Community developer blogs

Tim Anderson

Recent Posts

• Adobe engineer: we gotta beat Silverlight

  Posted: 11 hours ago

  There was an amusing incident in the Flash Player Internals session this morning at Adobe MAX Milan. An attendee asked engineer Jim Corbett about what he said was a long-standing (10 years) Flash bug. Apparently, sprites sometimes tear as they move across the screen. Corbett said he wasn't familiar

• Amethyst from SapphireSteel: Develop Flex in Visual Studio, an alternative to Tofino

  Posted: 01 Dec 2008 at 18:58

  Not long ago I looked at an early preview of Ensemble's Tofino, an extension to Visual Studio for developing Flex applications that target the Adobe Flash runtime. It was disappointing, though I've been assured that an improved build is in preparation. Ensemble had better be quick: I've just been in

• Why it’s hard to compete with Apple in mobile app development and deployment

  Posted: 01 Dec 2008 at 18:58

  One OS - one device - one AppStore - easy over-the-air purchase for end users. Apple's development and deployment model delivers results, despite mutters about lock-in and Apple helping itself to a generous slice of the revenue. Here at Adobe MAX Europe we've been hearing about the future of Flash o

• Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done

  Posted: 28 Nov 2008 at 20:33

  Embarcadero / CodeGear has released RAD Studio 2009, which includes Delphi 2009, C++ Builder 2009 and Delphi Prism. Note that Prism has its own IDE, which is actually the Visual Studio shell; this is the new take on Delphi for .NET that targets Mono as well as Microsoft .NET. You can also install Pr

• From the archives: Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie on ASP+

  Posted: 28 Nov 2008 at 11:16

  My editor at The Register asked me if I had any interviews that would be fun to dig out for a retrospective piece. This one is from September 2000, shortly after the announcement of the .NET Framework, where Microsoft’s Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie talk to me about ASP+, the name for ASP.NET when i

• Service triggers: an attempt to reduce bloat in Windows 7

  Posted: 24 Nov 2008 at 18:19

  I’ve been reading through the Windows 7 Developer Guide. I like this document; it is tilted more towards information than hype, and is readable even for non-developers. There are things mentioned which I had not spotted before. One example is triggers in the service control manager. There was actua

• What’s new in Adobe’s Flash Platform?

  Posted: 21 Nov 2008 at 19:50

  New post over at itjoblog. Technorati tags: adobe, flash, flex

• Google search wiki: user reviews for web sites

  Posted: 21 Nov 2008 at 15:07

  Google has announced its search wiki. Do I want to customize my search results? No; or at least, only by refining the search, not by forcing sites to the top or inserting my own urls. Do I want to comment my search results, just for myself? No. I can’t see myself using this, particularly as I delib

• eBay reinvents English language, punishes good sellers

  Posted: 19 Nov 2008 at 20:48

  The world’s biggest auction site has implemented a ratings system designed to promote high selling standards. Unfortunately, its effect is to punish good sellers as well as bad. Here’s how it works. Buyers are invited to leave seller feedback after a transaction ends. They rate the transaction posit

• Microsoft plans free anti-malware

  Posted: 19 Nov 2008 at 11:24

  Microsoft will be offering a free anti-malware suite codenamed “Morro”, from the second half of 2009, according to a press release: This streamlined solution will ... provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at

• Adobe Alchemy – compile C/C++ to ActionScript

  Posted: 18 Nov 2008 at 21:17

  I love the careful wording on Adobe’s Alchemy site: The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®. It needs to be put cautiously, because Alchemy - unlike Google

• Is easy concurrency the road to hell?

  Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 11:00

  Blog post over at ITJOBLOG. Not an original thought, but I guess it is with the release of .NET Framework 4.0 and its impressive concurrent programming features that we will discover whether such fears are justified. Technorati tags: concurrency, parallel programmin, .net, microsoft

• Develop for Adobe Flex in Microsoft Visual Studio – or maybe not

  Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 11:00

  News from the Adobe MAX conference this week in San Francisco: Ensemble has developed an add-in for Visual Studio for Flex development, code-name Tofino. It’s currently in beta and available for download. Flex is Adobe’s developer-focused SDK for Flash applications. I installed it this morning, and

• Sun’s financial problems – what comes next?

  Posted: 14 Nov 2008 at 17:06

  Sun has today published a press release announcing that up to 18% of its global workforce is to be cut and that Rich Green, VP of Software, has resigned. It has also formed a new business group called Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms, for advancing its cloud services efforts. Sun is a fascinati

• OpenOffice to become adware?

  Posted: 13 Nov 2008 at 16:48

  From Jonathan Schwartz’s blog: An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I

• Reasons to love Linux #1: package management

  Posted: 13 Nov 2008 at 11:58

  I posted recently about a difficult Ubuntu upgrade, drawing the comment “What do you prefer to do on Linux that you don’t on Windows?” Today I patched the Debian server which runs this blog. APT upgraded the following applications: MySQL 5 Apache 2.2 Clam AntiVirus Time Zone data (tzdata) Some of t

• Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice.org in UK education

  Posted: 12 Nov 2008 at 09:46

  Yesterday I took a seminar with a small number of people from schools and colleges in the UK, who had purchasing responsibility for software. I talked about some of the history, differences between the products, the ISO standardisation wars, the ribbon, and the way Microsoft’s pricing escalates in o

• Sun distributing Microsoft toolbar, Google drops Star Office from its Pack

  Posted: 11 Nov 2008 at 10:22

  Microsoft has done a deal with Sun where its search toolbar is distributed with the Java runtime. The deal only applies to US Internet Explorer users who download the JRE. Previously Sun distributed the Google toolbar with Java. Separately, as one or two have noticed, Google is no longer distributin

• Run a VM on your mobile phone

  Posted: 10 Nov 2008 at 15:23

  VMWare has announced its Mobile Virtualization Platform for Mobile Phones. The idea is that you run apps within a virtual machine on your device: Because VMware MVP virtualizes the hardware, handset vendors can develop a software stack with an operating system and a set of applications not tied to

• Windows is an adventure game

  Posted: 09 Nov 2008 at 20:48

  Many video games in the adventure genre are in essence collecting games. You have to get the gem to open the gate, and to get the gem you need the three pieces of tablet, etc etc. Windows is like this sometimes. I want to try Windows Azure. I need SQL Express. I download SQL Express 2008. Try to run