Sunday, December 29, 2002

Rational and Microsoft: Continued Support "Rational intends to continue to support Microsoft technologies, including the Microsoft .NET platform. For more than ten years, Rational has taken a leadership role in the support of Microsoft technologies. Rational was an early and ardent supporter of the Microsoft. NET development platform, and, with the launch of Rational® XDE ProfessionalTM, was the first to offer integrated visual modeling on the .NET platform. Our relationship with Microsoft spans ten years of collaboration." "The IBM FAQ states that, "It is IBM's strategy to provide the best support for customers with heterogeneous IT environments. With this acquisition, IBM will have the broadest support for software development environments – IBM intends to continue development and evolution of the tools that integrate and compliment the Visual Studio .NET development environment." "Rational is committed to the ongoing development and evolution of tools that complement the .NET development environment, including continued support of Visual Studio .NET for development and the .NET execution environment for deployment. Both Rational and IBM are Microsoft VSIP (Visual Studio .NET Integration Program) partners. Rational intends to continue working cooperatively with other Program participants. " [Full Text] Good news to anyone who uses XDE and VS.NET extensively. 9:13:36 PM    comment []

Microsoft's Latest Patent Battle: DRM "Certainly Microsoft's recent patent litigation track record tends to support Smith's point: Since 1994, when it lost a $120 million verdict, the company has won nine straight patent cases litigated to conclusion. And it's won three more judgments now on appeal." [Full Story from Fortune] It is nice to see that at least one company refuses to pay these rediculous patent claims. Maybe the ecommerce patent will wind up getting sent against MS some day so that they can put it to rest too. Speaking of patents, I came across some rediculous ones yesterday. This one in particular is from Accenture: "A system, method, and article of manufacture are provided for implementing information services patterns associated with a relational database management system in an object-oriented persistence architecture. An object attribute is translated to and from a database value utilizing a database. Data is controlled in the database utilizing a data retrieval mechanism encapsulated in a data handler. Data access to the database is then organized among a plurality of business entities utilizing a plurality of business objects. Multiple business objects are retrieved across a network in one access operation. Retrieved data is mapped into objects. Then a warning is provided upon retrieval of objects missing at least one attribute. The warning includes information on how to handle the at least one missing attribute." [Full Text] Sound familiar? Hope you don't plan on persiting your objects in a database any time soon... 5:23:58 PM    comment []