Archive for the 'microsoft' Category
Microsoft interested in ruby
By Justin Silverton
In a recent article here:
Microsoft is “very interested” in the Ruby programming language and also plans to expand its Expression design tools line, a Microsoft official said this week.
During an Internet chat with InfoWorld, Forest Key, Microsoft director of Web and client user experience marketing for the company’s developer division, acknowledged Ruby is on the company’s radar screen. Asked if the company would accommodate the Ruby on Rails Web framework, which is based on Ruby, in Expression, Key said, “Ruby is currently more of a ‘developer’ concept for us.”
“We are very interested in Ruby and have lots of thinking going on,” but nothing to announce at this time, Key said. He advised chatters to “stay tuned.”
Key added he was not the Microsoft person to comment in detail on this subject because he did not know the company’s plans. One chatter expressed wishes for an IDE for Ruby on Rails from Microsoft.
SapphireSteel, meanwhile, has shipped Ruby in Steel Developer, a Ruby environment for Visual Studio.
Commenting on the future of the new Expression line, Key said the company was “just getting started with V1 (version 1) of the Expression Studio,” which includes the suite of Expression tools.
One area targeted for expansion is interaction design, which pertains to designing the actual interaction or structure of an experience rather than just designing the onscreen pieces. A goal is to better tie Visio, the company’s diagram drawing software used by many interaction designers, to Expression and the company’s Visual Studio software development platform.
Sapphiresteel can be found here.
Red hat to be more compatible with Windows
By Justin Silverton
In a recent article:
“In the latest example of a Linux distributor looking to get closer to Microsoft, Red Hat said Tuesday that it has joined the Interop Vendor Alliance, a group of tech companies working to make their products more interoperable with those produced in Redmond.
Red Hat says most of its work within the group will focus on making its middleware more compatible with Microsoft’s and will build on efforts previously undertaken by its JBoss division. The goal, Red Hat says, is to ensure that its products can perform well in environments in which Windows also plays a large role. Shaun Connolly, Red Hat’s VP for product management, says the company is looking to make its user experience “transparent and seamless in spite of heterogeneous environments.
Red Hat’s announcement came a day after Microsoft and Novell outlined a roadmap for products designed to work in either Windows or Linux environments. The companies said they will focus their joint efforts on building more efficient, cost-effective products for facilitating server virtualization, Web services implementations, directory and identity interoperability, and document format compatibility”
Will linux finally have compatiblity with Microsoft windows? Given the history of Microsoft, I don’t think we are going to see a completly open .doc standard anytime soon.
5 open alternatives to Microsoft Exchange
By Justin Silverton
After the recent announcement by Novell that they were dropping support for the Hula project (an open alternative to Microsoft exchange), I decided to search the Internet for similar applications/projects.
1) Zimbra (commercial and free versions available)
- Desktop client compatibility. Sync mail, contacts, and calendar to Microsoft Outlook and/or to Apple (Mail, Address Book, iCal).
- Professional administration. Real time mailbox backup and restore, high availability clustering, storage cost management.
- Zimbra Mobile. Over-the-air synchronization of mail, contacts, and calendar data with mobile devices.
- Advanced web productivity. Ability to search for content inside attachments and view attachments as HTML instead of downloading.
- Domain management. Ability to re-brand the web client and administer multiple customer domains.
2) Open Xchange (commercial and free versions available)
- Linux Compatibility. Support 30 different linux distributions.
- All Information in One folder. Using one folder, users can store all information needed for a particular project, including all contacts, meetings, and background information.
- Document Management. Automatic versioning, locking of documents during editing, saving from MS Office applications, and access from MS explorer.
3) Scalix (commercial and free versions available)
- Outlook Support. Offers automatic offline mailbox caching and improved PDA syncing.
- Plug-in support. Provides certified plug-ins support for Google Desktop and MSN Search, McAfee VirusScan, Symantec Norton Utilities and Captaris RightFax Outlook Extension.
- Search and Indexing Services. Real-time indexing of private and public folder messages. This results in sub-second mailbox-wide search and retrievals, even in very large mailboxes and folders.
4) Citadel
- Ajax Support. An intuitive, easy-to-use AJAX interface.
- Domain Management. Multiple domain support.
- Easy Installation. installs in minutes without the need to manually integrate all the different components together.
- Contact Management. Saves and organizes thousands of personal and company contacts, telephone, fax, addresses, e-mail contact addresses just to mention a few. Easily configurable with extensive and speedy search capabilities, categorization and remotely accessible.
- Group Calendar. Manage meetings and events for an entire group or individual set of accounts. Attach notes to appointments. Link appointments to contacts and projects. Automatic detection of conflicts.
- Resource Planner. Keep track of your company’s resources such as automobiles, projectors or conference rooms. Searchable timeslots to check for availability of specific resources or resources assigned to a specific group. Automatically check for resource conflicts upon appointment creation.
Microsoft is dividing the open source community
By Justin Silverton
In a recent announcement from the samba team:
“In a letter to customers, Samba pointed out that one fundamental difference between Microsoft proprietary software and open source software was that the former divides and conquers with “coercive licensing agreements”.
The open source world, on the other hand, “encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.”
Samba said that the patent deal Microsoft and Novell jointly forged is “divisive”.
It parlays users depending on whether they are commercial or non commercial, and deals the cards differently - depending on whether the version of Linux came from Novell or from elsewhere”
This is an interesting perspective on the recent Microsoft/open source movement. It didn’t really make any sense. Microsoft, a company which stated in the past that open source was a virus was now supporting it financially through Novell.
Microsoft is taking a page right out of The Art of War. They know they cannot defeat the open source community by using standard business practices (who are they going to buy out?) so they are doing the next best thing: let the community destroy itself.
Because there are so many zealous linux users (including Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation), there will soon be different camps of users. Users that support Microsoft’s version of linux and users that don’t. It already seems to have started: I have seen many users on various linux community message boards and mailinglists that will not use any version endorsed by Microsoft.
I guess we always have Hurd.
Excel and php without activeX
By Justin Silverton
Introduction
Spreadsheet_Excel_writer is a PEAR component for creating Excel files without the need for COM components. The files generated are in the Excel 5 (BIFF5) format, so all functionality until that version of Excel (but not beyond) should be available.
Using
The most common use for Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer will be spitting out large (or not so large) amounts of information in the form of a spreadsheet, which is easy to manipulate with a fairly ubiquitous spreadsheet program such as Excel (or OpenOffice).
Example 1:
send(’test.xls’);
// Creating a worksheet
$worksheet =& $workbook->addWorksheet(’My first worksheet’);
// The actual data
$worksheet->write(0, 0, ‘Name’);
$worksheet->write(0, 1, ‘Age’);
$worksheet->write(1, 0, ‘John Smith’);
$worksheet->write(1, 1, 18);
// Let’s send the file
$workbook->close();
?>
The first thing you should notice, is that we created a workbook before any worksheets. All worksheets are contained within a workbook, and a workbook may contain several worksheets.
Another important thing, which you should have in mind when programming with Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer, is that ampersand sign (&) that appears when we created our worksheet. That ampersand means we are referencing a Worksheet object instead of copying it. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, all you have to remember is to always use ampersands when calling addWorksheet() for creating a worksheet, or addFormat() for creating a format.
Saving to a regular file
You may have noticed also the following line:
// sending HTTP headers
$workbook->send(’test.xls’);
What that means is that we are sending our spreadsheet to a browser. But what if we just want to save the spreadsheet in our machine? Well, you just have to omit that line and give a valid file path to the workbook constructor.
For example, if we wanted to save the same spreadsheet we created in our first example to a file named ‘test.xls’, we would do it like so:
Example 2:
addWorksheet(’test worksheet’);
$worksheet->write(0, 0, ‘Name’);
$worksheet->write(0, 1, ‘Age’);
$worksheet->write(1, 0, ‘John Smith’);
$worksheet->write(1, 1, 10);
// We still need to explicitly close the workbook
$workbook->close();
?>
More info and documentation on this component can be found here