Technical news and comment

Welcome to ITWriting.com. This site is where I post news and comment on the IT industry, with a focus on software development.

Tech writing blog

The ITWriting blog is where you will find all the content – news, reviews, and comment from an independent viewpoint. There are also thousands of comments from readers, in some cases (I freely admit) of higher quality or greater interest than the original post. The latest posts are shown under Recent Posts below.

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Forthcoming events

Forthcoming events are listed here. This is not a comprehensive directory of events; rather it is a select list of events of interest to software developers.

Software projects

Along with occasional code samples, there are a couple of software projects hosted here.

The HTMLEditor is a .NET control for displaying and editing HTML text.

The Simple Wrapper for SQLite is for Delphi 7 and higher, enabling use of this fast open source database engine without using data binding or any other database framework.

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It is a firm policy that advertising on this site is non-intrusive, never interfering with the reader’s experience. With that proviso, suitable advertising is accepted and the details are here.

Contact

Contact me by emailing tim(at)itwriting.com.

Recent posts

The Windows Netbook experience: Toshiba NB300

I’ve just received a Toshiba NB300 Netbook, which looks like it will be useful for blogging and web access during a couple of conferences coming up shortly – up to 11 hours battery life, great. I am interested in the user experience when starting out with a new machine, so made a few notes.

I regard

…continue reading The Windows Netbook experience: Toshiba NB300

Why programmers should study Microsoft’s random failure and not trust Google search

The bizarre story of the EU-mandated Windows browser choice screen took an unexpected twist recently when it was noticed that the order of the browsers was not truly random.

IBM’s Rob Weir was not the first to spot the problem, but did a great job in writing it up, both when initially observed and after it

…continue reading Why programmers should study Microsoft’s random failure and not trust Google search

Microsoft maybe gets the cloud – maybe too late

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a talk on the company’s cloud strategy at the University of Washington yesterday. Although a small event, the webcast was widely publicised and coincides with a leaked internal memo on “how cloud computing will change the way people and businesses use technology”, a new Cloud website, and a Cloud Computing

…continue reading Microsoft maybe gets the cloud – maybe too late

Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere

Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has blogged about the Windows Phone 7 development platform.

As widely leaked, the new mobile device supports Silverlight and XNA; Kindel also mentions .NET, but since both Silverlight and XNA are .NET platforms, that might not mean anything additional.

The big story is about compatibility:

To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform

…continue reading Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere