An anonymous reader writes "At the TechEd Europe keynote today, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1. With it, they also released a set of five 'Express Editions' of Visual Studio. These currently free applications offer a student and hobbyist-oriented version of Visual Studio, and are available in C#, C++, VB, Web Developer, and SQL flavors. Each download weighs in at right around 50MB and features tools, documentation, and starter kits. There's been multiple posts and more information on this announcement over at MSDN Blogs, too." Update: 06/29 13:57 GMT by S : A clarification from the Express FAQ: Although the Beta Express products are currently free to download: "We have not announced pricing and licensing and will not do so until next calendar year."

Kardamon writes "In an article on DBAzine, Fabian Pascal writes that SQL is not a good representation of the relational model, and is afraid the situation will get worse with XML and XQUERY. An overview of some of the reactions on the positions Pascal and also C.J. Date take on this issue is given in this article over at SearchDatabase.com by Sara Cushman."

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article that blames security flaws on poor programming, rather than any inherent problems with particular languages. From the article: 'Remember Ada? ... we tried getting everyone to switch to a 'sandboxed' environment with Java in the late 1990s... Java worked so well, Microsoft responded with ActiveX, which bypasses security entirely by making it easy to blame the user for authorizing bad code to execute.'"

elleomea writes "According to The Register, Sun is releasing Project Looking Glass, their new GNU/Linux based 3D window managing system, under the GPL during their JavaOne conference (beginning today)." The screenshots of Looking Glass make it out to be very pretty. I'm not sure if I have the spare CPU cycles to power such an environment, but it's sure nice to drool over.

An anonymous reader writes "In an effort to help device makers differentiate their products and compete more vigorously with Linux, Microsoft is eliminating major restrictions on the use of its "shared source" license for the Windows CE operating system. The change, which accompanies the impending full release of Windows CE 5.0, will counter competition from Linux and is likely to expand Microsoft's slice of the roughly $1B embedded OS market pie. Specifically, the new version of the Win CE Shared Source license will, for the first time, enable developers anywhere in the world to include modified Windows CE code within commercial products without having to sublicense the modifications back to Microsoft. Interestingly, the revised Shared Source terms are reminiscent of the BSD open source license, which permits the development of proprietary derivatives that need not be shared with the community, in contrast to the GPL, which obligates developers to make their modifications available to the public."

mrp101 writes "Over the past few months (aka year) the future of Java3D has been in question. Not too long ago Apple announced a port to Mac OS X, but still no official update from Sun. A few weeks ago Sun announced that they were going to release the source code and begin collecting comments for version 1.4/2.0. And today they delivered, right before the JavaOne conference. The announcement can be found here(1) and the CVS here(2). The code includes the core scenegraph, the vector math library, and Sun's own add-on utility libraries."

jpkunst writes "An interesting interview at the O'Reilly Network with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, who recently started their own publishing company. Many topics are covered. Dave has this to say about outsourcing: 'To get job security, developers need to position themselves as highly effective business-value generators, working with the rest of the company to solve common goals. If you sit in your cube waiting for a spec to be thrown over the wall, then you may be in for a wait -- that spec might be in an envelope on its way to Bangalore'"

TekZen asks: "LWN posted a reference to an ABC News article that claims 'Other than Linux, all the other open-source projects move along at a rate best described as glacial.' The reason? 'This probably is a function of how motivation and lack of fear work among open-source developers.' Are you motivated by fear to develop at work? What motivates you as an Open Source software developer?"

esj at harvee writes "Recently the Camram project released its latest version of a hybrid sender-pays anti-spam system. The project has proven that sender-pays works and has demonstrated how to make it work with existing e-mail systems. Camram has developed hybrid sender-pays techniques that scale down to the desktop and up to the enterprise. It's a completely decentralized system that can put spam-fighting power in the hands of individuals. It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?"

crem_d_genes writes "David Gristwood has a post on his blog that notes '21 Rules of Thumb - How Microsoft Develops Its Software', on which he will elaborate at TechEd in Amsterdam next week. It was derived from interviews with Jim Mccarthy, also of Microsoft. Gristwood: 'As someone who has been involved with software development for over two decades, the whole area of how you actually bring together a team and get them to successfully deliver a project on time, is one worthy of a lot of attention, if only because it is so hard to do. Even before I joined Microsoft, ten years ago, I was interested in this topic, having been involved myself in a couple of projects that, I shall politely say, were somewhat less than successful.' Tips include such features as 'Don't know what you don't know.'; 'Beware the guy in a room.'; 'Never trade a bad date for an equally bad date.'; and 'Enrapture the customers.'"

tpconcannon writes "Bob Bemer, the man who helped introduce the backslash as well as the escape key to computing, has passed away at his home at the age of 78. He also helped develop ASCII during the 60's at IBM. More interesting is that he predicted the Y2K bug all the way back in 1971!"

mhh5 writes "It's a bit surprising, but it looks like Microsoft is considering making some of its code open source. Obviously, Microsoft's OS or Office are not going to be opened, and it seems like Microsoft is just trying to get more developers, but it's a interesting change of policy."

sympleko (Matthew Leingang) writes "PHP5 has hit its third release candidate, so get used to the idea of using it. George Schlossnagle has written a great book on PHP programming which ought to generate some enthusiasm. But it's not just about PHP5: the book includes great information on everything from coding style to high-level problem-solving. I met George through a friend of mine who works for the Developers Library, and I'm glad to have finally gotten a look at his book." Read on for Leingang's review of Advanced PHP Programming: A practical guide to developing large-scale Web sites and applications to PHP5.

An anonymous reader writes "Sun's Java System Calendar Server connector (Hydrogen) for Evolution 1.4 on Solaris and Linux was GPL'ed today and is now available in GNOME CVS. This follows the recent GPLization of Novell's Ximian Connector (for Microsoft Exchange servers). In related news, the next major version of Evolution (version 2.0) is supposed to be released sometime during the next month, and beta testing have picked up pace. If you have some spare time, you can also give the Evolution 1.5.9 a spin. You can also use jhbuild to build Evolution from CVS (since the binaries are quite old by now). There is also a new project in GNOME CVS, called Evolution Brainread which adds a blog viewer to Evolution. It is not yet quite ready for production use, but looks quite good."

synopsis5 writes "The developers of Mozilla Sunbird, the standalone version of Mozilla Calendar, are looking for a new default theme and are asking the community to build a new one. Interested theme creators should read the guidelines posted in the MozillaZine Themes forum, which feature complete details. Submitted work must be licensed under the standard MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license and a rough showcase needs to be produced by Tuesday 13th July for the theme to be considered. A few showcases have already been brought forth and are discussed. Take a look!"

Simon Lyall writes "A new study of antispam software shows that Spamassassin performed well in various configurations along with Spamprobe , Bogofilter and Spambayes also came out good while CRM-114 failed to live up to its previous claims . The study shows: 'The best-performing filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to about 2 messages per day.'"

decuser writes "The MFS - Minix from Scratch project was established in the wake of the Brown-Tannenbaum controversy. MFS aims to be to the Minix community what LFS is to the Linux community, a recipe for building an alternative OS from 'scratch.'" See the project's website at mfs.sunsite.dk or minixfromscratch.org.

Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat announced a new advanced certification today, Red Hat Certified Architect. One training expert, however, cautions that Red Hat certifications can lock administrators in to Red Hat-specific skills."

popdookey writes " The BBC's broadcast, The World, has run a piece on the growing Linux movement in Iraq as was previously reported here on Slashdot. 'In Iraq, a group of computer users has started writing open source computer code. They're Linux enthusiasts. The idea is to make low-cost, home-grown software and is said to hold great promise for developing countries. It could leapfrog Iraq into a more competitive future. The World technology reporter Clark Boyd reports.'"

RaD Man [ACiD] writes "Farb-Rausch, one of the best-known groups at the forefront of the PC demoscene, has just released Werkkzeug, a fully featured, freely downloadable PC demo creation tool used to make the visually stunning and award-winning demo The Popular Demo. Not only have they freely published the creation tools, but they've also released the original datafiles for The Popular Demo as well." We also recently featured a 96kb FPS demo from the same authors.