Cloud computing is the use of shared IT resources as a service. Instead of having a server to make sure your office emails are sent, another server to house your accounting system, and that dusty old desktop (do not unplug that machine) that houses the timecard system you pay a cloud vendor to handle these needs.

Everyday more people are using their smartphones and tablets to do their daily activities.  Does your system need to adapt to your changing customer base by providing a mobile version of your current product?

It is very prevalent throughout the web development environment to follow the conventional HTTP paradigm of a synchronous request and response.  Whether in the standard context of HTTP/HTML or performing web service calls, frameworks and developers have elected to follow this methodology for various reasons.  Introducing asynchronous components to this standard web paradigm may provide performance benefits at critical points in a web-reliant application.

Our application worked great when testing with the load of one user.  The web server responded in a timely manner so we decide to promote to production.  Within a short period of time, the web server begins timing out, rejecting requests, and responding very slow back to the clients.  We add a quad-core processor and more memory to the server, but the time outs and rejected requests remain largely unresolved.  Why didn’t the expensive hardware alleviate the issue?

Our production example failed because the web server couldn’t complete the high volume...

As we all know, it is hard to keep the pace with the mobile marketplace. My iPhone 3G is a mere three years old but I feel like I'm living in a relative stone age.  New technology is appearing at least on an annual basis, but the enticing marketing campaigns make it difficult to sort out the mundane from the game changing and it can become overwhelming.

What would you do if tomorrow you woke up and the vendor who licensed you a software program critical to your business had disappeared or gone out of business? Would your operations be delayed, your customers upset, and your revenues decreased? In today’s economic environment, this is a very real scenario— your software vendor could be insolvent or otherwise unable to provide software support to your business, leaving you scrambling to put your business back together.

Imagine, a competitive framework to ASP.net Web Forms that runs faster, is easier to develop, and has a 75% code footprint. Stop short, because it doesn’t exist. However, it does raise concern to some of the shortfalls of ASP.net Web Forms. It does, in fact, run slow, is sometimes troubling to make it work to your liking, and arguably does have a large code footprint. The MVC framework makes steps to attempt to alleviate these issues.

As sacrilegious as it may seem to zealots on either side of the aisle, the ability to combine C#’s hallmark rapid development capabilities with the renowned stability and security of Unix can be a pretty compelling reason to overlook our petty differences and embrace the possibilities that such a marriage offers.

Author: John Monahon, Attorney & Counselor, Trusted Counsel (Ashley) LLC  

You have finally gone live with a software program that you hope will be the “crown jewel” of your business. Unfortunately, soon after launch, you discover that one of your licensees has been embedding your software into their own product and distributing it to thousands of end users—all of which occurs outside the scope of the licensing agreement. This copyright infringement is costing you thousands, if not millions of dollars in lost revenue.

“Unit tests”. Even the sheer mention of the words can send shivers down the most veteran developers’ spines and recall memories of unrelenting QA engineers. Okay, enough with the drama! Just tell your developers they are going to write them and they don’t have an option.

Time invested into writing unit tests should never be deemed as time wasted. In fact, it should be viewed as just the opposite: time saved. As a former rejecter of writing unit tests, it only took one large scale project to radically reverse my views and accept unit tests for what they are: time savers and debugging assisters. The best thing about the adoption of unit tests is the utter fact that it is never too late to begin writing them. The simple selection of an open source testing framework will instantly begin enhancing the quality of your company, team, or project’s solutions.

According to Apple, the average iPhone user spends 30 minutes per day using iPhone apps. With over 200,000 iPhone applications available and Apple selling over 1 million iPads in less than 30 days, it is clear that this is a massive, influential and captive market. In addition to the iPhone market, the use of Google’s Android operating system is rapidly increasing and with HP’s recent purchase of Palm, the market’s growth potential is infinite. With more than 234 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. alone, mobile devices are now more widely available and affordable than ever. With such staggering statistics, it is reasonable to assume that mobile apps are on the verge of creating a marketplace gold rush that we have not seen since the dot-com boom.