A team within Microsoft recently released an update for Visual Studio 2010 that incorporates support for HTML5 with Intellisense enhancements HTML5 elements and CSS3 declarations. We have reported that ASP.Net would be a good choice for writing HTML5 sites, and Microsoft confirmed a similar roadmap for HTML5 at MIX11; but now, you no longer have

When transforming an XML document into another format, XSLT provides a clean and portable method to accomplish the translation, and simple template match rules will often suffice to map the source tree onto the result tree. Often, however, some nodes need to be processed twice and represented more than once in the result tree. The

Web applications make great use of the model view controller (MVC) pattern to build complex usage patterns. The web lends itself really well to the model-view-controller framework because of it’s tiered architecture and views can be easily presented through HTML. Microsoft is pushing the model-view-controller framework in ASP.NET and Java programmers have used the abstraction to great effect. Most platforms and languages have a frameworks that implement the model-view-controller in addition to many other features. ColdFusion is no different.

This past Spring, in reaction to the recent high-profile abuse of the economic system, the Securities and Exchange Commission amended the Investment Company Act of 1940 with the Money Market Fund Reform. The reform seeks to tighten the short-term risks of the money market through several changes that limit investment firms to certain restrictions and to bring more transparency to the portfolio holdings.

The Model-View-Controller architectural pattern continues to prove itself so invaluable at separating and decoupling domain concerns thirty years after its conception, that companies are still implementing it on top of their platforms. Microsoft originally released the Community Technological Preview of their MVC framework for ASP.NET at the end of 2007, and then in 2009 released the first version of it. A year later, in 2010, they released the second version, and that puts the third version on track to most likely be officially released in March 2011.

NoSQL continues to get more and more coverage as scalability issues arise from popular web applications that have witnessed a need for a massive amount of basic primary key queries that return a single row of data. With less of a need for the extraneous features of a traditional relational database, many web applications, to improve performance, have moved to a hashmap-style datastore that stores values based on a key. While NoSQL databases provide a simple mechanism of storing and retrieving data, many organizations implement a relational database in addition to a key-value-store in a mixed-use environment when complex queries are necessary. The relative immaturity of NoSQL technologies compared to the long history of relational database techonolgies makes using them in production a risk.

Over the summer, Microsoft released a beta version of it’s WebMatrix product and the Razor templating engine. As developers try it out and test it, they are finding the combination a nostalgic throwback to the arguably better, but simpler, method of in-lining .NET code into the HTML page. This is familiar to most as it is reminiscent of Classic ASP and just as importantly PHP.

Having absolutely nothing to do with the Ubuntu Linux distribution, a somewhat forgotten subset of XML, first drafted in 1999 and fully W3C recommended by 2001, Canonical XML, can find wide use cases in a variety of XML applications, including those involving web service calls in SOAP or REST. Any piece of XML can be transformed in a piece of Canonical XML. It is essentially a normalized structure for XML where non-essential characters are removed and attributes are ordered, but the logical meaning of the XML does not change.

Even though ColdFusion does not always generate the latest hype and the CFUnited conference is no more, rest assured that ColdFusion is not dead. Adobe will not ignore its back-end server engine and let that key component lay fallow. While Adobe’s push for client-facing Rich Internet Applications will always be in the forefront, the communication channel that provides the data for the application is vitally important.