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At the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Microsoft launched its new User Experience Kit.

In a March 12 blog post on the Microsoft Silverlight team blog, Microsoft said the "Microsoft User Experience Kit is targeted at technical and creative leads who want to better understand the tools, technologies, and scenarios that span Microsoft’s User Experience ecosystem.  Key topics range from ‘Building Immersive Multi-channel Solutions using Expression Studio’ to ‘High fidelity and high Performing Desktop Touch Applications using Windows 7′ to ‘Web Branding and Audience Targeting using SharePoint.’"

Christian Thilmany is a User Experience Architect for Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism Team, said in a post: "The Microsoft User Experience Kit is targeted at technical and creative leads who require the latest in Microsoft’s User Experience collateral spanning much off the Microsoft ‘stack.’ The kit is organized by those categories currently driving scenarios most common to most creative agencies and user experience influencers mapping Microsoft artifacts to those scenarios. There are many technology specific repositories but nothing that helps ‘map’ the Microsoft ecosystem, technology, and tools stack to that of the user experience, agency and creative world…"

Moreover, according to the Silverlight team blog:

"Included in the UX Kit is a range of collateral and resources including: videos, reference implementations, sample code, live demos, installable tools, presentations, whitepapers and more. Featured technologies include Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows 7 Touch, Microsoft Surface, Windows Phone, SharePoint, Expression Studio, and Microsoft Advertising. Topics covered on the kit range from Rich Media Delivery using Silverlight and Deep Zoom to Multi-Channel Digital Marketing using Windows 7, SharePoint, Windows Phone, and Surface."

The Microsoft User Experience Kit’s contents can be browsed online or downloaded for offline use.  It includes videos, presentations, sample code, and much more. Get the kit at http://uxkit.cloudapp.net. 

LAS VEGAS — At its MIX10 conference here, Microsoft is slated to announce the Silverlight Analytics Framework.

In a March 11 blog post from the Silverlight team, Microsoft said with effective Rich Internet Applications as the ultimate goal, developers need a proven way to measure that effectiveness. Enter the Silverlight Analytics Framework.

According to the Silverlight team blog:

"To measure this effectiveness, developers and designer need to instrument the application and collect data about the ways users interact with them. Often instrumentation is being done after the fact, done partially or dropped. Current ways to instrument applications are cumbersome, are focusing on instrumentation of Web pages and sometimes not appropriate to next generation interactive connected applications."

During a session at MIX, Microsoft media experience evangelist Michael Scherotter will demonstrate how developers and designers can instrument their applications using the new framework.

Microsoft said the Silverlight Analytics Framework is scheduled to release on March 15 on Microsoft’s CodePlex open source project hosting site as a free open-source framework.  The Framework will be available for both in browser and out of browser Silverlight applications. It also is well integrated with the design experience in Microsoft’s Expression Blend tool and it supports many analytic services to report into.

Microsoft’s Silverlight Analytics Framework provides functionality similar to that which Adobe brought in house with its $1.8 billion acquisition of Omniture last October.

An Adobe statement at the closing of the deal on Oct. 23, 2009, said:

"Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture advances its mission of revolutionizing the way the world engages with ideas and information. By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and ubiquitous clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies, Adobe will be well positioned to deliver solutions that can transform the future of engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices." 

The Eclipse Foundation March 8 announced a series of moves for its Mylyn project, including a number of subprojects and support for Web services standards efforts.

Eclipse officials said the new initiatives support the ongoing growth of the Eclipse Mylyn ecosystem. The open-source Mylyn project is a framework for integrating task and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools with the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE).

The new projects include the “Tasks” project for integrating task and change management; “SCM,” or Source Code Management, for integrating source code management; “Build” for integrating build management and continuous integration; and “Review” for collaborative code review. The new subproject leadership will support a broader range of leading Agile software development vendors contributing to the ongoing evolution of Mylyn.

"The SCM project is going to provide new integrations between Mylyn and leading SCM systems," said Mik Kersten, creator and leader of the Mylyn project and CEO of Tasktop Technologies. "And as part of this, we’re getting more vendors to participate in the Mylyn project." Kersten said Perforce will take a leading role in the "Tasks" subproject.

“Mylyn’s rapid adoption by Agile and ALM vendors means that we now have to scale up both the integration frameworks and the governance,” Kersten said in a statement. “With more than a million monthly downloads, inclusion in nearly all Eclipse distributions and 45 ALM integrations, Mylyn and its ecosystem are ensuring that developers have first-rate task management tools integrated with the Eclipse IDE and the productivity benefits of the task-focused interface, no matter how diverse their ALM stack.”

The new subprojects have provided a channel for vendors in the ALM community to become more deeply involved with the Mylyn project. In addition to Perforce, organizations leading and contributing to the new subprojects include Rally Software for “Tasks,” Cloudsmith for “Builds” and INSO for “Review.” Also, Mylyn will now embrace the new Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) Web service standards for ALM. 

“Tasktop and IBM share a common commitment to enabling interoperability across the ALM lifecycle,” said Scott Bosworth, IBM strategist and OSLC program manager, in a statement. “Both companies contributed to the initial OSLC change management API, which set the stage for the even broader ALM scope and industry participation that the OSLC community is experiencing today. We expect the new Mylyn subprojects to accelerate adoption of OSLC’s open interfaces for ALM interoperability.”

At its core, Mylyn provides integrated and personalized task management through its task-focused interface. As the Eclipse IDE’s adoption has grown beyond Java, Mylyn has extended its support to programming domains such as mobile C/C++, PHP and Spring Framework-powered enterprise Java applications. 

“Thanks to its broad ecosystem of open-source and commercial integrations, Mylyn now supports nearly all of the popular ALM tools used by Eclipse users,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. “Mylyn will extend this reach by growing the community of committers and contributors working to make Mylyn an industry-standard framework for Agile ALM.”

“Mylyn’s success comes from broad bottom-up adoption by developers,” said Kersten. “While the new Mylyn subprojects will provide reference integrations to popular open-source ALM tools such as Bugzilla for Tasks, Git for SCM and Hudson for Build, the growing demand for Mylyn in the enterprise is being met by Tasktop Pro, which integrates a diverse range of commercial tools for Agile ALM.”

Kersten said the group of vendors that have expressed interest in the new Mylyn proposal include AccuRev; Atlassian; Cloudsmith; CollabNet; HP; IBM; Microsoft; Perforce; Polarion; Rally Software; Sonatype; SpringSource, a division of VMware; Tasktop; ThoughtWorks Studios; VersionOne; and Zend.

The project restructuring proposal, including a list of participating vendors, is at http://www.eclipse.org/project-slides/mylyn-restructuring-review.html. 

LAS VEGAS—Here in the land of the big bet, Microsoft has upped its ante in support of the open-source JavaScript library known as jQuery.

At its MIX 2010 conference here, Microsoft announced that it will contribute to the development of new features and enhancements in the jQuery JavaScript Library and shared the release of new software development kits (SDKs) for the Open Data Protocol (OData) that make it easier for developers to access data from the cloud to create more compelling cross-platform Web applications.

As part of Microsoft’s broad engagement with open-source communities, corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft is investing resources to contribute to the development of the jQuery JavaScript Library to help improve the development process of standards-based Web applications. Microsoft will also work to provide better interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET so .NET developers can better incorporate jQuery capabilities. In addition, Microsoft will actively promote and distribute versions of the jQuery JavaScript Library by packaging it with popular products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. As a first step, Microsoft will contribute a templating engine to the jQuery JavaScript Library Team to simplify Web applications.

During Guthrie’s portion of the MIX10 keynote on March 16, John Resig, the creator of jQuery, took to the stage to express his enthusiasm for Microsoft’s support for the jQuery project. Microsoft support for jQuery is not new; the company has used it and supported it for more than a year.

"We’re really excited to be working with Microsoft here on jQuery," Resig said. "We’re very happy Microsoft has taken the opportunity to enhance it and build an excellent library."

Resig said the jQuery team started working with Microsoft on an experimental templating project, "and we’ve been using the traditional jQuery development process on GitHub."

Brian Goldfarb, director of developer platform marketing at Microsoft, said the jQuery news was a big highlight for his team, as Microsoft has been investing in open-source technology in an ongoing way and doing it "in a way that’s compatible with the community." He said his team has contributed "people resources" to the jQuery effort in the form of Microsoft staff who have worked on the jQuery initiative on a full-time basis.

Indeed, Goldfarb will take part in a panel at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on March 18, where he said he plans to make the case that Microsoft is in the unique position to be able to invest in and support open-source software in ways that few other companies can.

Microsoft offers full support for the jQuery technology when it comes to Microsoft customers, Goldfarb said. Also, Goldfarb said Microsoft’s work with jQuery is very much in line with the company’s strategy of meeting open source where it is. For instance, with its work with the CodePlex Foundation, Microsoft is working to support open-source efforts that touch Microsoft platform technology. However, that technology resides with the CodePlex Foundation or even in Microsoft’s internal CodePlex open-source project hosting site. Yet, in the jQuery case, Microsoft is working through jQuery’s existing GitHub arrangement.

In response to an article about the Microsoft/jQuery relationship on Ajaxian.com, a poster identified as Jadet said:

"That seals the deal, jQuery wins. I should probably be porting stuff over right now. Microsoft wanting to invest resources in open source is a nice change, not sure how I feel about that yet, hopefully it doesn’t hurt the library in the end. Personally, jQuery is getting a bit old for me; I think resources are better spent on something fresh. Looking back we can do better these days. I’m looking forward to the day we can all get hyped over a new generation of JavaScript frameworks."

Another responder identified as NerdInACan said:

"I REALLY don’t want to see Microsoft sneaking any of their poorly-architected mess into an otherwise fantastic library. I have yet to see any Microsoft code library show up without a bunch of proprietary strings attached. Sure it all works ok if you use their browser, their integrated security, yada yada. As soon as you want to do anything like grown-up, however, things get a lot more convoluted, and that’s when Microsoft code fails. Every time."

LAS VEGAS — Microsoft has unveiled its developer platform for the Windows Phone 7 Series, introducing an end-to-end development environment including free tools

At its MIX 2010 conference here, Microsoft officials Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform, and Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president, Windows Phone Program Management, detailed the opportunity for developers to use proven technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight and the XNA Framework to build new mobile applications and 3-D Games.

Microsoft had previously indicated that Silverlight and XNA would be key to the Windows Phone 7 Series application development story.

“As the browser, server, Web and devices evolve, a focus on delivering consistently great user experiences has become paramount,” Guthrie said, in a statement. “By extending our familiar platform technologies and tools to phones, Microsoft is delivering the premier application development experience across a variety of devices and form factors.”

During the keynote, Microsoft provided the first deep dive into Windows Phone 7 Series application development. By combining Silverlight features for rich application development and the XNA Framework for games, Windows Phone 7 Series empowers millions of developers and designers to build visually stunning and immersive applications and games — one of the industry’s most profitable mobile application categories — while taking advantage of device-specific capabilities. Specifically, developers will be able to take advantage of the following features:

•         Accelerometer, an intuitive control that responds to motion

•         A Microsoft Location Service to provide developers with a single point of reference to acquire location information

•         Microsoft Notification Service for pushing information to the phone, regardless of whether or not an application is running

•         Hardware-accelerated video with digital rights management (DRM)

•         Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming for the industry’s highest quality content viewing experience

•         Multitouch

•         Camera and microphone support

“Windows Phone 7 Series brings together a rich application environment, powerful hardware, a fresh approach to software and a smart new design,” Belfiore said, in a statement. “It was designed to generate incredible opportunities for developers and designers to quickly and easily deliver compelling applications and games. With the best developer tools, an established ecosystem and marketplace, and a path for developers to use their Silverlight and XNA Framework skill sets, we are delivering an application platform that is simple, powerful and inspiring.”

Microsoft also announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, which is specifically designed for building Windows Phone applications and is now available free in a single download at www.developer.windowsphone.com. Visual Studio 2010 Express includes an emulator that will allow developers to build and test their applications directly on their PCs in a virtualized Windows Phone 7 OS environment. That means developers won’t need the phone hardware to get started at building phone apps.

In addition, Microsoft also showed how developers and designers will be able to bring applications and games to market with a new Windows Phone Marketplace. The Marketplace features a panoramic design and active merchandising to increase the discoverability of games and applications, and supports one-time credit card purchases, mobile operator billing and advertising-funded applications. The Marketplace also will enable customers to try applications before buying them and allow developers to cross-promote their applications through deep linking.

Several leading companies will be creating exciting applications and games for Windows Phone 7 Series. They include The Associated Press, Archetype International Inc., AWS Convergence Technologies – WeatherBug, Citrix Systems Inc., Clarity Consulting Inc., Cypress Consulting, EA Mobile, Fandango Inc., Foursquare Labs Inc., frog design inc., Glu Mobile Inc., Graphic.ly, Hudson Entertainment Inc., IdentityMine Inc., IMDb.com Inc., Larva Labs, Match.com LLC, Matchbox Mobile Ltd., Microsoft Game Studios, Namco Networks America Inc., Oberon Media Inc., Pageonce Inc., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., PopCap Games Inc., Seesmic, Shazam Entertainment Ltd., Sling Media, SPB Software Inc., stimulant, TeleCommunications Systems Inc., Touchality LLC and Vertigo Software Inc.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will include free tools for developers to use. To further support an end-to-end development experience, Microsoft announced the availability of comprehensive tools support for Windows Phone 7 Series. The easy-to-install package includes previews of the following:

•         Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

•         Windows Phone 7 Series add-in to use with Visual Studio 2010 RC

•         XNA Game Studio 4.0

•         Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator for application testing

•         Expression Blend for Windows Phone Community Technology Preview (available as a separate download).

All the latest from MIX10 is available at http://live.visitmix.com/press, including downloads of tools for Windows Phone 7 Series, the Silverlight 4 RC and Expression Blend 4 Beta, which will be available today. 

As Microsoft continues to tout its push toward Web browser interoperability, Google has released the results of a recent run of its Sputnik JavaScript conformance test, which shows Microsoft’s Internet Explorer falling behind on JavaScript conformance.

In a March 11 blog post, "Does Your Browser Behave?" Christian Plesner Hansen, a Google software engineer, said the company has released a test runner for Sputnik so that users can run the complete Sputnik suite of more than 5,000 tests to test the JavaScript compliance of their browsers.

"Incompatibilities between browsers remain one of the biggest challenges for Web developers," Hansen said. "We hope that giving users and browser vendors an easy way to test their browser will help promote browser robustness and compatibility across the industry."

Describing the results of a recent preliminary run of Sputnik against five prominent browsers, Hansen said:

"You can also use Sputnik to compare browser conformance. For example, below is an experimental plot that compares five popular browsers and which we hope to update as new stable versions of the browsers are released. We created this chart by running Sputnik in each of the five browsers and then plotting each browser such that the fewer tests a browser fails the closer it is to the center and the more failing tests two browsers have in common the closer they are placed to each other. In this example, when running Sputnik on a Windows machine, we saw the following results: Opera 10.50: 78 failures, Safari 4: 159 failures, Chrome 4: 218 failures, Firefox 3.6: 259 failures and Internet Explorer 8: 463 failures."

Sputnik, which Google launched in June 2009, "touches all aspects of the JavaScript language defined in the third edition of the ECMA-262 spec," Hansen said. "In many ways it can be seen as a continuation of and a complement to existing browser conformance testing tools, such as the Acid3 test. While we are always focused on improving speed, Sputnik is not about testing how fast your browser executes JavaScript, but rather whether it does so correctly."

Moreover, Hansen added:

"When we first released the Sputnik test suite we noted that to be compatible with the web you sometimes had to be incompatible with the JavaScript spec. Since then a new version of the spec, ECMAScript 5, has been released. Besides introducing a number of new language features, ECMAScript 5 changes how many existing features are defined to bring them in line with how they are used on the web. We are updating the Sputnik tests to reflect those changes so that 0 failures would mean not only compatibility with the spec but also compatibility with the web."

Despite the Sputnik test results showing Internet Explorer lagging behind other browsers in JavaScript compliance, Hansen gave a nod to the software giant for its efforts to continue to pursue compliance as an ultimate goal, saying:

"We are excited to see the efforts on conformance testing by other browser makers. For example, where Sputnik tests the language features in ECMAScript 5 which were also present in ECMAScript 3, Microsoft’s es5conform project tests the new language features that were added in ECMAScript 5." 

Adobe has announced that its photo editing system for smartphones, the Photshop.com Mobile editor, is now available for Android application developers.

Adobe said third-party application developers now have access to the Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 editor. In addition, Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 provides users of the Google Mobile operating system with quick and easy photo-editing and sharing capabilities. Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 also enhances the camera phone experience by providing a collection of new editing effects.

Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 advances mobile photo editing with effects such as Vibrant, to boost photo colors, and Pop, which brings a ‘pop art’ style to images. The Soft Black and White, and Warm Vintage tools can be used to add a classic and aged effect to photos. With one touch, users can also apply changes to a photo’s look and feel with Vignette Blur, White Glow and Rainbow. In addition, all edits and changes can be undone so users can apply effects and know that their original photo is safe.

“Photoshop.com Mobile is the ‘go-to’ photo editing application for iPhone and Android devices,” said Doug Mack, vice president and general manager of Digital Imaging and Rich Media Solutions at Adobe, in a statement. “Unlike iPhone, the Android platform allows us to make the Photoshop.com editor broadly available to developers so they can provide it within any application they are working on. Photoshop functionality can then easily be accessed from an online auction, real estate or social media application so users can quickly fix photos and make them look their best, before being showcased.”

Meanwhile, a new Android-focused developer site now allows Android developers to leverage the Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 editor to create other application workflows. The Website, found at http://mobile.photoshop.com/android/developers.html, provides access to Adobe technology and promotes an ecosystem where developers have more creative freedom when developing their software, Adobe officials said

Adobe Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 is available as a free download in all countries with Android Market in English only. To retrieve the update, launch the Android Market application via the Android device and search for “photoshop.com.” More information on Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 can be found here.  

The development platform for Windows Phone 7 Series will be different, Microsoft says–so different in fact that previously built Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.

That was perhaps the key takeaway from Charlie Kindel’s blog post about Windows Phone 7 Series development delivered on the evening of March 4. Kindel is the Partner Group Program manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform & Developer Experience.

Kindel used the term "different" at least nine times — all in bold — in his post to denote the "clean break" the new user and developer experience will provide with Windows Phone 7 Series. Well, to be sure, Kindel said .NET developers’ skills will move forward with the new development scheme. And another very key point from Kindel’s post is that Microsoft’s Silverlight and XNA technology will be integral to Windows Phone 7 Series application development.

Of the overall "difference" of Microsoft’s new mobile platform, Kindel wrote:

"For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series."

Silverlight is Microsoft’s Adobe Flash-like framework for creating rich Web, desktop and mobile applications. XNA is Microsoft’s game development platform consisting of a set of tools and runtime environment. The XNA Framework is based on the .NET Compact Framework. And XNA Game Studio is an IDE (integrated development environment) for game development.

However, Kindel did not focus very much on what developers must do to build the next generation of Windows mobile applications, or how all the pieces will work together. For that, he said you will have to attend Microsoft’s MIX10 Web design and development conference in Las Vegas starting March 15–or at least watch the Webcasts and blogs from the event.

Said Kindel:

"The expertise and familiarity with our tools is not lost. If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy. New developers to the platform will find a cohesive, well designed API set with super productive tools."

Moreover, Kindel said Microsoft sought out feedback from developers about what they wanted and came back with three main goals for the Windows Phone 7 Series platform:

Enable end users to be able to personalize their phone experience through a large library of innovative, compelling, games and applications.

Enable developers to profit.

Advance the “3-screen-plus-cloud” vision. 

LAS VEGAS — In his first public speaking engagement since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Java creator James Gosling ensured the Java faithful that Java is safe and secure in Oracle’s hands.

Gosling delivered the opening keynote at TheServerSide Java Symposium (TSSJS) here on March 17 saying he was "encouraged" by the direction Oracle is taking with Java and that "I don’t think anybody in this room has anything to worry about" regarding the future of Java. Particularly, with his talk entitled, "Java Today and Tomorrow," attendees were looking for some indication of where Oracle might make changes to Java or disrupt the status quo. However, Gosling assured that the business of Java as well as the ongoing technological innovation of the Java platform continues apace.

Indeed, among the first things Gosling did was deliver an update on the use of Java worldwide. For instance, the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is downloaded 15 million times a week, Gosling said, except for spikes such as when Brazilians file their taxes annually — which is done via a Java application. Moreover, there are 10 billion Java-enabled devices, one billion Java-enabled desktops, 100 million Java-enabled TV devices, 2.6 billion Java-enabled mobile devices, 5.5 billion Java smartcards, and more than 6.5 million professional Java developers, Gosling said.

Regarding Java desktops, Gosling said these desktops are "usually the front-end to a back-end using a service oriented architecture (SOA) where the front end has to be more sophisticated than AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L]."

Despite the TSSJS event focusing on enterprise Java, Gosling said Oracle also is working on Java on the desktop, and in embedded, mobile, high-performance computing and other systems. Yet, "the unifying principle of all of it is the network; the network ties it all together."

Paying homage to his enterprise Java audience, Gosling said Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) is the foundation of the next generation of enterprise software. Gosling credited the Java community and leading vendors for banding together to get the Java EE 6 specification approved last November and for delivering a bunch of new and updated Java APIs.

In addition, Java EE 6 focuses on modularity and introduces the concept of profiles, Gosling said. As yet, there are but two profiles, the full profile and the web profile. The web profile is the first Java EE profile to be defined. It is a "fully functional mid-size stack for modern web application development," Gosling said.

"We wanted to focus on the web tier in this release," he said. "We wanted to create a level playing field for web frameworks."

Moreover, Gosling said the “pluggability” and extensibility in the new version of the enterprise Java platform comes from the Open Services gateway initiative (OSGi) modularity system at its foundation.

And Gosling welcomed the addition of dependency injection into the Java EE 6 specification. "Dependency injection allows you to inject dependencies in your code and you’ll be able to use the annotations features in JDK 5 [Java Development Kit 5] to factor out boilerplate," he said. In addition, "all the pain of EJBs [Enterprise JavaBeans] has just gone away," he added. Ironically, just a few years ago these same issues were the source of bitter battles within the Java community, with visionaries like Rod Johnson of VMware’s SpringSource division leading the charge to make changes to the Java specification.

Meanwhile, Gosling gave an update on the GlassFish application server, which now lies at version 3 and is the reference implementation for Java EE 6. GlassFish also is the world’s most downloaded application server at one million downloads per month, he said. Gosling also noted that Oracle continues to advance its NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE), which is targeted for enterprise, mobile and desktop development.

"The thing that’s nice about Java is that it’s a two-level specification," Gosling said. "There’s the Java language, but the magic is in the VM [virtual machine] and how it works with other languages like Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Python, PHP, JavaScript, JavaFX and a host of other languages. Literally hundreds of languages can run on top of the JVM [Java Virtual Machine]. It’s a nice way to develop your app using all kinds of different tools in all kinds of different ways."

Gosling also said he expects to still "be coding in the year 2030," although he expects that he will be working on massively parallel systems with up to 5,220 cores if things progress as they have been.

Regarding the future of the Java language over the next five to 10 years, Gosling said developers should look for stability, with steady language enhancements that bring the entire developer base forward.

Gosling also said the Java Store that Sun touted so highly when it was first announced it in 2009 hit a slight roadblock when the company’s accountants told the engineering team they had to implement a system to handle taxation of items sold in the store. "We said why can’t we just be eBay," Gosling said. "But we’ve come up with a viable tax solution and I expect that we will have a new release of the Java Store for developers coming out any day now. The feedback from the developer community has been really enthusiastic, because they’ve seen what happened with iTunes store and with all the Java devices out there that’s another couple of digits in the market size [as compared to iTunes]." 

Microsoft has released the final version of ASP.NET MVC 2—a free framework that helps developers build standards-based, SEO-friendly Websites.

In a March 11 blog post, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie announced that ASP.NET MVC 2 come less than a year after the initial version. ASP.NET MVC follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which isolates domain logic from input and presentation, enabling independent development, testing and maintenance of each. The popular Ruby on Rails Web development framework also follows the MVC pattern.

ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for Visual Studio 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5, Guthrie said. However, the final release of Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in—so users will not need an additional install to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.

Said Guthrie:

"ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1—so all the knowledge, skills, code and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward. Like the first release, we are also shipping the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 under an OSI-compliant open-source license."

Some of the new features and capabilities, according to Guthrie, include:

New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers

 Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client

 Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization

 Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas”

 Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long-running tasks in parallel

 Support for rendering subsections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction

· Lots of new helper functions, utilities and API enhancements

 Improved Visual Studio tooling support

Moreover, ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 1—meaning developers can have applications built with Version 1 and others built with Version 2 on the same machine, Guthrie said.