More than a year passed since Adobe decided to stop supporting Flex framework and gave it away to Apache Foundation. This writeup is based on the conversation I had with my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky in January of 2013. In this conversation I’ve been representing the HTML5 community while Anatole fought for Flex framework. I’m trying to find arguments against using FLex framework even though I believe that it remains the best and the most production way for developing Web applications. I’ll be just playing devil’s advocate here. Anatole also believes that Flex is the best framework available today, but in our company we often argue about the tools to use for various projects. We hope that Web developers find this conversation useful and thought provoking. Yakov. If you read this blog, most likely you know about our company, Farata Systems. Our engineers work on ... (more)

The Next Chapter in the Virtualization Story Begins

Cloud Expo Europe €550 Savings here! Cloud Expo West $800 Savings here! Cloud Computing Journal recently caught up with Pete Malcolm, CEO of cloud management innovators Abiquo - a major new player in the fast-emerging Cloud ecosystem and Platinum Plus Sponsor of 6th Cloud Expo being held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 21-22 June 2010. Malcolm is keynoting at the event. His theme will be "An Open Cloud Ecosystem - the Gathering Storm." Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities ! Abiquo was also Platinum Plus Sponsor of the 5th International Cloud Expo held April 19-21, 2010 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City Cloud Computing Journal: How would you define the difference between Private clouds and Public Clouds, and why is the distinction so important in the context of Cloud Computing? Pete Malcolm: Actually, I think people get rather too hun... (more)

Book Review: The CSS3 Anthology

The CSS3 Anthology by Rachel Andrews is subtitled instant CSS answers, how-to's, and examples. This subtitle clearly explains the goal of this book. The book consists of nine chapters. The first chapter is a quick review of CSS. The other chapters cover major topics such as text styling, image design elements, navigation, tabular data, forms and user interfaces, CSS positioning basics and CSS for layout. The topics in each chapter are laid out in the form of a question followed by one or more solutions and then a discussion explaining why that solution was offered. Here is an example of one of the questions: How do I remove the large gap between an h1 element and the following paragraph? I really like this book because it's a practical problem solver for everyday issues you encounter when designing web pages. It is especially useful for people just getting started ... (more)

Book Review: Essential C# 5.0

If you are looking to get into .NET development, this book is a great place to start. This book will teach you all you need to know about C# development. It will provide C# beginners with a complete foundation on which to build other .NET skills like WPF, Windows 8 App Store, XAML, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, etc. The book does not cover the libraries to implement these technologies, but that is a good thing. You should have a solid understand of C# before moving on to them. I have read a lot of C# books that include coverage of the base class libraries, WPF, Windows Forms, and ASP.NET as the second half of the book. I have never bothered with those parts of the book unless I was simply looking for an introduction to a new technology. They are never covered in-depth enough to do them justice. By leaving them out of this book, the authors were able to provide deeper covera... (more)

At-a-Glance: Comparing VMware vSphere 5.5 & Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

There’s been lots of buzz on the virtualization front over the past month …  In August, Microsoft announced the RTM version of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, the latest major releases of the Windows Server and System Center families.  In addition, at VMworld this year, VMware announced the latest edition of their vSphere hypervisor platform: VMware vSphere 5.5. IT Pros have been very interested in learning about the pros and cons presented by each offering – particularly because the total cost of Windows Server 2012 R2 + System Center 2012 R2 can be quite attractive in comparison to VMware’s offerings. More information: See Shopping for Private Clouds for a sample cost comparison between Microsoft and VMware virtualization solutions based on real-world requirements. With so many features called by differing names in each virtualization platform... (more)

Media 2.0 on Ulitzer - New Media and Content Marketing Strategies

Here is an interesting news item which claims that UK online ad spend overtakes mainstream TV. The same news was corroborated by another post which stated that spending on online advertising surpasses TV. The news was little disconcerting because it did not seem to match with my ground level experience. So, I decided to probe a little deeper and unearthed more data on Internet ad spend. What I uncovered was more in line with what I perceive to be the real situation. These reports claimed that the Internet ad spend is less than 10% of total ad spend which is only a fraction of ad spend on TV. Ad Spend to Grow 6.7% in '08, Internet to Overtake Radio in '08 & Mags in '10 Share of Ad Spending by Medium - April 2008 How can both be true? Careful reading of all the reports resolved the mystery. The first set of reports … “… counts the money companies spend on their own we... (more)

Choosing Between Azure and VMM Private Clouds

I’ve spent the past day reviewing all that’s floating around the Interwebs on the Azure announcements from the WPC this week. There are definitely a lot of nice nuggets to digest and stuff that’s going to take a while to process. Most of the Azure talk at WPC has been, as expected, about how partners can benefit from and build solutions on top of Azure. That’s a compelling message and one I think Microsoft got 100% correct. Now if only they’d franchise Azure we’d really be cookin’ ;). But what about enterprise customers using Azure? Since enterprise virtualization is the overwhelming topic here on The Virtual DC, I’m going to focus on that rather than the partner angle. One thing that struck me straight away today was a comment from Bob Muglia in a CNET interview: Businesses and hosters will want to offer their own clouds he said, and Microsoft will have tools for ... (more)

How to Avoid .NET Performance Problems

Every time I work with one of our .NET customers to help them with managing their application performance I come across the same problems as seen with other clients before: lots of ADO.NET queries, many hidden exceptions in core or 3rd party .NET libraries, slow 3rd party components, inefficient custom code… Too often we from dynaTrace are introduced when it is already very late in the development cycle. Most of the time we're introduced when the first performance test results show bad response times and nobody understands why it is that slow. In other cases we get called when there are problems in production and it has already taken too much time to figure out the root cause. Solving these problems at that point can become really expensive as it sometimes involves changes to the architecture. Most of these problems can be prevented by following some basic principl... (more)

Microsoft Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Expo 2010 April 19-21 Javits Center

Microsoft Session at Cloud Expo SYS-CON Events announced today that Microsoft has been named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 5th International (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Register Today and Save $800 ! Explore Sponsorship Opportunities ! Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Microsoft cloud services mean freedom for businesses. The freedom to access the technology you want, where and when you want it. The freedom to take advantage of the latest technology as a capital expense, or an operational one. The freedom to focus on running your business - not running IT systems. Microsoft cloud services are Microsoft by extension: Giving you the ability to m... (more)

Office 365 How to: Build and Deploy a Web Part with SharePoint Online

You know by now that the cloud is hot and Microsoft says “we’re all in.”  That being said, there has never been a better time to push all of those chips forward and  jump on the bandwagon.  It’s time to get some experience with SharePoint Online / Office 365.  I know most people don’t have access to the Office 365 beta yet, but when it opens up, you should sign up for the public beta and start getting familiar with it.  If you haven’t seen SharePoint Online yet, check our my previous article which gives a quick tour of it.  I plan to write more about SharePoint Online in the future, so I figured the best place to start is with an introductory development article on building and deploying a web part.  My past series on building and deploying web parts to 2010 and 2007 are still the most popular articles on DotNetMafia.com.  Let’s take what we learned there and see ho... (more)

Book Review: C# 5.0 in a Nutshell

This book is great. It's no nonsense approach to covering the C# 5.0 language is like a breath of fresh air. It is clean, to the point, and thorough. It makes finding a topic, and learning it, or getting a refresher, a very fast process. This new version includes new information on the new asynchronous functions async and await. The authors have a great writing style which makes the book a very enjoyable read. You can read this cover to cover, or use it as a very handy reference. You won't find any case studies, or made up scenarios, to help the authors describe the technology. They stick to writing about the technology, which is nice. I have listed the chapters below. Introducing C# and the .NET Framework C# Language Basics Creating Types in C# Advanced C# Framework Overview Framework Fundamentals Collections LINQ Queries LINQ Operators LINQ to XML Other XML Technologies... (more)