Was a tough week for Adobe when both Steve Jobs and Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, both came out questioning various aspects of Flash.    Well, some disclosures are in order...Northridge is a Microsoft partner and we use a lot of their technology.  We also do a good bit of Flash development.    Both Jobs and Hachamovitch hit on the reliability, security, and performance issues of Flash.  Yes, there are some of those for sure, but there are certain t ...

2009 and 2010 will be remembered as the time when the words "search" and "Microsoft" became closely associated in the minds of enterprise technology customers, vendors, and developers. In addition to the consumer-facing splash Microsoft has achieved with the innovative Bing, Microsoft has also been making major investments in its search offerings to businesses, government entities, and non-profits--both through internal R&D and a key acquisition. In this post, I will b ...

On September 1, 2009 Microsoft announced the availability of a preview release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the latest in Microsoft's line of embedded/compact editions of the Windows operating system. This allows manufacturers of devices such as point-of-sale kiosks, point-of-service handhelds, and other thin client devices to preview the latest Windows advances, including "hundreds of feature packages based on latest innovations for Windows 7."   Prior to adopting the " ...

The world of analytics continues to evolve from basic traffic stats to more behavioral indicators. Well, enter the newest of analytics...Sentiment Analysis. With all of the user-participation online with ratings, comments, and so on, there is a wealth of "feelings" about brands and products online.  Some companies have begun to analyze this data to get a sense of how people feel about a movie, a product, or a company. While there is still some limitations about how the technology tr ...

A paradigm shift is underway for how .NET solution developers work with identity and authentication. The shift is not only in the tools and recommended design patterns for validating user identity (authentication) and managing role-based permissions for what a user is allowed to do (authorization). While many of the seeds and shoots for this change have been underway for some time, critical mass is near.   The paradigm shift is from a domain-based orientation to a claims-based orientation. ...

Yes, I own Thriller and Off the Wall (on vinyl!), but this is not about the work of Michael. The impact of his death on the Internet was pretty remarkable. Twitter, music sites, AOL's Instant Messenger, Facebook...you name it, they got rocked by the King of Pop's death. Twitter alone saw a peak of 5k Jackson-related messages per minute! Akamai's Net Usage Index reported traffic to leading news sites in North America was 20% above average.     See more of the details on the LA Times Website ...

Good news: WCF programmers no longer need to suffer REST envy in relation to their brethren in the wider development world. .NET developers will now be able to easily achieve both RPC and REST type services in WCF. Let's clear up some of those acronyms:   WCF, for the uninitiated, stands for Windows Communication Foundation, a feature of .NET that simplifies much of the mechanics and "plumbing" of programming service-oriented interfaces, particularly web services. The default WCF ...

Digg is looking to take its approach currently used for stories to how it displays ads. Users will be able to vote ads up and down just as it does stories.    AdAge talked with Digg founder Kevin Rose about how he sees acceptance of commercial content from the fickle Digg users. Other Web 2.0 sites have tried and failed when trying to bring explicit advertising to its sandbox. Will be interesting to see if Digg can succeed, but here is some of the back and forth:   Ad Age: So, what m ...

...but you HAVE to touch! With the release of Windows 7 later this year, Microsoft is introducing Windows Touch, a platform designed to provide an enriched multi-touch experience, bringing Windows to the Surface. By empowering developers with the ability to provide touchscreen applications utilizing the power of the PC, Windows 7 will open up all kinds of possibilities. From Windows Media Center mounted on your basement wall to custom GPS routing applications in your delivery van, Windows T ...

Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but as Microsoft partners, we get a lot of news from them without even needing to look and most recently got hit with some of the new Xbox stuff. Take that wii, no controller required!  http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/ ...