13 August 2012

The Future For Java Has Never Been Brighter

In this episode of the TPM podcast show Gennaro Marrazzo, a Technical Development Engineer, explains how the fragmentation of the Java platform is not a weakness, but actually one of its greatest strengths. There are flavours of Java available for everything from front-end UIs to real-time computing and mobile devices. Gennaro sees no clouds in Java’s future now that Oracle has acquired it. After all, it is in Oracle’s interest to keep Java as a vibrant development environment.

The emergence of new platforms like Python and Ruby may erode some of the niches where Java had previously flourished but Gennero believes that Java’s best days are still ahead.

Download the sound(right click and save as link) : Download

You can find all the Optimistic Bear shows here: Software

You can find all the Entrepreneurs Northwest shows here: Entrepreneurs Northwest

03 August 2012

Visual Studio Takes The “Integration” Of Ides Further Than Ever

In this episode of the TPM podcast show Ryan Berry, an Application Development Manager, explains how the breadth of integration in Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE greatly simplifies the life of developers and increases productivity. When using Visual Studio Ryan can automatically file bugs, see notes from other developers, and even publish his apps to the cloud. Visual Studio features like Intellisense and XAML UI editing (new in VS 2012) take the pain out of getting things right the first time and reduce the amount of context switching developers have to go through when using lots of different tools.

Ryan is particularly happy to use Visual Studio 2012 with its closer integration with Team Foundation Server and Azure. He can easily manage his apps through the entire life-cycle, letting TFS publish his app for testing, integration with other developers and then to the Azure cloud. Ryan does point out that all this IDE automation comes at a cost. He tells about one company that ran into trouble building an app that used the .NET Entity Framework rich text field for storing pictures. The app choked under heavy load with lots of pictures loaded. The simplicity of the VS tools made it easy to walk into a problem like this, without understanding what was actually happening under the covers.

Download the sound(right click and save as link) : Download

You can find all the Optimistic Bear shows here: Software

You can find all the Entrepreneurs Northwest shows here: Entrepreneurs Northwest