Doug Holland

With the release of Visual Studio 2005 in November Microsoft Visual Studio entered the enterprise development tools space with a coherent set of products targeted at the distinct roles in the software development lifecycle. On March 17 2006, Microsoft released Team Foundation Server, which finally enables users of the various editions of Visual Studio 2005 to achieve the Team System. Visual Studio 2005 Team System enables the primary stakeholders in a software development project, the architects, developers, testers, and project managers, to collaborate through a common environment provided by the Team Foundation Server. According to the Standish Group, businesses in the United States spend around $250 billion annually on software development projects with the average software development project ranging from $430,000 to $2.3 million. Today only 16% of these proje... (more)

Cloud Computing Journal Book Review

Doug Holland's Blog Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online by Michael Miller is an excellent introduction to this phenomenon within the software industry. Written using a style that takes the reader on a gentle journey through a "brief history of computing," explaining where we have been and why we'll be living and working in the clouds in our future, the book is an excellent introduction. The book is not a deep technical book on cloud-based architectures and how to implement those architectures using .NET or J2EE technologies, ... (more)

Dynamic Page Generation

You have probably not escaped seeing the latest commercials for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which urge listeners to "do more with less"; this has been an aim of software engineering since the very beginning. When I started writing software using C and C++ on Unix systems, programmers aimed to do more with less by reusing others' header files and precompiled libraries. Today I find myself doing more with less through many technologies such as COM+ components and commercial extensions to the .NET Framework. Recently I discovered I could also do more with less through .NET Reflect... (more)

Chart FX for .NET

In today's enterprise applications nobody is going to comment on the quality of your middle-tier components or the databases to which you persist your application's data. Enterprise applications, like all others, are judged using the age-old adage: first impressions count. Essentially, your applications are judged on the quality of the user interface. Integrating advanced business and scientific charting into your application is a breeze with Chart FX for .NET, which supports both Windows Forms and ASP.NET Web applications. Chart FX integrates into the Microsoft Visual Studio .NE... (more)

Software Engineering Master Class

UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Third Edition Since 1997 the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been the de facto modeling language for describing object-oriented systems, from requirements analysis to design and implementation. Since the first edition, UML Distilled has been the de facto guide for novices and experts alike using UML to describe their software development endeavors. This year the Object Management Group (OMG) has standardized UML version 2.0, probably the single biggest advance in the UML standard since it first emerged. F... (more)