Codeguru Update eNewsletter – May 20th, 2008

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CodeGuru.com   Tuesday May 20, 2008

This Week’s Topics






Comments from the Editor


While eggs are being thrown Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer in Hungary, I decided to only throw a codeword or two at you.

If you hear the term SOA, you likely begin to think immediately of services. After all, SOA stands for service-oriented architecture. If you mention SOA at Microsoft today, you are likely to hear the “Oslo” codename. Oslo describes a set of products that will materialize next year or later. The products and technologies will include extensions to the application platform that can be used to create composite applications. The composite applications can help bridge the gaps between in-house and off-site projects (online or offline). Ultimately, Oslo strives to reduce the complexities of integrating technologies as well as business in general. Microsoft stated in a press release “As part of ‘Oslo,’ Microsoft will work to deliver a unified platform integrating services and modeling, moving from a world where models describe the application to a world where models are the application.”

Is Oslo going to have an impact on you? Time will tell. Microsoft states that there are five key areas where they will deliver Oslo advancements. These are Servers such as BizTalk Server “6”, Services such as BizTalk Services “1”, Frameworks such as Microsoft .NET Framework “4”, tools such as Visual Studio “10”, and Repository. If you are using Microsoft technologies, it seems there is a good chance you will see Oslo creeping into your future tools or platform(s).

Linking back to the eggs being thrown at Steve Ballmer, you could say that Oslo is like SOA “over easy.” If you don’t want to deal with Oslo, you might want to do what Ballmer did and duck behind a podium when the next versions of your favorite Microsoft tools and frameworks are tossed to the market!

Until next week…

Brad!
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Bradley L. Jones
www.CodeGuru.com
webmaster@codeguru.com
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Recently Published Books


For those of you keeping up by reading books. The following are just a few of the new books that have been recently released. If you’ve read any of these, feel free to write a review to be posted on CodeGuru. See the submission guidelines.


Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
368 pages for $27.95 (Hardcover)


Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems
By Ross J. Anderson for Wiley
1080 pages for $70 (Hardcover)


Ivor Horton’s Beginning Visual C++ 2008
By Ivor Horton for WROX
1392 pages for $54.99


New & Updated Articles on CodeGuru


Following are short descriptions of new articles on CodeGuru. If you are interested in submitting your own article for inclusion on the site, then you will find guidelines here.


Unit Testing with Service Stubs or Mock Types
By Paul Kimmel
Build your applications with built-in “mock types” (aka “services stubs”) to facilitate continued development and unit testing even when essential systems services are unavailable.


.NET Tip: Following Table Relationships with LINQ
By Jay Miller
Use LINQ’s from clause to easily traverse the relationships in your database.


Creating a DockablePanel-Controlmanager Using C#, Part 7
By JonnyPoet
Going on to design a dockable panel, discover some very interesting techniques, such as hooking the mouse and how to debug an application in such cases. Learn to unpin a docked panel so it slides to the border of the main application.


Implementing a Simple 2D Object Tracker
By OlegK
Learn how to combine four image alignment algorithms (Lucas-Kanade, forwards-compositional, Baker-Dellaert-Matthews, and Hager-Belhumeur) into a 2D object tracker with dynamic templates and template pixel weights.


Faster and Friendlier Access to Oracle’s OCI API
By Victor Volkman
Why get bogged down in the quicksand of the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) when you can get the same service with less code and fewer headaches with Vincent Rogier’s OCILIB?


Discussion Groups


Check out the CodeGuru discussion forums
Forums include Visual C++, General C++, Visual Basic, Java, General Technology, C#, ASP.NET, XML, Help Wanted, and much, much, more!

… HOT THREADS …


Deck of Cards (Java)


Using Multitreading to log (VC++)


StreamReader/StreamWriter (C#)


New Articles on Developer.com


Using Forms and Items in MIDlets
By Richard G. Baldwin
Create a form in your midlets that can be populated with a variety of objects ranging from strings to images to interactive guagess.


The Large-Grid Issue
By Art Sedighi
See how you can manage, maintain, support, or even build large-Grid environments.


Portal Federation with WebLogic Portal WRSP: Advanced Techniques
By Scott Nelson
Learn how to share entire pages and books between portals and then how to use data input from one remote portlet in another remote portlet.


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