developer

It seems only fair that since the hardware side of the computing world plowed ahead with parallelized computing, they should help out the software development community.

In that spirit, AMD plans to let developers take a crack at its Light-Weight Profiler Tuesday as a possible assist for the growing problem faced by PC software developers: just how the hell are we going to effectively use processors with multiple cores? AMD's LWP could let applications written for runtime environments like Java or .Net interact directly with hardware to know how much performance is available across a series of cores, said … Read more

As I watched Arsenal beat Ajax this afternoon, I kept an eye on an interesting piece of research from The Journal of Systems and Software written by Sowe et al. and entitled Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study [PDF]. The research revealed something that I suspected but had not yet seen data to prove: developer communities are great for developers, and not so great for anyone outside them.

What does this mean if you're an enterprise hoping to hitch a free ride on an open-source project? Well, it means that you're better off paying a little money for professional support. Free support is good up to a point, but if that point ends when your job begins, you may be in a world of hurt without it.… Read more

Microsoft clearly has serious problems with its development and distribution methodologies. Problems that open source could help. Problems that far too many entrenched interests within the company would kill before they could be given a fair chance.

That's the lesson I take from yesterday's Wall Street Journal profile of Craig Mundie. The man puts in over 200,000 miles on planes every year, desperately trying to help the company become less like itself, and more like open source software communities. Mundie describes Microsoft and his job within it thus:… Read more

Dave Dargo has written a thoughtful piece on one problem with proprietary software today: it spends too much time isolating itself as a product, rather than opening up itself and combining to create solutions. As it turns out, open-source software is following in these same destructive footsteps, as we notes:… Read more

Microsoft is readying releases of its Web development tools as it looks to replace Adobe's Flash platform with Microsoft's own Web browser plug-in Silverlight.

Later this week, Microsoft is set to release a string of a tools, including Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate and a second beta of Visual Studio 2008.

It said that Silverlight 1.0 is scheduled for final release in the fall, which should automatically be updated to users who download the Release Candidate. Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 are set for release by the end of the year.

Silverlight is … Read more

Continuing to warm up to Web developers, Microsoft released an early version of IronRuby that will let programmers write .Net applications with the Ruby language.

In tandem with the "first code drop" of IronRuby, Microsoft will be taking code contributions from outsiders, John Lam, program manager on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft, wrote in his blog on Monday.

Lam said that the company intends to fully release IronRuby on RubyForge and take a wider range of contributions by the end of August. The software is available under the open-source style Microsoft Permissive License.

IronRuby uses the … Read more

Intel on Tuesday is scheduled to release the source code to a development tool for writing applications to run on multicore chips.

The company released Threading Building Blocks last August, a C++ template designed to simplify the job of writing applications that take advantage of processors with multiple cores, or processing units.

During the last year, Intel found that customers and potential customers wanted greater platform support and assurances that the toolset would be around for a long time, said James Reinders, the director of Intel's software development products.

To address these concerns, Intel has decided to release the tool … Read more

Paving the way for genuine, binary applications that run on the iPhone (and don't originate from Apple), developer "Nightwatch" has created, compiled and actually run a basic "Hello World" application natively under the stripped-down version of OS X that ships on the iPhone.

The new development is part of the "iPhone binutils" project, with a stated goal of producing a high quality set of binary utilities for the Apple iPhone, primarily an assembler and linker.

According to the iPhone Dev Wiki, certain parts of the toolchain -- dubbed ARM/Mach-O -- including the … Read more

Apple will hold a series of "tech talks" on developing Web 2.0 applications for the iPhone in the following cities (with locations and dates):

The event is open to all Apple Developer Connection (ADC) members (if you're not an ADC member, you can register for free here).

Apple's promotional … Read more