Web services requests. As with Amazon RDS, provisioning and maintenance are automatic, as …

Thought you were bleeding edge with your quad-core PC? Think again. A company called Tilera today announced that it's working on a chip containing 100 processor cores, which it says could be seen by 2011. It's part of its new TILE-Gx line of 64-bit multi-core processors, the first of which--a 36-core chip--will be sampling by the end of 2010, the company said today in a statement. With its top-end TILE-Gx100, Tilera claims to outstrip Intel's next-generation Westmere processor in performance-per-watt by a factor of 10. Other models will contain 16 and 64 cores, and will sample in early 2011.

But all those cores won't do much good without applications to exercise them, right? So Tilera also offers Multicore Development Environment, a simplified multi-core Eclipse-based IDE that can target SMP Linux 2.6, Zero Overhead Linux, Bare Metal Environment and hybrid systems. The package includes an ANSI C/C++ compiler, system simulator, GNU command line tools and graphical multi-core application debugging and profiling.

The breakthroughs in multi-core technology are the result of an architecture under development since 1990. TILE-Gx chips share local cache across all cores, and a proprietary two-dimensional interconnect eliminates the need for an on-chip bus.

“We believe this next generation of high-core count, ultra high-performance chips will open completely new computing possibilities,” said Tilera CEO Omid Tahernia, a 21-year veteran of Motorola who joined Tilera in 2007 after running the DSP division of Xilinx. “Customers will be able to replace an entire board …

One way to become the "ultimate" of something is to simply declare it. JetBrains, maker of the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, on Thursday began previewing IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition, the latest version of its commercial integrated development environment for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The "ultimate" designation is presumably to differentiate it from the Community Edition, which is now available as open source.

The company had previously offered a free version if IntelliJ IDEA for non-commercial use, but source code was not made available until now. Both are based on the forthcoming version 9 of the IDE, formerly code-named Maia. No release date was given.

"Open source has become the mainstream, and we continue to embrace it as an exciting challenge," said JetBrains CEO Sergey Dmitriev of the move. "In brief, we're not changing direction — we're moving forward." The company positions the Community Edition, which will be available under the Apache 2.0 license, as a good choice for developers of pure Java/Groovy applications or for doing Swing development. "It has all the crown jewels ofIntelliJ IDEA, including various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance, debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support, as well as Ant and Maven build integration." It differs from Ultimate in too many ways to list, but if you're working with PHP, Python, Ruby or SQL, the free version won't cut it. Also, it works with CVS, Git and Subversion, but if you're using a commercial CMS, you'll …

With all the libraries available that have emerged, Java and Ajax applications practically build themselves these days. This week Java tool maker Instantiations added support for Ext GWT to GWT Designer 7.2, the latest version of its Eclipse-based drag-and-drop GUI-building environment that can be had for as little as $5 a month.

Also known as GXT, Ext GWT builds on the Google Web Toolkit, adding a slew of customizable UI widgets and CSS-based themes, plus full documentation and backward compatibility. It's made by Ext LLC. And if you're currently building Web apps and you haven't hard of them, a look at their JS Desktop for an idea. For a couple hundred bucks, their libraries might help you avoid reinventing the foundation.

Now back to the news. With the addition of GXT 2.0.1 support, GWT Designer 7.2 adds multiple GXT-specific palette categories for Panels, Layouts, Widgets, Forms, Menus and Toolbars. It also provides WYSIWYG editing for all GXT components, properties and layouts, and adds several Ext-specific wizards for creating GXT Windows, Dialogs and Composites.

GWT Designer v7.2 also adds a multi-page CSS Style Editor as well as other CSS enhancements and continued support for GWT through 1.7.1, and stays in sync with GWT 1.7, which adds better support for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4. The company also claims to have improved the tool's overall performance and specifically its parsing speed.

Current subscribers can upgrade …

With the release of any new OS release, the question facing developers is whether or not to port existing applications. Often the answer hinges on two major factors: Will the operating system be widely adopted and what's downside of doing nothing?

In the enterprise the decision is often made for you, when policy dictates whether the company will upgrade its desktops to something new. According to a survey of 450 developers conducted by Visual Studio Magazine published this month, almost two out of every five (38.9%) are currently developing for Windows 7 or plan to do so within the next three months. That, despite the fact that not all of Win7's promised capabilities will be present in .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack, which is included with the release. The Multi-Touch UI, ribbon toolbars and other major functionality will have to wait until next year when .NET 4.0 comes out.

While UI whistles and bells are a major focal point of Windows 7, most of the developers surveyed were more interested in better performance. When asked about their "level of excitement about specific Windows 7 features," the top two responses were improved security and optimized I/O handling. Tied for third place were a "power-efficient infrastructure" and an "updated graphics stack and high DPI support."

Will Windows 7 be the must-have OS that XP was, or will it fall flat in the enterprise as Vista did? I'll admit I'm rooting for Microsoft. After all, Apple's OS fortunes certainly turned …

Research In Motion yesterday released new versions of its BlackBerry development tools, including the BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE) Plug-In for Eclipse Beta 2 that's better integrated with the open-source IDE, can perform pre-processing for builds and receives updates through the Eclipse Update Manager. There are also new versions of the BlackBerry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio and BlackBerry MDS Studio, which can stand alone or work through Eclipse.

The BlackBerry Plug-in for Visual Studio allows users of Microsoft's IDE to visually construct applications for BlackBerry devices and RIM's Mobile Data System and application framework. I have seen RIM's drag-and-drop application builder in action, and it is sweet. Version 1.1 now lets your apps integrate with those included with the BlackBerry, and the plug-in works with Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Vista.

If you're using the Plazmic Content Developer's Kit to design BlackBerry themes, custom UIs, icons and wallpaper, you'll be happy to know that version 4.6 is out, with support for the latest BlackBerry Bold and Pearl flip phones. RIM reports that the Plazmic 4.6 CDK also now permits designers to integrate Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) with their customized themes, Web portals, games and other applications.

Earlier in October RIM began publicly beta testing BlackBerry JDE 4.7, its tools for the BlackBerry Storm. The version includes a Storm simulator, touch screen and accelerometer support, screen orientation and rotation capabilities and new APIs for a virtual keyboard and DRM …

It’s like TiVo for Java EE apps. At least, that’s what Replay Solutions says about ReplayDirector for Java EE, which began shipping today. According to claims, it’s unlike other software playback/record products because it virtualizes the execution environment and records not only code, but also program inputs, database transactions and all other server interactions.

No changes to source code are required, the company says, and on playback, everything executes as it did during the original execution, recreating precisely any bugs, faults or issues, simplifying root-cause analysis. The tool adds just a little overhead during recording, and plays back execution faster than the application alone, without the need to recreate the original execution environment, according to claims.

ReplayDirector for Java EE records and replays “Servlet and JSP code execution, database transactions request and results, transactions involving other app servers” such those employing representational state architecture (REST) and other Web servers, authentication systems and complex production environments, read a company white paper. The result is a recreation of application execution that includes the GUI and all its interactions, “not just a log file that needs to be parsed for root cause,” as offered by competitive solutions.

Here’s how it works. ReplayDirector isolates, captures and records the non-deterministic inputs and events that affect the application under test during execution. The tool employs “light-weight byte-code instrumentation” as it records running AUT code, ensuring that actual code is executed during replay, the company says. Recorded sessions can be played back …

If your application provides custom dialog-box features, menu items or other capabilities by making changes to the Windows Registry, you can deploy those capabilities to other computers simply by distributing an update or patch to the Registry.

Updating the Registry involves nothing more than exporting the capabilities from the Windows Registry Editor to a file and applying them on the target system(s). Carrying those changes is a plain text file with an .reg extension, and contains the key(s) or value(s) you've created. It's applied either by double-clicking its icon in Windows Explorer, importing via RegEdit or executing it from a command line.

Here's how to create the file:

1. In RegEdit, navigate to the branch or sub-branch that contains your functionality. It doesn't matter how deeply buried the key(s) are that contain your features; just that you select only your own changes. It might be necessary to analyze the registry before and after you make your changes to figure out which Registry keys are storing your functionality. If you're confident you can do that, skip to step 2.

How to Identify Your Registry Changes
1a. Reboot Windows, running as few apps and system tray utilities as possible.
1b. Open RegEdit and single-click the HKEY_CURRENT_USER branch. Select File>Export to export the branch. Repeat for the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch.
1c. Implement the changes necessary for your application.
1d. Repeat step 1b--be careful not to change anything else in Windows.
1e. Use your favorite diffing …