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MonoDevelop, an IDE for Mono, was released Friday, the leader of the project said.

Miguel de Icaza, who has shephered the Mono project, said the IDE has shipped after being in development for four years. Mono is an open source version of Microsoft's .Net Framework.

"MonoDevelop 1.0 is designed mostly for Linux developers creating Gnome and ASP.Net applications but MonoDevelop is also available for MacOS users that download our Mono installer and will still be useful if they are building Mono-based applications on OSX," de Icaza said in a blog entry.

MonoDevelop 1.0 is accessible here.

MonoDevelop, an IDE for Mono, was released Friday, the leader of the project said.

Miguel de Icaza, who has shephered the Mono project, said the IDE has shipped after being in development for four years. Mono is an open source version of Microsoft's .Net Framework.

"MonoDevelop 1.0 is designed mostly for Linux developers creating Gnome and ASP.Net applications but MonoDevelop is also available for MacOS users that download our Mono installer and will still be useful if they are building Mono-based applications on OSX," de Icaza said in a blog entry.

MonoDevelop 1.0 is accessible here.

ActiveState released its Komodo IDE 4.3 for dynamic languages this week, with improvements in areas such as code-finding.

Komodo IDE 4.3 enables developers to build applications using dynamic languages and "open" technologies, the company said. The company also announced an open source version of its Komodo Edit editor for dynamic languages.

Version 4.3's "Find and Replace" functionality, for finding code snippets and making changes, has been redesigned. Also, new features have been added including Find in Project, Replace in Files, multi-line Find and Replace and fixes for regular expression searches. A new Find back end handles Unicode-encoded files and skips binary files.

A unit testing interface has been added for Perl, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), Ruby and Python, enabling developers to run test suites within Komodo IDE to find failure points in source code. Control of source code is featured in the release.

An Abbreviation feature inserts snippets from the toolbox. Default snippets are included and additional snippets can be added.

Version 4.3 also features bug fixes and performance improvements for Perl, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. Firefox-style extensibility is featured.

Version 4.3 costs $295.

Komodo Edit is a free editor supporting major scripting languages and offering capabilities such as in-depth auto-complete, multi-language file support, syntax coloring and syntax checking. Vi emulation and Emacs key binding are highlighted also.

Built on the Mozilla code base and based on the Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit is now licensed under the Mozilla Public License, GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License.

Serena Software on Monday will tout plans to offer several of its products via SaaS.

The first product to be offered via this format will be Serena Mariner, the company's project and portfolio management (PPM) tool. Mariner offers visibility into project status and metrics to ensure the right persons are on a project at the right time, the company said.

Users can try the SaaS version free and buy it online. Pricing will be half the price of alternative PPM offerings for the first six months, Serena said.

Also planned for a SaaS implementation are solutions for Business Mashups and the agile space.

The Honor Society of Leap Year Babies, which describes itself as the world's largest Internet birthday club, has released free software to correct the "invalid birth date" bug that can impact those born on February 29.

Persons born on that date, which only shows up on the calendar once every four years, can encounter this bug whenever they enter their birth date on a Web site registration screen, the Honor Society said. The software also can be used in automated birth date response systems that usually ignore people born on February 29, according to the society.

"I think the main [impact of the software] will be that when we get a birthday, it will sort of be treated like everybody else's birthday," said Peter Brouwer, a society representative who was himself born on February 29. He wrote the software as a six-line Perl program.

Intended for Web designers, the software determines if any year is a leap year and can be used for birth date verification. The code is posted on the organization's Web site. The society was formed in 1997 and has more than 6,000 members worldwide.

Fresh from the delivery of its Visual Studio 2008 toolset and .Net Framework 3.5 this past fall, Microsoft is readying enhancements to these technologies in the area of client development, a Microsoft official said in a blog this week.

"We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications," said Scott Guthrie, general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. "All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward."

Enhancements planned for the next few months include:

• Improved .Net Framework setup for client applications. Due this summer, the improvements will make it easier to build optimized setup packages and can be integrated with existing installation frameworks such as InstallShield. Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications will be able to use the setup framework via a bootstrap utility.

• Improved working set and startup improvements for .Net client applications. This is intended to enable .Net client applications to launch faster in "cold startup" situations, in which no other .Net client applications are running and the OS must load lots of pages from disk. Also due this summer, the improvement will be made available via an update to the Common Language Runtime that features significant internal optimizations to data structures. An improvement of 25 percent to 40 percent is anticipated for cold startup performance.

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) improvements. A service update to WPF this summer will include performance optimizations for text, graphics, media and the data stack. A new WriteableBitmap API will enable real-time bitmap updates from a software surface. Support for a new effects API also is planned for building richer graphics scenarios.

• WPF control improvements. Due later this year, new controls being worked on include DataGrid, Ribbon and Calendar/DatePicker controls

• Visual Studio 2008 WPF Designer improvements. A servicing update to Visual Studio 2008 is planned including feature additions to the WPF Designer. Included are tab support within a property grid for control events, toolbox support within source code and other enhancements.

"The above improvements should make it easier to build great desktop applications," Guthrie said.

In a dramatic move, Microsoft is opening up documentation for it APIs and communications protocols, the company announced Thursday.

Developers do not need a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information, the company said. Open access is intended to ensure that third-party developers can connect to Microsoft high-volume products just as other Microsoft products do.

Interoperability principles announced by Microsoft apply to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and OfficeSharePoint Server 2007. Future versions of these products also will be covered.

More than 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols previously available only under a trade secret license will be published on MSDN.

Microsoft also will indicate on its Web site which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and license all of these patents under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms at low royalty rates, the company said.

Additionally, Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementation of these protocols. Developers can use the documentation for free to develop products.

Also, Microsoft will design new APIs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.

Microsoft also is launching an open source interoperability initiative to enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products.

Looking to entice a new generation of software developers, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unveiled Monday a software giveaway program for college and high school students to access Microsoft developer and designer tools, the company said.

Available now to 35 million college students in several companies including China and the United States, the Microsoft DreamSpark program makes available a broad range of tools, the company said.

Tools included in the program include the Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Editions, XNA Game Studio 2.0, Microsoft Expression Studio tools and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition. Also available through the program is Windows Server Standard Edition.

Global coverage and an expansion of the program to high school students could enable the program to reach as many as 1 billion students worldwide throughout the next year. The program will be expanded to additional countries as well, including Australia and Japan.

“Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students to explore the power of software and encourage them to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs," Gates said in a statement released by the company.

Microsoft plans early next month to release the next public preview of ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) Framework, said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog this week.

The framework is set to be released at the Mix08 conference, which is being held in Las Vegas March 5-7; it will be downloadable off the Web so users do not need to attend the conference to get it.

The technology will add to ASP.Net support for developing Web applications using an MVC architecture. MVC features models, which are components of an application maintaining state; views, which are components for displaying an application user interface, and controllers, for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model and choosing a view to render to display UI.

A prior preview of the framework was offered as part of ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP Release in December. Improvements in the March release include the ability to deploy the framework in the \bin directory and work in partial trust; enhanced routing and infrastructure and improved Visual Studio 2008 tools support. Also featured are HTML helpers and refactoring and design improvements.

Source code for ASP.Net MVC Framework will be downloadable as a buildable Visual Studio project solution, for viewing and debugging source code. A license will be included permitting users to patch the framework source code although they will not be able to redistributed their patched versions.

"But [the license] will enable developers who want to get started building ASP.NET MVC applications immediately to make progress - and not have to worry about getting blocked by an interim bug that they can't work around," Guthrie said.

The framework has been slated to ship as part of ASP.Net by the first half of this year.

Microsoft in March plans to discuss enhancements to ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) libraries, Guthrie said.

Microsoft's patterns and practices group has released a February Community Technology Preview of Unity, a lightweight extensible dependency injection container for software development.

Dependency injection is a technique for building loosely coupled applications.

Offered on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project site, Unity Application Block, or Unity for short, addresses the issues faced by developers using component-based software engineering, according to a CodePlex Web page on the project.

Modern business applications feature custom business objects and components that perform specific or generic tasks in addition to components that address cross-cutting concerns such as logging, authentication, caching and exception handling. The key to building these applications, according to Microsoft, is to achieve a decoupled or very loosely coupled design. These applications are more flexible and easier to test.

Dependency injection can handle dependencies between objects, such as an object that processes customer information, which may depend on other objects that access that data store, validate the information and check that the user is authorized to perform updates.

Unity is geared to Visual Studio 2005 but can work with applications built in Visual Studio 2008 if users set a reference to the binary assemblies. The final release of Unity is planned for March 15.

The CTP is accessible here.