CA is buying privately held Nimsoft Inc for $350 million in cash, another bet in the cloud. The deal should close by the end of the month and Nimsoft would remain a standalone business unit under current management reporting to Chris O’Malley, head of CA’s cloud products and solutions business line. CA will use money it has on hand but overseas to pay for the property. The deal follows its recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore and its pending acquisition of 3Tera. All are basically cloud-directed and meant to bring the old mainframer into the 21st century. Nimsoft has previously identified CA along with IBM, HP, BMC, EMC and a bunch of smaller firms as competitors.

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Almost there! Follow @designtoolbox to learn when the site launches…...( read more )...(read more)

How do you tap the social media sites in a way that reaches repeat customers, ensures a consistent user experience yet internally has the peace of mind regarding the customer data, scalability, and ease of development? In their session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Jeff Barnes, a Microsoft Architect Evangelist, and Jim Zimmerman, an ASP.NET MVP, will discuss how Thuzi has created a repeatable approach. For example, a whopping 540k people signed in just four weeks for an Outback Steakhouse “Blooming Onion” promotion. As many as 35,000 Facebook fans signed up per day. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

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How do you tap the social media sites in a way that reaches repeat customers, ensures a consistent user experience yet internally has the peace of mind regarding the customer data, scalability, and ease of development? In their session at the 5th International Cloud Expo, Jeff Barnes, a Microsoft Architect Evangelist, and Jim Zimmerman, an ASP.NET MVP, will discuss how Thuzi has created a repeatable approach. For example, a whopping 540k people signed in just four weeks for an Outback Steakhouse “Blooming Onion” promotion. As many as 35,000 Facebook fans signed up per day. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

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Users overlook features if the GUI elements - such as buttons and checkboxes - are too far away from the objects they act on.

At this year’s Mix, next week in Las Vegas, there will be several sessions by members of the Blend team: Authoring for Silverlight 4 with Expression BlendMonday, March 15th, 2pm to 3 pm, Mandalay Ballroom DChristian Schormann and Pete BloisIf you want...(read more)

‘Twas the week before MIX, when all through the tubes Not a developer was sleeping, not even the noobs. The laptops were paved removed of their glitz In hopes that they soon will get some new bits. A developer was coding, building an app Trying to build...(read more)

Effective Rich Internet Applications are everyone’s goal. To measure this effectiveness, developers and designer need to instrument the application and collect data about the ways users interact with them. Often instrumentation is being done after the...(read more)

At the PDC last year, you may have seen that NASA and Microsoft made a number of announcements. New data APIs in Codename Dallas, a Silverlight+ASP.NET MVC 2 site on Azure.... but did you realize they also launched a programming competition? NASA has...(read more)

The latest episode of Silverlight TV is now available on Channel 9 ! In this episode, Silverlight MVP Laurent Bugnion of IdentityMine appears on the show to discuss using MVVM with Silverlight. Laurent and John discuss their experiences with MVVM and...(read more)

Pyjamas is a stand-alone python to javascript compiler, an AJAX framework / library and a Widget set API.

SightWF is a JAVA web framework build on top of the J2EE technologies and particularly on top of the servlet API. SightWF has initially been created to be deployed on Google App Engine and can be run in a J2EE servlet container such as Tomcat.

In my previous post I discussed creating the database and tables for the Silverlight HVP configuration data.  All that was great, and worked just dandy until it was time to get the data from the database server to the application running on the client...(read more)

We've all been busy on our various sites. Earlier this year, we put out an overall redesign for MSDN. Yesterday, the asp.net site team went live with a redesign to the asp.net site (looks awesome, btw). Also yesterday, we went live with the redesigned...(read more)

The new Get Tree from Page example demonstrates how the Uize.Node.Tree.getTreeFromPage static method of the Uize.Node.Tree module can be used to build a tree data object respresenting the structure of the document, by analyzing the occurrence of different CSS classes for section headings at different depths of the document (in this case, the CSS classes level1Header, level2Header, and level3Header). A tree data object like this can be supplied to a tree menu widget, or can otherwise be used to build UI for navigating to different sections of the document (a contents tree, for example).

The new Get Tree from List example demonstrates how the Uize.Node.Tree.getTreeFromList static method of the Uize.Node.Tree module can be used to build a tree data object by analyzing the structure of a nested list defined by an HTML ul tag. A tree data object like this can be supplied to a tree menu widget, or can otherwise be used to build UI for navigating to different sections of the document (a contents tree, for example).

The new Uize.Node.Tree module provides convenience methods for generating a tree data object by analyzing HTML on a page. A tree data object is an array, where each element of the array is a Tree Item. Because a Tree Item may itself contain a child Tree Data Object, specified by its items property, a Tree Data Object can be used to represent an arbitrarily complex, hierarchical structure for information. A Tree Data Object can be used in any number of ways, but is commonly used for building tree-based user interface elements such as contents lists, structured dropdown menus, etc. A number of widget class support data in the Tree Data Object format, such as the Uize.Widget.Tree.List, Uize.Widget.Tree.Menu, and Uize.Widget.Tree.Select classes. Outside of widgets, tree data objects can be used to drive the generation of HTML, in build scripts or Web applications, using JavaScript Templates.

A number of instance and static methods of the Uize.Widget.Tree module have been deprecated and migrated into the new Uize.Node.Tree module. The getTreeFromList and getTreeFromPage instance methods, along with the Uize.Widget.Tree.getTreeFromList and Uize.Widget.Tree.getTreeFromPage static methods, have been deprecated and migrated into the Uize.Node.Tree module as Uize.Node.Tree.getTreeFromList and Uize.Node.Tree.getTreeFromPage. For backwards compatibility, the deprecated instance and static methods of the Uize.Widget.Tree class are all still supported, and will be supported for some time. All existing code using the deprecated methods should continue to work as normal. It would be wise to progressively migrate code over to using the static methods in the new Uize.Node.Tree module. In order to achieve backwards compatibility, the Uize.Widget.Tree base class now requires the new Uize.Node.Tree module. Other than that, the static methods in the new Uize.Node.Tree module have the same signature and behavior as the deprecated methods of the Uize.Node.Tree module.

The Uize.Population module has been migrated to under the Uize.Widget namespace as Uize.Widget.Population. For the most part, the interface is entirely the same and compatible with the old interface, with some very minor differences. As a widget class now, instances of the Uize.Widget.Population class must be wired (by calling the wireUi instance method) before changing the value of the items set-get property will result in an update of the contents of the instance's DOM node. Also, as a true widget class, instances of the Uize.Widget.Population class can be added as child widgets of other widget instances. Finally, the DOM node into which generated HTML is injeted can now be specified with either of the idPrefix, node, or container set-get properties. This change, which is not backwards compatible, has the benefit of further cleaning up the Uize root namespace. The two examples that were previously using the now defunct Uize.Population class, Populating Photo Details and Structured Record Population, have been updated to use the new Uize.Widget.Population class. If you were previously using the Uize.Population class, then you can use these two example pages as a reference when updating your own code.

The Uize.Url module has been improved with the introduction of the Uize.Url.from static method (actually, it's existed in the code for a while, but has never been officially documented or fully tested). The Uize.Url.from static method returns an object, containing properties for the various logical segments of the specified URL string. This method provides a convenient way to get at very precise portions of a URL string, such as the file name without the extension, the file type without the "." (period) character, the query params string without the "?" (question mark) character, the anchor without the "#" (pound / hash) character, etc. The Uize.Url.from method is comprehensively documented and fully tested. Additionally, all static methods of the Uize.Url module are now fully unit tested by the module Uize.Test.Uize.Url.