GoAlfred Blog

David Chappell, Principal of Chappell & Associates, presents the various communication styles provided by Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) in his white paper called "Dealing with Diversity: Understanding WCF Communication Options in the .NET Framework 3.5".

Series of articles from The Rational Edge about the trends surrounding global development and delivery in the marketplace and their underlying motivations, the benefits to be found in a globalized delivery model, and the challenges that such a model can present.

The Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 release is a big one for .NET, and delivers a lot of new capabilities and improvements for web, client, office and mobile development. Over the next few months Microsoft will be delivering a series of additional products that build on top of this VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 foundation. Scott Guthrie explains a road-map on his blog of some of the upcoming initiatives and releases for .NET web development his team is currently working on for the months ahead.

Eclipse Europa is the annual release of Eclipse projects. Like last year’s Callisto release, the Europa release is a coordinated release of different Eclipse project teams. This year, the annual release includes 21 projects. By releasing these projects at the same time, the goal is to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

This was the third webinar on mapping applications given by Tele Atlas. This and other webinars can be looked at on developerlink (go to technical tools, trainings).

This webinar demonstrated how building a ASP.NET/C# application with basic mapping functionality. The used data provider was deCarta that delivers a free to use web service that is facing their DrillDownServer. Registration on their web site is required to get the necessary credentials to be able to use the web service. 

References:

• http://developerlink.teleatlas.com
• http://developer.decarta.com

A network management system provides the means to configure, control, and diagnose several entities in the network. Several management functions can be considered:

• Configuration and registration of the network and its entities.
• Control giving access to the controlling functions of the network entities such as start-up, and shutdown.
• Fault diagnostics providing assistance in diagnosing problems.
• Notification providing alerting capabilities and allowing the definition of alarm rule expressions.
• Performance statistics are required for performance analysis and parameter tuning. An historian can collect and store this data over selected periods of time, allowing a more long-term analysis.

Read more...

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) is a server-side component architecture that simplifies the process of building enterprise-class distributed component applications in Java:

• Scalable, reliable, and secure applications.
• Not writing your own complex distributed component framework.
• RAD for the server side.
• Designed to support application portability and re-usability across vendor's enterprise middle-ware services.

EJB is a standard for building server-side components in Java. It defines an agreement (contract) between components and application servers that enables any component to run in any application server. EJB components (called enterprise beans) are deployable, and can be imported and loaded into an application server, which hosts those components.

Read more...

Callisto is about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle. By releasing 10 projects at the same time, the goal is to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

While Callisto is about the simultaneous release of ten projects, it is not a unification of the projects - each project remains a separate open source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own project plan.

Below is a listing of all ten projects involved in the Callisto Simuntaneous Release:

• Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project
• C/C++ IDE (CDT)
• Data Tools Platform (DTP)
• Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)
• Graphical Editing Framework (GEF)
• Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)
• Eclipse Project
• Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform Project (TPTP)
• Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project (WTP)
• Visual Editor (VE)

The Callisto Experience starts with a small download in the form of the Eclipse Platform Runtime Binaries. From this starting point, using the Callisto Discovery Site, you can add as few or as many of the features produced by the ten projects involved in the Callisto release train as you need.

IIOP.NET allows a seamless interoperation between .NET, CORBA and J2EE distributed objects. This is done by incorporating CORBA/IIOP support into .NET, leveraging the remoting framework. IIOP.NET was born on May, 2 2003, and grew from a small experimental project to a stable and useful application, mostly thank to the great feedback and dedication of our growing user's community.

Features:

• Tight coupling between distributed objects in .NET, CORBA and J2EE;
  components on each platform can act in either client or server role.
• Transparency: existing servers can be used unmodified, without wrapping code or adapters.
• Extensive coverage of CORBA/.NET type mappings.
• Native integration in the .NET framework;
  IIOP.NET is directly based on the standard remoting infrastructure.

IIOP.NET is released under the LGPL license.