Despite the doubts in stability of the American economy in 2012, the research has showed that American companies are going to expand their IT staff. Analytics have found out what IT professions will be called for. The results of the annual research organized by Computerworld showed that 29% out of 353 IT-executive managers are planning to increase the number of their departments by the summer 2012.

‘The demand for IT-specialists in companies of all types and sizes is constantly growing’, says Mike McBrierty, the executive director of one of the biggest recruiting agencies the Eliassen Group. Moreover, according to his own words, the companies are planning to update the infrastructure and restart the realization of the projects postponed for the last 3 years.

As Computerworld claims, in 2012 the directors of IT departments have set teeth for implementing innovations and that’s why the most relevant for future employees will be the following nine main skills.

•    web and mobile application development skills
•    project management skills
•    technical support and maintenance skills
•    network technologies skills
•    business analysis skills
•    Web 2.0 technologies skills – more and more companies are planning to implement these technologies and the demand for php/java/.net software developers won’t decrease in 2012. Also there will be a big demand for Ajax GWT professional web developers as well as the specialists in .Net, PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, Flash and Javascript.

Microsoft has released the new tool for mobile application development companies that allows using the possibilities of the cloud platform Windows Azure and the software Windows 8 Metro.

The new set of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 has been designed for the simplified apps development under Windows Metro which is able to work with the cloud operation system Windows Azure. The new tool is reported to let using the remote Azure storage as well as its computational capabilities.

The new tool includes the Windows 8 Cloud Application templates for Visual Studio, which allows working with it from the common environment for software developers.

Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 supports JavaScript and HTML5, as well as .NET, C#, C++ and Visual Basic. Among the additional options there are tools for checking dependency, Windows Push Notification Service libraries and Visual Studio 2010 templates.

Eclipse has rolled out Orion, a new web development tool that will enable web application development in the cloud. Unlike Eclipse flagship products Orion is a browser-based tool designed to support widely-used web technologies and take these technologies to the cloud.

SD Times, the first and only newspaper that was launched for software development managers in February 2000, has become interested in our expertise in Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. So we have got an opportunity to share our experience with more than 60,000 subscribers in more than 130 countries.

Mr. Sergey Marchuk, the Chief Technical Officer of Oxagile, disclosed some secrets in his interview. First of all he explained whether it’s correct to compare Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, and noted that speaking about AIR on this point we should considered Flash / Flex development and such technologies as JavaScript / HTML.

Discussing pros and cons of both platforms he provided interesting data about their percent abundance. Silverlight was proved to be less popular than Flash (50% of PCs with preinstalled Silverlight plug-in vs. 97% of machines supporting Flash). Moreover their rates of popularity can change as new version of HTML (HTML5) becomes available. As we know, it allows watching video without any additional plug-ins (Flash Player or Silverlight). So, as the CTO of Oxagile stressed, nowadays it’s very important to find “the right” software developer and consult on how and which platform to use for every specific software project.

Professional portal development demands special knowledge of Flash, JavaScript, Java-applets and ActiveX-components. All these technologies are not supposed to complicate your life. But sometimes it’s not so easy to enrich user experience going beyond traditional tasks and at the same time ensure great results in a short space of time. On this point Rich Internet Application and RIA development offers revolutionary possibilities that combined in a single runtime environment.

What does it mean for users? It means “all in one” or integration of content, communications, user interface and a set of custom components and. Of course, all these units work in real time.

What does RIA mean for programmers? First and foremost it opens doors to Rapid Application Development or RAD. Developers use advantages of Ajax GWT programming and in the shortest possible time create new web portals based on reusable program components.

Beyond question, web is a dynamic, vibrant platform, where it is very important to reduce the time from birth of new ideas to their realization. That is why such RIA components as Ajax Toolkit will be in great demand. They allow to make fast and easy changes in new applications, giving developers what they want at this very moment for this very project.

Today we continue our list of 14 the most relevant technologies for software developers adding some Web-oriented technologies to it:

#4. Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
No matter you can love RIA or hate it, today developers use Flash not only for cartoons about politicians who sing silly songs, but also for more serious things. Flash has rich functionality to create applications using technologies such as Flex and AIR. Companies that develop Flash analogues, for example JavaFx and Silverlight, also improve similar features and increase productivity.

HTML5 soon will combine the full functionality of RIA, including connection to the databases and putting the official seal of W3C on AJAX technology.

It means that in the near future, the differences between RIA platforms will be decreased.

#5. Web Development
Web development won’t sink into oblivion in the near future. Many Web developers ignore, or at least only familiar with the basics, providing frameworks. However, companies want more and more people who able to work with these technologies. So, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML will be still successful even in 2014.

#6. Web Services
JSON or XML? REST or SOAP? This choice depends on the project, and work complexity increases without Web services technologies. Even those areas, where developers used ODBC, COM, or RPC, are gradually moving towards Web services.

to be continued…

My expectations were justified – it was the most interesting part of conference “Microsoft DevDays“: the presentation of the first demo of Visual Studio Team System 2010.

Approximately in a year we’ll be able to see all new features ourselves, but now only announcements and demos. According to the company official information it will be the largest release in the history. All graphic interfaces will be rewritten using WPF. That will allow to accelerate work of visual editors and to reduce the size of required free space. By the way, rumors that the installation will require 75 Gb of disk space, are just rumors.

Shortly about the basic features and improvements of the new version:

VS environments:

• WPF-based editors as was mentioned above;
• Better multi-monitor support.

Navigator:

• Quick search;
• Highlight references.

Project system:

• 100% search code compatible;
• Multi targeting (VS 2010 allows to develop applications for .Net Framework 2.0, 3.5, 4.0).

Web Development:

• Javascript full support (including jQuery);
• HTML snippets;
• New MVC and Dynamic Data tooling;
• Integrated web deployment.

Office development;

Sharepoint development:

• SP tooling for common customizations.

Debugger:

• Richer platform support;
• Breakpoint improvements (grouping and labeling, import/export);
• Historical debugger (record & playback of application exceptions).

Among features which will be useful for testers, are the following:

• Bug generation under information of test cases;
• Automated user interface testing;
• Application exceptions recording & playback.

Also Visual Studio Team System 2010 will be integrated with UML-diagrams:

• Documentation creation;
• Code generation using diagrams;
• Documentation/model generation.

Beta1 will be released in the second quarter of 2009, Beta2 – in the third quarter of 2009, and final release is planned on the end of 2009.

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network software services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

YouTube, MySpace, Odeo, Flickr, Match and Facebook – all in one solution named ‘Dolphin smart community builder’. Developed for creating dating sites, social networks, content sharing portals.
Dolphin is absolutely free.

Dolphin is based on: PHP, MySQL, Ajax, JavaScript, Flash, Java.
Official site: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/. Demo site: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/doldemo/
Dolphin software contains most popular features peculiar to a common social network. Among them:

• Blog
• User profile
• Forum
• Audio/Video sharing
• Friends invitation
• Private messaging
• User groups
• Voting
• And much more

This solution is optimal for rapid start of your own social network (of course, if your goal is to get free solution).
There are many analogous solutions:

• Pligg
• PHPIzabi
• Elgg
• PHPFox
• Other

Also there are services for creating social networks.
Among them:

• Ning
• Kickapps

This software does not provide the source code (are not open source), they provide API. All interaction is held using XML and JSON. Solutions are not free.

Today Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for downloading. Microsoft will release the final version of Internet Explorer 8 at the end of this year. All of you know that it will be more standards-compliant in the content rendering behavior. But also a new version of this popular browser will have a lot of features which can be useful for users and web developers.

There are some of them:
• Accelerators
• WebSliences
• Search providers
• Search suggestions
• Developer tools
• InPrivate browsing
• Deleting data for not favorite sites
• Browser security settings
• Ajax navigations
• DOM storage
• 6 connections to the host (instead of 2)
• CSS 2.1 support
• W3C ARIA support
• JSON Support
• Javascript improvements
• XMLHTTPRequest improvements
• And others

And I’m going to tell you about the features for developers in detail.

Web standards compatibility
The new version of IE is said to be CSS 2.1, W3C ARIA and HTML 5.0 compatible. And there is good news for developers whose web applications work properly for IE 7 or earlier and they don’t want to rewrite the layout. Using a special meta tag instructions you can choose an engine for your web-site rendering. For example:
[source='php']

Content goes here.

[/source]
Or put the next piece of code in Web.config of your ASP.NET application:

[source='php']










[/source]
Javascript improvements
• Fast arrays handling
• Strcat now is faster than ArrayJoin for small and large strings
• All methods for strings handling were improved
• Garbage Collector improvements.

Developer tools
IE 8 developer tools allow developers to debug javascript and make in place HTML and CSS changes. It also contains a profiling tool which can be helpful for checking the application performance.

Ajax navigations and DOM storage
IE 8 is said to support the development of much better Ajax applications. For example, it now treats windows.location.hash updates as navigation. You can therefore navigate using the back and forward buttons in Ajax applications, as on other web pages, something that was not possible previously and which was a source of irritation for users. Thanks to the use of DOM Storage from HTML5, the browser can now store large data volumes locally. As the new connectivity events allow developers to check whether the browser is online, applications can be written to like Google Gears, which works both online and offline.

Let’s wait for the release to see IE 8 in action!