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CollabNet ups ALM Ante

CollabNet Corp.’s integration of the technologies it acquired last year from VA Software continues apace.

The Brisbane, Calif.-based maker of software lifecycle management tools recently released a new version of its SourceForge Enterprise application lifecycle management (ALM) system. The company also introduced a new desktop-configuration tool. Among other things, CollabNet’s new offerings sport a single interface to Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Eclipse IDEs.

CollabNet’s core platform is designed to connect geographically distributed software development teams and provide them with integrated tools. It’s also the corporate backer to the popular Subversion build- and change-management package.

The company has been integrating its core products with its assets acquired last year, says Rob Cheng, CollabNet’s director of product marketing. The result is SourceForge Enterprise 5.0, which offers a Web-based tool suite for software configuration management (SCM), issue tracking (which CollabNet calls artifact tracking), collaboration and product management.

Essentially, the suite centralizes the management of users, projects, processes and assets, Cheng says, with the aim of providing a high level of transparency that bumps up productivity and cuts costs. Because it’s all linked together, you have this very clear visibility and traceability into each release, Cheng says.

ALM Focus
There are two key improvements in SourceForge Enterprise 5.0 emphasizing ALM. The first is customizable project pages, which are designed to allow dev teams to capture and share workflows, best practices and other project content, the company says.

Project pages are flexible, portal-style project homepages where anybody who has access can create rich, nested Web pages that have within them portlet-like components that give you real-time data on the status of your project, Cheng explains.

The second ALM-focused feature in the system is the new product templates.

Once you’ve created these project pages that model what you want to do as a group, Cheng adds, you can capture that and save that entire structure — including the content, components that you want to deliver real-time data from, and the customized workflows and fields — all that information is captured as a template, which can then be used as a blueprint in future projects.

This enhanced project-templating functionality standardizes dev processes by capturing and re-using both the structure and the content of existing projects, Cheng says, from project pages and discussion forums to custom issue-tracker fields, saved searches and workflow definitions.

Source: reddevnews.com

Shine on Silverlight and Windows with XAML

Web bling tone Extensible Application Markup Language, or XAML, lies at the heart of Microsoft’s rich-client strategy. The user interface for both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight, which is mostly a subset of WPF, is typically defined in XAML.

It is, therefore, something Windows developers will have to get to grips with if they want to stay in tune with Microsoft’s latest and – arguably – most ambitious technology roadmap. Even if WPF itself never really takes off, Silverlight is almost certainly going to be big in Microsoft circles.

But what is XAML? It is easy to call it an XML language for defining a graphical user interface (GUI), but that is not quite right. Microsoft calls it “a system for representing structured information,” which is about as generic as you can get, and reveals in its document XAML Object Mapping Specification 2006, here, that although XML is “a common format for XAML… any physical representation may be used.”

It is also important to distinguish the XAML system from specific XAML vocabularies, such as WPF. Microsoft also uses XAML for Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), using a different vocabulary that has nothing to do with GUIs. A better stab at defining XAML is to call it a declarative programming language for .NET, or a means of representing a graph of .NET objects.

It turns out that XAML has an uneasy relationship with XML. All the XAML documents you are likely to see are valid XML, but validating them as XAML is not easy. Microsoft explained back in 2006 why it could not develop a satisfactory XML schema for WPF.

The problem is not the core XAML, usually the namespace with an “X” prefix in a XAML document, but the WPF vocabulary, usually the default namespace. Visual Studio 2005 used a huge XamlPresentation2006.xsd that worked mostly but not always. Visual Studio 2008 replaced this with a language service like that used to support IntelliSense for C# and Visual Basic. While this works better, it is unfortunate for anyone wishing to use other XML tools for XAML editing.

XAML has features that simplify the way it maps to the .NET API. Several of these relate to setting property values. Typically XML does this with attributes, but this is awkward when a property is a complex object. XAML supports property elements, which use dot syntax to define objects that are properties of the containing object. Here is an example:

It so happens that in this case you can do the same thing with a conventional attribute:

How does the XAML parser know that the string “Gold” must be converted to a SolidColorBrush? This is done through a Type Converter, a class that in this example converts a string to a new SolidColorBrush object.

Type Converters extend the number of properties that can be set as attributes, but do not deal with every possibility. In this example, if you wanted to use a different kind of brush, you would have to use the verbose property element syntax, or possibly a Markup Extension.

Source: theregister.co.uk

F# Update: MonoDevelop, a New Book, and a New CTP

Though still officially just a research project, the excitement over F# continues unabated. In today’s roundup, we take a brief look at what’s new for F#.

First up is a new F# IDE plug-in for MonoDevelop 2.0. This version of MonoDevelop is still in a preview state and some F# features such as syntax highlighting won’t work unless you recompile MonoDevelop from sources.

Next up is “F# for Scientists”. Don Syme writes,

I haven’t got my hardcopy just yet, but I read a draft of this book, and was really very impressed. The 3D visualization chapter is stunning in its simplicity and power, the parallel programming techniques presented are simple and powerful, and the examples of interoperating with Mathematica, MATLAB and using web databases opened gateways to the crucial information sources and tools that form a significant part of modern science.

In an Amazon review, Jamie Bernardin wrote,

I wish more books were written at this level of quality. While this book can be used by anybody that wants to get up to speed with F#, it’s also well suited for use as a text book for an undergraduate course in applied math or computer science (or reference for a graduate course). It’s well organized, well written, and draws from classic examples in mathematical computing.

It’s not easy material, and deserves to be read slowly and perhaps a couple times – much like any sophisticated treatise on a difficult but powerful subject. Don’t loose patience if you don’t get it at first glance. If you enjoy this type of stuff, it’s an absolutely pleasure to read – logical in flow and well articulated.

Probably the biggest problem for F# is that it is a moving target. Though the tools and books keep on coming, so do the new versions. Not even in beta yet, F# continues to evolve.

The September 2008 F# CTP targets Visual Studio 2008. IDE features include a scripting mode for quick experiments, a project mode for application development, and improved Intellisense via a new language service.

Incredibly useful for anyone doing scientific or engineering work, this CTP also adds support for Units of Measure. While any freshman science major knows you cannot multiply “50 meters per second” by “30 seconds” and shove it a variable expecting “kg-meters/second”, most programming languages aren’t so smart. F# does this by adding a meta-type system. In addition to the underlying type, usually float, F# variables can also know what units of measurement they represent. When used, both the IDE and compiler will check for conflicts and flag them as errors.

Source: infoq.com