Covad and Verizon have announced an agreed settlement that “resolves all pending litigation and disputes” between them, including the dismissal of Covad’s upcoming antitrust case against Verizon, dismissal of a suit Verizon filed against Covad, and resolution of all billing disputes. Another agreement also enables Covad to provide xDSL services over lines being used Verizon’s voice services resellers. "We are pleased to be able to expand our existing wholesale relationship with this highly valued customer," said Virginia Ruesterholz, President of Verizon’s Wholesale Markets. Financial terms were not released. Covad has also entered into an agreement with MCI, which is in the final stages of its merger with Verizon. The agreement makes Covad a “preferred provider of local access and network services” to MCI’s DSL business... (more)

Cloud Expo, Inc. Announces Cloud Expo 2011 New York Venue

Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo - International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held in New York, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. Over 900 corporate sponsors and more than 65,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, tenfold more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, Chairman and Founder of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘soft... (more)

Windows 2003 End of Support Poll By @AppZero_Inc | @CloudExpo

2014 State of Readiness for Windows 2003 End of Support: Poll Results Most IT administrators are painfully aware that Windows Server 2003 will reach the end of extended support in July 2015. This is a big deal because Windows Server 2003 has been a monster success since it was released 11 years ago. From 2003 to 2010 this platform was the workhorse for applications deployed at both small businesses and large enterprises.  And, even though Microsoft released a major update with Windows 2008, late in 2008, most enterprises stuck with Windows 2003 until Windows Server 2008 R2 launched on October 22, 2009. The newest Windows Server platform is 2012, R2 and little is publicly known about the number of production instances.  As of the summer of 2014 however, it was widely reported that Microsoft believed there to be 22+ million Windows 2003 Servers still running productio... (more)

Accessing the ASP.NET Authentication, Profile and Role Service in Silverlight

In ASP.NET 2.0, we introduced a very powerful set of application services in ASP.NET (Membership, Roles and profile).  In 3.5 we created a client library for accessing them from Ajax and .NET Clients and exposed them via WCF web services.    For more information on the base level ASP.NET appservices that this walk through is based on, please see Stefan Schackow's excellent book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management. In this tutorial I will walk you through how to access the WCF application services from a directly from the Silverlight client.  This works super well if you have a site that is already using the ASP.NET application services and you just need to access them from a Silverlight client.   (Special thanks to Helen for a good chunk of this implantation) Here is what I plan to show: 1. Login\Logout 2. Save personalization settings ... (more)

Microsoft Azure Pricing Adds to Cloud Confusion

The long awaited Microsoft Azure pricnig model was announced recently. For a while I really thought Microsoft would use its fashionably late arrival to Cloud Computing to build upon the short comings of other vendors and maybe take advantage of the opportunity to establish a leadership position in Cloud Pricing. Alas, yesterday I discovered that Microsoft will instead add to the confusion when it comes to Cloud Pricing. Here is a snippet of what they announced: Azure pricing is a disappointment on three counts: It isn’t true utility or consumption computing pricing because the customer will not end up paying for what they actually use. Compute and Storage hours are a mistake because it presumes the full consumption of compute unit for any part of 1 hour. The customer doesn’t realize it but they are paying for computing resources they aren’t necessarily going to use... (more)

Book Review: Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework

This is the perfect book for the beginner and the advanced MVC developer. It is a one stop shop for learning the ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework. It starts out with a nice little sample application that will get beginners up to speed fast. It then covers the MVC Pattern in detail and how it relates to Domain-Driven Development, Repositories, Dependency Injection, and Automated Testing. Next the is a chapter on the C# features a good MVC developer needs in their tool belt, as well as the Razor syntax. This chapter does a good job of introducing the Razor view engine. Then there is a chapter on the essential tools MVC developers should understand. This chapter covers Ninject, Unit Testing and Moq. In the next three chapters the authors take you through building a real application. Everything is included from the views to the repository (using Entity Framework 4.1), to the databas... (more)

Microsoft Misses Estimates

Microsoft's little adventure into tablet land has cost it a $900 million charge to cover its slashing prices on its hard-to-move ARM-based Surface RT widgets earlier this week by as much as 30%. But that was only part of its fiscal Q4 story of missed revenue and profit expectations Thursday. Outside the Surface write-down, which cost seven cents a share, it reported earnings per share of only 66 cents against Wall Street projections of 75 cents on revenues of $19.9 billion, up 10% year-over-year, when the pundits were counting on $20.7 billion. Nearly all its business units missed internal projections and its share price dropped 6.3% after-hours to $35.44. For instance, its server and tools business was supposed to grow 12% but was up 9% instead. The Windows unit, ostensibly up 6%, was really down 6% excluding revenue associated with a Windows 8 promotion. Similarl... (more)

Alienware's Latest Offering Provides Reliable Solution For Web Hosting

Alienware has announced the release of its new Alienware Hivemind 5520 5U rack server – the most powerful addition to its Hivemind rack server line. Powered by dual Intel Xeon processors with dual-core technology and with 3TB of hard drive storage and up to 16GB of memory, the Hivemind 5520 represents a complete solution for a range of businesses. "Corporate customers needing an extremely powerful, reliable solution for databases, storage area networks, web hosting, multiple workloads, or other large-scale applications will find the answer they have been looking for with the Hivemind 5520," said Patrick Cooper, Director of Product Management for Alienware. "By being fully scalable and easy to manage, the Hivemind 5520 allows companies to expand and diversify as smoothly as possible." "Our work with Alienware has enabled them to develop a platform based on Intel ... (more)

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers." Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed. What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX? Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! 1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX? 2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?  3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business se... (more)

Visual WebGui Launches AJAX Enterprise Application Development and Deployment Platform and Announces Silverlight Compliant Solution Supported by Microsoft

Company Solves Enterprise Level Development Complexities and Security Challenges of AJAX by Providing an Open Source Solution With no Client Dependency and Proven Reductions in Development Time of Over 80% Visual WebGui, developer of the AJAX enterprise application development and deployment platform, today announces the availability of their enhanced browser-based solution. The company, whose solution has reduced enterprise application development times at companies like SAP, Network D, and others by more than 80%, also announces that Visual WebGui, which is seamlessly integrated into Microsoft's Visual Studio and .NET framework, will soon launch a Microsoft Silverlight compliant solution supported by Microsoft. Since the company's soft launch in mid 2007, there have been 150,000 downloads of Visual WebGui's browser-based solution with more than 20,000 application... (more)

Flexing Your .NET 3.5 Skillset

With the arrival of .NET 3.5, WPF and the RTM of Silverlight 2, .NET developers have more choices than ever for designing, developing and deploying compelling applications with rich user interfaces. However, there are other mainstream alternatives that don't fall into the .NET camp. When it comes to the RIA world, technologies such as Adobe Flex and Flash may seem more foreign to some of us then driving on the left side of the road would be to an American. However, given the need to work on a Flex project, we are actually quite well suited for the transition, more so in many cases than developers coming from a more traditional web development world. First off all, why choose to use Flex anyway? If you are building an RIA to deploy through the browser, Silverlight would seem the logical choice for a truly custom and unique UI when ASP.NET and AJAX don't fit the bill. ... (more)