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Microsoft’s My Phone Service »

Microsoft recently launched the My Phone service, for Windows Mobile phones. If you have missed the “service’ part in the title, you probably assumed that Microsoft is launching some thing similar to iPhone! Well, after the experience with Zune, I don’t think Microsoft would try any thing like that very soon.

Well, what is My Phone service anyway? It is an online service to sync data between your phone and the web. You can read Ars Technica’s review here.

Comparing RIA Frameworks »

Here is a link that compares Open Laszlo, Flex and plain-old-Ajax. However, it would have been nice if it included Java FX and Silverlight as well.

Facebook’s new ToS »

Facebook’s new Terms of Service debate should make us all realize that we trust the web too much. There is a clarification from Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on this here. We need to be careful before sharing pictures or messages with friends online. Essentially, you lose control/ rights on the things you share. In a way, he is right that you don’t have much control on email messages that leave your email client. Do think twice before sharing stuff online – “With great power comes great responsibility”!

Microsoft and Red Hat virtualization deal »

Less than two years back, Microsoft claimed that software like Linux, violates its patents. You can read all about that here. But lately, Microsoft is changing its approach towards the Open Source community. I recently posted about Project Stonehenge here.

Now, Microsoft and Red Hat signed agreements to test and validate server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors. You can read more about it here. This is a very good development because customers can now get support for the OSs on the virtualization platforms.

Web Standards in 2009 »

I guess it is probably not so cool to talk about Web Standards in 2009. But with more and more browsers available, it is now more important to comply with the standards than ever before. Browsers have their own self-interest to encourage web developers and designers to use their own standards and style. But we need to make sure that our site works as intended, in all the browsers. Following web standards is one easy way to make sure that your site works fine in more than 90% of the browsers. Making your site work with the remaining 10% of the browsers, is always tricky, time-consuming and costly! I personally recommend using popular frameworks, like jQuery or YUI, wherever possible. They keep the browser nuances away from us.

One more evolution in the web development process is the MVC pattern (or some derivative of it). In the company I work with, we still support a legacy, complex, web application, written in ASP. Unfortunately, the original developer started off using <font> and <b> tags all over and we never had time to clean it up. The only good thing about that application is that the developer tried to put all business logic inside Stored Procs, instead of individual queries in the ASP page. Just changing the theme on the site is so tedious, that we procrastinate it. On the other hand, we developed a PHP based web application last year, using Code Igniter. Maitaining that site is very easy (even though I wish we used a template engine).

Speaking of compatibility, I have a very bad experience with Google Chrome. I know that it is still in beta (so are many other Google products), but this one is so bad that it does not work well even with Google sites. You would expect that Google would have tested their browser against their sites first before making it publicly available. Here are some screenshots from Google Chrome: