SapphireSteel Software is poised to release Amethyst, which lets you develop Flash and Flex applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 or 2010.

I had a chat with Jay Schmelzer and  Doug Seven from the Visual Studio LightSwitch team. I asked about the release date – no news yet.

Microsoft has announced a new edition of Visual Studio called LightSwitch, now available in beta, and it is among the most interesting development tools I’ve seen.

A comment here points me to this comparison by Decebal Mihailescu of start-up times for processes on Windows using different runtimes: .NET in several versions, Java 1.6, Mono 2.6.4, and Visual C++ 2010 (native code).

A number of blogs are running a coordinated poll on what users would most like to see in the next version of Windows. The results so far are unsurprising but still worth repeating, since there is a good chance that they differ from Microsoft’s priorities.



Note that users are less concerned about new features, more concerned about an OS that works better and faster.

Less bloat, currently number five in the list, will be hard to achieve while PC vendors still insist in bundling poor quality add-ons with their systems.

If you want to vote you can do so at any of various blogs including 4sysops – which has some notes expanding...

Oracle is suing Google over Java in Android; the Register has a link to the complaint itself which lists seven patents which Oracle claims Google has infringed.

Following the replacement of many keyboards, mainly due to USB and PS2 incompatibility, there has been a realisation that some of the older Keyboards are just a bit, well, mucky.

I have had several discussions around putting them in the dishwasher, which has been known but perhaps not recommended.  It seems that a good jet of air is the safest and easiest method of giving the old keyboard a good clean. That and a bit of an upside-down shake.

Then it occurred to me that we have a new device in the office that would do the job nicely ! In the newly refurbished amenities here at the office, we have a Dyson Airblade  (other air based hand dryers are available), perfect for a good strong jet of air to blow all the dust out of your keyboard ! 

-  oh yes! and drying your hands.    

...

Embarcadero has announced RAD Studio XE and will be showing a number of “sneak peaks” during August prior to release in “early September”. You can see the previews and further information here.

The suite includes Delphi XE, C++Builder XE, Delphi Prism XE (Delphi for Visual Studio and .NET) and RadPHP XE.

The first preview focuses on integrated Subversion support, a nice feature but hardly a game changer – most IDEs have had this for years, though this looks comprehensive with differencing, file history and so on within the IDE.



There’s also a look at RadPHP, which is a new version of Delphi for PHP....

Jimmy Schementi, until recently a Program Manager at Microsoft working on IronRuby, has posted about why he is leaving the company; and in doing so answers a question I posed a few months back, Why F# rather than IronPython in Visual Studio 2010?

I’m impressed by the demos at the IE9 Testdrive site, which is full of fun and interest. Of course it’s good to try the demos in other recent browsers, though as you would expect on a Microsoft site, IE9 tends to work best.