This paper explains our efforts to add Ada to Microsoft’s family of .NET languages. There are several advantages to weaving Ada into the Common Language Environment provided by the .NET environment. This paper explains our approach and current progress on the research. We provide the means to extract Ada specification files from Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) code and compile Ada programs into MSIL.
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Delphi/400 is a suite of application modernization tools designed to enable System i application developers to build completely new Web applications or build new Web interfaces to existing applications. For the System/i developer, there is lots of good news. The approach is based on the same notion of holistic application design and user interface / logic separation that System i developers have been using since the box you and I love was once called the System/38 Delphi/400 is the toolset that best addresses the notion of the application factory of rapid application development. It is the natural next step in a progression of tools from those with sophisticated names such as “Intelligent Development Environment,” “Componentization,” and “Visualization.” Yes, It is all of those and more. It does its thing by asking the developer to think about the whole application, not just one Web page at a time. Isn’t that how System i developers already think?
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There is an ongoing information war raging in the software world. Despite free software developers’ best efforts, new proprietary software continues to proliferate. Improved techniques must be developed to reverse engineer efficiently closed data formats so that free, interoperable solutions can be deployed under Linux.

Software reverse engineering occurs on various levels. It may be necessary to study a piece of poorly written, poorly commented code developed in a high-level language such as C++ and understand what the original program was supposed to accomplish. It may also be necessary to disassemble a program that has been compiled into machine language and express it as a higher-level language. In doing this, the underlying algorithms can eventually be expressed as higher-level concepts in a human language. After obtaining an algorithmic description via reverse engineering, the algorithm can be reimplemented for any language on any computing platform.
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DOT NET is one of the key products that enable application development under the new vision. However, DOT NET is not quite backward compatible with prior versions like visual basic version 6. This makes migration a serious issue. Converting existing source code to DOT NET architecture is not just a matter of loading it to the new version. DOT NET has its built-in migration tool, which performs the vital task of converting the source code syntax. But that’s just half of the work done. But before the converted code is actually compiled, the developer needs to enable it to smoothly fix lot of issues to fit into DOT NET architecture. In present efforts to find out solutions to these migration issues, a re-engineering Migration Model for Legacy Source Code (MMLC) has been proposed in this study. Proposed model has been further validated using a in-house project at one of the leading software development organisation. It is envisaged from the experimental try-out that the model would help the developer community to easily convert their legacy source code to DOT NET framework.
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Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools. Taking advantages of the latest information technologies, it aims to provide a data-intensively online research environment for astronomers all around the world. A large number of high-qualified astronomical software packages and libraries are powerful and easy of use, and have been widely used by astronomers for many years. Integrating those toolkits into the VO system is a necessary and important task for the VO developers.
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As weird as it might sound, you are reading a book that was born almost accidentally. When we began to work on this material, we weren’t even thinking of writing a book. Our initial, quite unpretentious goal was to define a list of guidelines for internal use in Code Architects, the software company we founded in 2002.
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Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 introduces a whole new set of .NET technologies that will revolutionize, once again, the way you develop smart client and web-based applications; the most notable being LINQ, WPF and, of course, Silverlight. For most of us working in and around web application development in the business world, Silverlight is a big step forward; especially if you consider that it provides clean coding practices with extensible languages (e.g. XAML and C#). It also provides some of Visual Studio’s rich programming model that we have become accustomed to and can no longer live without; such as class libraries, debugging capabilities and IntelliSense among many others.
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Cyberinfrastructure 1 and e-Science 1 are conventionally presented in terms of Grid technologies 2 3 that support remote access to computational science resources (such as supercomputers), distributed data management, networked instruments and similar technologies. Web Services are a key technology for realizing this vision 4 5. In contrast to these heavyweight approaches, however, many important innovations in network programming are emerging outside the (by now) traditional Web Services framework and are collectively known as Web 2.0 6. As we discuss in this chapter, these developments need to be tracked and incorporated into the e-Science vision.
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