Software application development

Hushed mutterings around the MSDN’s many chambered portals this afternoon confirm that today is in fact the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to MSDN subscribers. General availability apparently follows the day before Thursday’s official Windows 7 launch on October 21 and the final product is now expected on 22 March 2010.

In what is effectively a channel-driven announcement, Microsoft is trying to extol the virtues of what it describes as a “newly simplified” product lineup and pricing options.

As such, VS 2010 is being presented in the following three editions: Ultimate (a team based product with increased focus on collaboration), Premium (styled for what Microsoft calls high quality scalable applications) and Professional (for more basic software development needs).

Upfront in terms of new technologies being tabled are new testing options by virtue of enhancements to the IDE that that are said to allow developers to use existing skills to deploy applications whether their focus and experience lies in modeling, coding, testing or debugging.

Sniffing around the edge of this news this afternoon as I was, I had a conversation with Microsoft’s principal program manager lead for developer customer management Jeff Beehler to try and get a feel for what has really happened in between the Beta 1 and Beta 2 timeframes.

“Performance of Visual Studio 2010 is considerably better in Beta 2 than in Beta 1. We focused on platform improvements to help in scenarios such as sluggishness over remote desktop connections and within virtual environments as we knew that these were common configurations for our early adopters. Customers who have picked up interim drops of Visual Studio 2010 between Beta 1 and Beta 2 have commented positively, without prompting, about the improvements,” said Microsoft’s Beehler.

So what else is new in .NET Framework 4? There’s drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and WPF, built-in tools for Windows 7, SharePoint and new support for high performance middle-tier applications (including parallel programming, workflow and service oriented applications) and backward compatibility through side-by-side installation with .NET Framework 3.5.

Microsoft hopes the big draw will be its “Ultimate Offer” – an incentive where active MSDN Premium subscribers will be transitioned to a higher-level Visual Studio 2010 with MSDN subscription at launch.

According to Microsoft, “This provides access to an unprecedented amount of resources including test and development rights for Microsoft server software (including Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008), Microsoft Office, and premium Visual Studio tools.”

I glossed over the point in my first paragraph here, but they key part of this news for many may be the March 2010 full product availability date. What happens between now and then is anybody’s guess – in fact, I’d love to know more about what happens between now and then, the trouble is… the doors are usually fairly tightly sealed while the special sauce simmers away right?

I am due to meet up soon with an open source enterprise content management (ECM) company called Alfresco whose success in the US may have lessons for us in the UK defence sector. The company’s records management module is apparently the first open source software to pass the rigorous U.S. Department of Defense 5015.02 rating.

Cutting through the PR with a fairly heavy palette knife, this is clearly not the first open source software to be used by the US defense authorities. Multifarious manifestations of Java and many other open source variants have, allegedly, been used by the NSA (No Such Agency) and many other bastions of defence for some years now.

That said, the exacting standards needed to meet the governance, retention and compliance strategies of US federal agencies and government is no small matter. So any open source inroads made in this space are, arguably, fairly admirable in nature.

Combine this positive development with the fact that the UK’s CIO Council published a policy designed to stimulate the uptake of open source across the public sector way back in February of the year and you can see why this is an issue.

So why go open source for a records management application? What’s the big deal?

It comes down to money of course. Traditionally records management apps would be priced on a per user basis and Alfresco’s Records Management Module v3.2 offers an open source pricing model that the company says will “significantly” reduce the barrier to regulatory compliance.

Alfresco’s tool has a web-based GUI offering secure access from any location and is typically described with all the normal buzzwords including native support of IMAP, drag and drop filing, seamless integration, single repository control and low administration overhead. Available from all good chemists and all in one easy to swallow capsule no doubt.

What this type of technology should open our eyes to is, broadly, the fact that the US is doing this and the UK isn’t. Alfresco chief executive and founder John Powell is refreshingly vocal on this subject and is (I would like to suggest) unselfishly highlighting his company’s success in the US to show us what we are not doing in the UK.

Perhaps the increasing adoption of open source in the commercial enterprise space will cause the government to wake up and see the benefits of these technology streams. Or maybe it won’t.

Having recently been subjected to a rather bland online questionnaire from my local council on public services, I was equally unimpressed to have been approached a couple of times by clipboard hugging inquisitors at European airports this month.

If we are adding to our full-fat butter-enriched data mountain with yet more yes, no, maybes – then a) what are we doing with this data? b) is it of any use in the first place? and c) do the software development companies pumping out management tools in this space need a firm reality check?

A firm called Confirmit unashamedly labels themselves as ‘leading global vendor’ of software for customer feedback, employee feedback and market research. So what do they think they need to make meaningful use of my answer to the Easyjet survey lady this week: “The best thing about your in-flight service are your happy crew and the Wasabi-peanuts.”

Confirmit actually shares a bed with an outfit called Clarabridge, a provider of text analytics solutions that claims to improve customer experience management (CEM). I know, I know CEM, it sounds awful and cheesy – don’t turn off yet though.

Could text analytics inside research projects provide extra (and surely much needed) contextual insight for enterprises trying to number crunch data? Are these two complimentary technologies and should we be talking about them more naturally anyway?

My typically sardonic and obtuse survey responses serve to amuse myself for sure, so what’s the corporate line and response to that kind of feedback?

“Open-ended customer comments add a breadth and depth of context to feedback,” said Henning Hansen, president and CEO of Confirmit.

Open-ended moi? I haven’t even gotten warmed up yet sir. Anyway, carry on.

“Confirmit enables data capture through IVR, telephone, kiosk, handheld device, and paper scanning in addition to the web channel. Dashboard reporting delivers actionable, real-time insight. A sophisticated alert program notifies management of any unusually low scores so the problem can be resolved immediately,” so says the blurb.

So can over 50,000 business users using Clarabridge’s text mining software to stay competitive be wrong? I’d like to say yes, possibly – but that would be being deliberately sceptical.

Should developers working on analysis projects involving customer survey data take heed of the marriage between text analytics and customer research. I’d like to say yes again – but this time I’ll say it with full conviction.

After 36 hours of developer ‘show-submersion’ I think I have a pretty good idea of how the Nokia X-factor is playing out in the Qt cross-platform world. There are very few blue Nokia logos around and everyone is wearing Qt green. The company’s staff are even still calling themselves ‘trolls’ in reverence to their former incarnation under the Trolltech brand.

The customers seem upbeat, the partners say they are making more money and Qt itself says that downloads have actually increased 250% since the licensing model went LGPL. But what of the developers? Well there are more of them – over 1000 if you add the 700 or so here to the 300 registered attendees for the sister event in San Francisco at the start of November.

But crucially – since open sourcing, there have been 400 substantial contributions to the Gitorious.org code repository in terms of patches and other submissions. Is that a lot? It would be if we could quantify the size, quality and potential usefulness of those submissions, but at this stage Qt is just saying that in total there is a spread. Predictable I suppose. But only a determined sceptic would suggest that there isn’t some true worth in most of what is there.

On the news scene, as expected, there was the first public beta of Qt 4.6 as well as Qt Creator 1.3, the upcoming new version of its cross-platform Qt Integrated Development Environment. According to Qt, these releases should allow developers to target new platforms as they feature new support for Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 - Qt 4.6 also introduces a port of Qt to the Symbian Platform with integration for the S60 framework.

To get a little extra colour and analysis of Qt from the outside, I spoke with Nick Jones, VP & distinguished analyst at Gartner, “Qt looks easier for developers to work with than native Symbian APIs and so provides some extra leverage (as my US colleagues would say) in terms of powerful graphics APIs so will probably become the de-facto Symbian and Maemo toolkit for most developers creating native apps for the Ovi store for example. But Qt is also important for Nokia in other areas. For example, Nokia has some PC applications such as PC suite. I’d guess that in the future Nokia might want PC-side applications that run on Mac, Windows and possibly Linux so Qt could help there here as well. To summarise my view, Nokia’s interest in Qt isn’t just about being a good open source citizen, although I’m sure they’d be grateful for any interesting new features that come from the open source community. Qt is an important tool that solves a number of other problems for Nokia.”

Gartners Jones sums up the feelings voiced by many of the attendees here. Qt was a good move for Nokia, a smart move in terms of doing the right thing ‘inside’ the industry. Commercially, both Qt partners and individual developers appear to share a “what’s not to like?” take on the fact that the Nokia mothership is hovering somewhere (supposedly) placidly in the background. There is now the undeniable presence of a bigger brand, with more muscle and better outreach for even a homegrown app taking its first steps in the big wide world.

That said, the purists are still here and one software engineer I spoke to said that he had generally had more trust in Trolltech than Nokia due to the company’s excellent standing and reputation in the open source space. In fairness, he also said that 18 months into the new ‘regime’ that he was building trust for Nokia and saw that the company respects and sees the value in so-called ‘small’ (or smaller at least) innovators.

There’s more to report on here in terms of a more clarified roadmap, a certification programme and some noteworthy corporate blogging that rivals the openness I’ve really only previously witnessed from Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, but enough for now. Back to the pretzels, the weißbier and the sessions.

Let’s just be absolutely ‘Oktoberfestly’ clear about this can we? I am in Munich for the start of Nokia Qt Software’s Dev Days 2009 to learn more about customers’ use of the Qt cross platform C++ GUI tool kit. There is beer, there are huge pretzels and there is mustard – but these factors did not influence my decision to attend.

Actually, it has been a year since I was last here and around the same time period since ZDNet.co.uk first reported on Qt’s purchase by Nokia. Since that time we have seen the platform pushed out to open source, or as the company somewhat stiltedly puts it, “Extended to support the open contribution model.”

With open sourcing in mind, I will do my best to try to ascertain just what kind of impact this has had upon Qt in the last 12 months while I am here. Although I fear I may be presented with more fiery-eyed Norwegian and German engineers that customers. Let’s see what the two days entails.

So what else is likely to be new? If I can count properly and use a calendar then I think it’s a safe bet to expect a new version of Qt. Well we already know about the Technology Preview of 4.6 so no major prizes on that level.

Over last night’s pretzel and beer rituals there was talk of a new certification programme and a new developer zone, possibly in ‘closed beta’ at this stage. I imagine we should learn more later. The entire Qt roadmap seems to have been given a good set of new clothes and is being presented online in a more digestible format, so hopefully more on that later too.

As a keen ZDNet.co.uk reader you’ll already know about the official Maemo port to Qt for the Nokia N900 operating system as reported last week – and we’ll be hearing more on this no doubt from company chief Sebastian Nyström after some nice instant cups of Café Hag later this am.

So there you go, that’s just a taster of the morsels I think we can expect over the next two days. I guess if you were a hard core programming purist (or dare I say it - an analyst) of these matters, the most important thing you’d want to know about is:

a) has the open model really benefitted Qt and have companies evidenced continued use of the technology over the last (busy) months?

b) have companies, individuals and practitioners at all levels supported the open model?

c) do all of the above still recognise (or now recognise even more) the benefits of the technology proposition that is being brought to the table here?

We shall see, but at least you know my plan this way. If I can answer a b or c and still consume the statutory required amount of beer and mustard under Bavarian state law then I think I’ll have done my job.

Proste!