Reflections on how the nature of programming and development have changed over the last 10 years.

Performance and standards look like dominating work on Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer. As ever with Microsoft, though, it's likely to be the former that not just trips up the latter but that also continues to sour Microsoft's relationship with the rest of the industry.

JPA has standardized the interfaces for persistence frameworks. However how much is standardized regarding the runtime behaviour of frameworks. These small code samples show different uses cases to test with your JPA framworks. Additionally hints on the actual framework behaviour, will help to improve usage.

Every time I work with one of our .NET customers to help them with managing their application performance I come across the same problems as seen with other clients before: lots of ADO.NET queries, many hidden exceptions in core or 3rd party .NET libraries, slow 3rd party components, inefficient custom code, … This article discusses the top problems, how to avoid them and how to do application performance management across the application lifecycle

Paul asked me to review this, his first book, and my comment to him was that he had a pretty high bar to match; being of the same "series" as Release It!, Mike Nygard's take on building software ready for production (and, in my repeatedly stated opinion, the most important-to-read book of the decade), Debug It! had some pretty impressive shoes to fill. Paul's comment was pretty predictable: "Thanks for keeping the pressure to a minimum."

JetBrains gained a lot of attention when they released an open source version of thier IntelliJ IDEA development platform. For Ruby and Ruby on Rails users, JetBrains created the RubyMine IDE, which is built on the principles of IntelliJ. However, RubyMine did not start out as a plugin like comperable Ruby IDE's for Eclipse and NetBeans. In an exclusive interview, DZone spoke with RubyMine's lead developer at JetBrains, Dmitry Jemerov. The interview covers the recently introduced RubyMine 2.0, which features improved code refactoring and added support for popular Ruby/Rails technologies. Although RubyMine hasn't been around for very long, it has quickly become the one of the most natural Ruby/Rails development environments.

This is a really cool jQuery selector tester that let's you try selectors and automatically highlights them in the html. Lots of fun to play with and helps with the understanding of how jQuery selectors work! A must try!

Nexan unveils a "Beast" of a storage system and Microsoft opens it's Surface SDK to everyone. SAP and Microsoft also form a marketing alliance that might irritate Oracle.

How and why a large financial organization is using the NetBeans Platform.

This is a list of Rapid Application Development tools that might sometimes save your precious time. Some tools you already use might not be in this list so if you want it to be added here, please drop a comment.

db4o Deep Prefetching for C/S mode is examined via runtime statistics (a facility that allow you to track db4o behavior). (Even if you don't use db4o in C/S mode, it may still be worthwhile to keep on reading, since some of the observations made apply to db4o configuration optimization in general - or actually even more, to performance tweaking in general)

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