Microsoft on 'Open Source': Patterns and Practices,Application Blocks and Software Factories

Yes, its true that Microsoft is now open sourcing some of its stuff.

Microsoft has used industry wide pattens and practices and lessons learnt from several projects to come up with Application blocka that can be used 'as is' or extendend by application developers.

These blocks include common tasks that are performed in almist every application, like data access, security, caching, UI etc.

You can now develop a generic UI that can host almost every application that you develop thereby enforcing standardisation and uniformity, and reduce on development time by reusing already made components.

By using standardised data access blocks that connect to ant database using generic methods; you improve on easiness of migration from one database to another or develop an application thata can connect to different databases in different or the same environment without changes to your source code.

The other blocks, security, cryptography, caching etc help standardise common application problems and also reduce time to market as you will be reusing standard components.

THere are a lot of the open sourced blocks, among them the smart client application block, composite UI application block, web client app block, enterprise library app block etc; which are fully supported by microsoft and updates are provided free; fully documented.

For more information see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx

Visual Studio code name 'Orcas' Beta now available

Hi folks!
Good news!

The self extracting installer for Visual Studio Team System for Orcas Beta 1 is now available for download at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx

Lets test the product its the future of our beloved Visual Studio which is the best IDE ever.

The comments that we pass are very important as they will help Microsoft Develop the IDE that we need

.NET vs Java (Article by ComputerWorld)

I found this story on ComputerWorld.com ... click the title above or copy the url below and paste it in your browser address http://www.computerworld.com/developmenttopics/development/story/0,10801,71221,00.html

.NET vs Java

Well, there has been a lot of talk about .NET and Java. People have been arguing which one is better than the other etc etc. But very few factual and proven arguments have been put forward. I am inviting proven and factual arguments of which is which.