NEW PRODUCTS
Developers can now embed IP telephony links into their applications and devices using SkypeKit. The kit, currently in a closed beta, will support both Linux-based consumer-electronics devices and Mac and Windows desktop applications. SkypeKit only includes a set of APIs for a variety of popular Skype features, including voice and video calling and instant messaging, but also uses the Skype SILK wideband audio codec.
OpenSpan is offering a free Visual Studio plug-in that lets developers see how users interact with applications. The OpenSpan Plug-In links .NET applications to the company’s OpenSpan platform.
Makara is offering a closed beta of Makara Cloud for JBoss, a self-service portal for application teams to create development and test environments on public or private clouds. The product delivers cloud provisioning, elastic scaling, built-in monitoring, stack configuration, log aggregation and auditing of all system changes. The final pricing will be based on a per-server-hour fee.
FlyCast is offering an open-source library of demonstration mobile apps created with CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript, designed to show how mobile applications can be built without Flash. The gallery can be viewed using iPhone, iPad or iPod touch devices at appMobi’s website.
UPDATES
Kentico has updated its content management system for ASP.NET to work with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Kentico CMS 5.5 integrates with Facebook Connect, OpenID and SharePoint Server authentication systems, extending beyond the previous version’s integration with Active Directory and Windows Live ID. It also integrates with the MetaWeblog API, used by many blog systems.
Version 3.7 of CounterSoft’s Gemini project issue management system focuses on a new visual project planner designed to help agile developers solve GUI visual issues. It also plugs directly into Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 with a plug-in, and links to the Git and Mercurial source-code control systems.
Smart Bear Software says that its Code Collaborator peer code review software now integrates directly into IBM Rational’s Team Concert workflow management system.
Easy Projects .NET has updated its eponymous Web-based project management and collaboration suite. Easy Projects .NET 7.0 improves the user experience with a better UI and contextual menus; displays resource workloads during activity assignments; and provides a weekly view grid for time logs. It also has better batch operations and makes it easier to change a user’s role on multiple projects.
EC Software has updated its Help & Manual software to deliver source-code documentation from Visual Studio. Version 5.4 uses Microsoft Sandcastle (a command-tool) to read Visual Studio source code and comments, which can be published into team documentation.
Froglogic has updated its Squish cross-platform GUI test software to use a new GUI test development environment based on Eclipse. Squish 4.0 also supports automated GUI testing of native Windows applications based on toolkits such as MFC, .NET, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, Windows Forms and so on. It can also do GUI testing of CocoaTouch for iPhone, iPod Nano and iPad applications.
Infragistics says that NetAdvantage for .NET 2010 Volume 2, its set of UI development tools and components, includes an ASP.NET toolkit that is fully compatible with Novell’s Mono framework running on Linux servers.
ANTS Performance Profiler 6, from Red Gate, adds the ability to instrument a live production ASP.NET website, now letting developers profile the site without going offline. Other new features include profiling SQL and IO performance, automated profiling via a command-line interface, Silverlight profiling, and compatibility with NET 4.0.
INDUSTRY
The Multicore Association has created a Tools Infrastructure Working Group, which aims to define a common data format and create standards for sharing data across diverse application development tools. The Multicore Association is a vendor-neutral consortium promoting multicore development by both academic institutions and a wide range of semiconductor and tools companies.
