The Ajax interface has proved an interesting animal. Many people trace asynchronous JavaScript use back to Microsoft’s early Outlook Web clients, but it was not promoted by Microsoft much until open-source AJAX [for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] as used by Google became popular about three years ago. Then, Microsoft embraced it wholeheartedly, creating its own ASP.NET Ajax version of AJAX, and saving some trouble for its developer legions. Yet, third parties still have a role to play in moving ASP.NET Ajax forward, as SearchWinDevelopment.com’s Vendor roundtable series can attest.

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 1 - Browser Compatibility

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 2 - Resurgence in JavaScript

ASP.NET Ajax Roundtable Part 3 - Open Source

SearchSoftwareQuality.com survey on Agile processes is out. The Web site asked its readers a series of questions on team-oriented development issues.

The take-away: Requirements gathering is still hard; waterfall methods are still as prominent as Agile methods; and Use Cases are here to stay despite a push toward User Stories for requirements modeling.

Take a look at the SearchSoftwareQuality.com Agile Trends 2008 Survey and related articles and you will see what the overall team thinks about these compelling trends. Tell us what you think.  Happy Fourth of July!

The USENIX conference is a technical undertaking dedicated to all things UNIX and some things Linux. Actually, it is nothing less than the premier event for system programmers.

Despite the UNIX-leanings, USENIX in recent years has featured some Microsoft experts, usually from the company’s research arm.  This year, at USENIX in Boston, Benjamin Livshits and Weidong Cui of Microsoft Research shared a view on the company’s work on JavaScript worms.

In the paper they proposed Spectator automatic detection and containment solution for JavaScript worms. . The Spectator software examines the traffic between a Web application and its users, looking for long propagation chains associated with worms.

Microsoft parallel extensions to .NET have undergone an update in the form of a new Community Technology Preview. Included are Coordination Data Structures, now part of the extensions.

Coordination Data Structures join Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library and other elements intended to address the  new era of mulitcore processors.

Coordination Data Structures are said to contain lightweight and scalable thread-safe data structures and synchronization primitives. Apparently there is more than one way to skin a cat or facilitate communications between threads.

The Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 libraries are downloadable  now.

Document generation is nobody’s favorite task. Microsoft has had a pre-beta automatic document generator brewing for a number of years that would help take classes, code and the like, and create documentation, saving some onerous tasking.

This long-running project took on an open-source tenor with a Codeplex download. It is suddenly dark.

Apparently, the source code was not available, making it less than open source. Microsoft apologized, and pulled the rev from Codeplex. A free download, without open-source panache, can be found on Microsoft’s download site.