In the 90s, ColdFusion was all the rage. Good products never die; they just go into maintenance mode!

In truth a lot of ColdFusion is still in use today. In fact, one of our sites, DevX, is written in ColdFusion. As a product, it continues to deliver new features and new editions. Today's new edition was announced is Adob e ColdFusion 9. It was announced along with Adobe ColdFusion Builder Beta 2 and a private beta of ColdFusion 9 in the Cloud that runs on Amazon Web Services.

Adobe made the following comment on ColdFusion 9 in their press release:

ColdFusion 9 accelerates the development cycle by reducing complex and powerful business logic into a few lines of code. ColdFusion 9 applications easily access data from existing enterprise infrastructure including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office files and Java J2EE portlet standards. New ColdFusion 9 features include an Adobe® AIR® application for managing multiple ColdFusion servers from one location, saving performance time and reducing redundant tasks. ColdFusion 9 also offers local and remote database synchronization with Adobe AIR, giving users access to applications regardless of Internet connectivity. Also, deep integration with Hibernate's object relational mapping (ORM) provides developers with database independent applications.

You can find more information on the Adobe ColdFusion releases at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion.

So are you using ColdFusion? If so, are you doing maintenance or new development?

I've looked at getting an eBook reader for quite a while now. My wife was going to buy me a Sony eReader for Father's Day when they were super discounted at Borders; however, they were sold out all around town due to the low price. If you go to a store that has ebook readers, it is hard to resist picking them up and poking on one. Some of the off brands are not the coolest devices, but the Sony and Kindle eBooks work as small, lightweight devices to read books.

But I contend that today's eBooks are a fad.

If you think about it for about one second, it should be obvious as to why they are a fad. In today's world of Internet Connectivity, why would you want a device that costs several hundred dollars that does only one thing. For the same price you can by a netbook that not only let's you read books, but also surf the Web as well as run your own programs. What is to prevent an eBook reader from surfing the Web? Why can't it work as a touch screen browser? Why can't it have color? Why can't it store my documents or also do the things a PDA does such as keep my calendar and show me my emails? I believe eBooks will do all of this. When netbooks take on the ebook format-- thus being more of a micro-tablet, then today's simplistic ebook readers will fade away like an oversized CRT monitor.

The technology today doesn't seem to be fitting netbook/tablet functionality into the eBook format, but it is getting closer. Of course the rumors of the Applet tablet have been circulating for months.

Another device that has the potential to send current eBooks to the history book can be seen on Gizmodo. This is the Microsoft Courier device that is in the late prototype stage. The device is more of a book format and really takes the features of PDA, eBooks, and tablets and combines them into one. Take a look at the following video and see if you don't agree that today's eBooks just don't cut it anymore!

Datamation has recently published a couple of interesting articles you might find interesting. The first is Why Developers Get Fired. If you are feeling comfortable in your job, you might want to take a look at what Eric Spiegel has to say.

Have you seen the salary surveys posted around the internet and in magazines? If so, then A second article published on Datamation is worth a quick look. Are These Developer and IT Salary Figures Accurate? asks a question worth considering as you look at the numbers posted in these surveys.

A name like MiniFuzz File Fuzzer sounds like something you'd either read in a Dr Seuss book or on April 1st; however, Microsoft released this tool yesterday to provide "an easy to use, customizable solution for spotting unexpected application behavior."

Also released yesterday was the Microsoft BinScope Binary Analyzer. While this name isn't as fun as File Fuzzer, it still rates high on the geek scale for product names. In brief, the BinScope Binary Analyzer provides analysis of binary code to help you understand if your applications are vulnerable to common security coding errors.

You can download both tools freely from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/cc421514.aspx along with a number of other Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) tools.

http://www.developer.com/

We updated Developer.com today. Take a look at the site and let me know what you think! We are still working out a few minor bugs, but overall it seems to be up and running cleanly.

Take a look!

 

Yahoo! news reports, EU probes Oracle-Sun deal, cites open-source issue

The center of the issue coming form the EU commission is that Oracle is the largest database company and it is taking over the largest open soruce database. According to the newsreport, The EU commission has noted that the database market has 85% control in the hands of only three companies — Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Thus, they are weighing the risk that a high visibility, open-source database could be hurt by the Oracle purchase.

It will be interesting to see what safeguards are required to keep MySQL in the hands of the open-source community—if any

Internet.news and several other sites have reported that Windows Mobile 6.5 will be released October 6th. The changes in 6.5 include an improved user interface, better Internet browsing capability and access to the new Windows Marketplace.

Comments that I've seen around the internet have not said the improvements were bad; however, they have indicated that they aren't overly great either. One of the guest comments on WinProNews summed it up the 6.5 release interestingly. To quote:

As a developer on windows mobile this is about as useful as a poke in the eye. New front end to the tired old backend....wow. Nice one Microsoft, you'll only be a couple of years behind the pack when this comes out. Pull your finger out and get Win Mo 7 released then you will have something to shout about, but until then you've got no business trying to hock this off to anyone.

Sounds like at least a few people will be waiting for Windows Mobile 7.0.

This is not a technical entry to my blog, but I thought it was worth mentioning that a new update of Windows Live Movie Maker has hit the internet. This is a free application from Microsoft that can be used to quickly and easily create movies from your videos, pictures, and music.

Shameless Plug: I have a new book that will be releasing in about two weeks called Windows Live Essentials and Services: Using Free Microsoft Applications for Windows 7 . I devote one of the longest chapters to Movie Maker. In fact, I was able to cover the features of this newest release — which is good because the previous release was a huge step backwards from the prior Movie Maker program Microsoft had working with Windows Vista. (Note that the applications covered in my book work on Vista too.)

This new Movie Maker gives you the ability to create movies using a storyboard, using transitions, using titles, captions, and credits, using visual effects, and much more. You can also animate your photos with panning and zooming to create some really cool movie effects from what were still images. If you have video clips from a camera, cell phone, or other video device, you can knit them together, or even break them into pieces.

Movie Maker will also let you generate movie files when you are done. More importantly, you'll be able to save in a variety of sizes. This includes saving for the Internet, for television resolution, or even in High Definition (HD) including HD 480, 72, and 1080P.

I know this blog entry sounds a bit like an ad, but this is actually a very good program for the price of free. In fact, for many people this does as much as they would want when working with home movies and those clips of the kids and of vacations. If this is the standard for free applications, then as developers, we are once again going to have to step up as the bar for basic applications is again rising.

You can download Windows Live Movie Maker from the Essentials download page: http://download.live.com/

Microsoft is doing a number of events between September 24th and November 11th across the USA. If you attend the events, they say you will get a copy of Windows 7. The events are to be broken into tracks for IT Pros and developers. The cities are:

• Atlanta - Sep. 28
• Baltimore - Nov. 9
• Boston - Oct. 5
• Chicago - Oct. 20
• Cleveland - Oct. 12
• Dallas - Nov. 4
• Denver - Sep. 24

• Detroit - Oct. 7
• Houston - Nov. 9
• Kansas City - Nov. 4
• Los Angeles - Oct. 28
• Miami - Sep. 24
• Minneapolis - Sep. 24
• New York City - Oct. 20

• Orange County - Oct. 26
• Philadelphia - Sep. 28
• Phoenix - Sep. 28
• Pittsburgh - Sep. 30
• Portland - Oct. 14
• San Diego - Oct. 26
• San Francisco - Oct. 20

• San Jose - Oct. 5
• Seattle - Oct. 12
• St. Louis - Nov. 9
• Washington - Nov. 4

You can find more informaiton at Microsoft's "The New Efficiency" site. Word is that the IT Pro tracks are filling (or filled), but at the time of this post I was told there is still space in the developer tracks.

Of course, I'm from Indianapolis, which is not on the list. We are working on an event in Indianapolis for October 8th. Stay tuned for more information on what the Indianapolis event will be!

I am in a discussion with the owner of a local consulting company, AstraDigital. We were talking about Delphi and its current popularity. He had suggested an article on Delphi 2010 for Developer.com. I'm not sure if he was serious, but I'm sure he would write it if there is interest.

My response, however, was that interest in Delphi is not what it use to be. In fact, if you look on sites such as LangPop.com, you see that Delphi is indeed pretty far down on the "popularity" chart, although it is ahead of technologies such as ColdFusion and COBOL.

The interesting thing about these three languages/tools is that they at one time were extremely popular--so popular in fact that if you knew how to use them, you could find a job even if you weren't an expert. Today, they are obviously not as popular and you'd be much harder pressed to find a job.

The change in popularity of programming languages generally leads to a discussion on learning new stuff. Today's more popular technologies are .NET, C#, Java, and a several others. Of course, there is always new stuff to learn. Beyond that, there is always new concepts and technologies you need to know just to keep up.

In my conversation the owner of AstraDigital, he made an interesting comment. It was interesting enough that I thought I'd write this entire blog post to simply share it with you.

Jeff's words (he may have taken these from somewhere else):

Learning requires filling the void with something [the void wants to be full]

Keeping up requires dismissing old knowledge and replacing with new [much harder IMO]