In the late 1990’s many ERP companies caught the web browser wave, undertaking projects to leverage the Internet and browser technology and even to convert their software to “lite-client” or web “portal” architectures. Unfortunately for some, .NET came on the scene too soon after this major overhaul. When .NET appeared, some were too technically exhausted, or inflexible, or still basking in the glow of their new “Internet-based architectures” to recognize and embrace .NET. Other ERP software companies were and continue to be simply too busy struggling to stay solvent during the devastating one-two-three punch of Y2K, the recession of 2000, and 9/11. They lack the resources to consider the complete restructuring of their products that .NET warrants.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

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?
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Globalization and ecommerce have fundamentally reshaped the competitive landscape, and forced companies to operate more efficiently. Mobile technology and broadband networks have enabled employees to work anywhere, and raised their expectations for easy access to centralized applications and corporate databases.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Writing documents in Microsoft Word™ is convenient and produces good looking results, but posting these documents to web sites presents a problem. Students who do not have a copy of Word installed can not view the documents. When a person without Word left-clicks on the link to the word document, they will be prompted to download the doc as a file. If they figure out how to download it and then try to open it, they will be presented with several unfriendly looking windows asking them how to open the file. This is more than enough to scare off the average student.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Everybody who wants to install a web server database but does not know which software is necessary and how it is installed should benefit from reading this text. This text provides all information necessary to get a SQL database for a web server going; it does not go into any detail of CGI programming, nor does it explain the SQL database language. Excellent books are available on both topics, and it is the intention of this text to provide a working platform based on which a user can then study CGI programming and SQL. For getting a small scale SQL system running (not the notorious example of a major airline booking system, or space mission management database) it will be sufficient to have the software described in this text and the documentation accompanying it. The user manual of msql (a database introduced in this text) provides sufficient information on SQL for building your own database.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Activote is Promethean’s integrated personal response system that is designed to encourage student participation and enhance learning. This could be as straightforward as determining whether pupils are following a lesson, or it could be the basis for planned discussion. And it’s all done by asking students to make a choice and press a button. Capturing student responses when they are questioned can be a powerful tool in influencing the direction of a lesson or the planning of future work. Activote allows the answers of each pupil to be saved for retrieval later - individually or as a class. Results can also be exported to Excel for record keeping and further analysis where appropriate.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

The Human Interactions in Programming (HIP) team in Microsoft Research applies human- centered research techniques to builds tools that improve the software development process. The joke goes, “we build tools as if software were made by people … working together.” As a human-centered effort, we draw from various research fields including human-computer interaction, information visualization, computer-supported cooperative work, and social computing. The central tenet of these fields is that one needs to understand the user in order to design tools to support them. To this end we have initiated a series of investigations to understand software development at Microsoft. Our research builds on a rich history of research into professional software development practices [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7]. This document describes the process we used, what we learned, and directions for future user research.

METHODOLOGY
We performed two surveys and several face-to-face interviews of developers at Microsoft during the summer of 2005. The first survey contained 205 questions asking how developers spend their time, what tools they use, and the severity of various problems they face. We deployed it to 1000 architects, software developers and software test developers randomly selected from the Microsoft address book by job title. We received 157 responses, though the data presented here includes only the 104 responses from the developers.

Next we performed semi-structured interviews with six software development leads and five software developers drawn from our survey respondents. Each was done by two interviewers, who took copious notes. Each interview lasted about an hour. Most were recorded on audio. To find the themes latent in the notes we transcribed them onto 800 3×5” cards and did a massive card sort exercise.

Download pdf Software Development at Microsoft Observed

• 0 Comments

This is tutorial #2 in the series for changing or removing backgrounds. This method uses the extraction tool available in Photoshop CS2 (I’m not sure if it’s available in Photoshop CS, but it won’t be available in any version prior to this). Unfortunately, unless other softwares contain this tool (I don’t know of any that do), the tutorial will only be geared to those who own Photoshop CS2 upwards.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments