The latest version of Silverlight is 5, it was released on December 2011. And since those date there are no news about the future of Silverlight. The company saying that’s too early to comment the future. Can Silverlight survive in a world of HTML5?

“Silverlight is a powerful development tool for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web and mobile applications. Silverlight is a free plug-in, powered by the .NET Framework and compatible with multiple browsers, devices and operating systems, bringing a new level of interactivity wherever the Web works” says official MS website. So can it live together with HTML5?

Here is some thoughts by Paul Krill, the InfoWorld’s editor in his article “Will Silverlight live or die? Microsoft won’t say“.

“The annual Microsoft Mix conference, which has been used to showcase Silverlight, is not being held this year. Mix instead will be merged into Microsoft’s next developer conference to be held later this year… Microsoft Vice President Scott Guthrie declined to comment on the fate of Silverlight when asked at the Node Summit conference in San Francisco last week. “I don’t work on that team anymore, so I’m not going to put words in their mouth,” Guthrie said.”

“Silverlight was a rising star just a few years ago, when it was expected to give Flash a run for its money. But HTML5 has taken the luster off of proprietary plugins. Microsoft and Adobe have really had no choice but to embrace HTML5 to a degree. Microsoft’s silence on Silverlight at this juncture might not mean all that much: …Silverlight developer jobs are listed online as well,” says Krill. Yes, Silverlight jobs are still on demand.

We’ll keep you informed about the future of Silverlight and it’s important for us to stay updated about the latest news in software development world.

Originally “The new rules for enterprise apps” posted by Minda Zetlin for ComputerWorld. SoftElegance as software development company with major part of enterprise customers attended in the latest trends in enterprise IT world.

“To be successful today, enterprise software must be more user-friendly, get updated more often, and offer users outside your company more transparency than ever before”.

In this post you’ll find some of most important new rules for enterprise apps and software.

…”Whatever applications IT deploys need to run smoothly on a wide range of operating systems and screens, but the challenge doesn’t end there. In addition to being platform-agnostic, today’s enterprise apps must be as user-friendly and inviting as those found in a mobile app store in order to entice users who, increasingly, can choose whether or not to bother with them”, the author says.

Rule #1: Make It Appealing

It’s a plug-and-play world, and no company wants to invest its money and employee time in lengthy or even brief software training. Even if your company does want to spend money on training, you may have a hard time getting people to show up. A recent survey by Swedish ERP vendor revealed that many employees will simply bypass enterprise software they find user-unfriendly or not intuitive. Rather than take the time to learn how it works, they’ll come up with elaborate workarounds involving other consumer software.

…

Rule #2: Make It Transparent

As the insurance company with the legacy interface may soon learn, in today’s business world, information is king, and the more information your employees can obtain quickly, the more competitive advantage you can gain. And that data has to be up-to-the-minute.

…

Rule #3: Update It Often

There was a time when updates, upgrades or any sort of changes to the software used at work were met with a general groan. But that time is well behind us. These days, employees expect, and even want, frequent updates to the applications they use.

…

Conclusion

At the end we would like to remind: “And if you can’t make a simple and user-friendly interface, you’re sunk. With mobile devices proliferating, screens in every direction, and more and more competition for mindshare, the time when you could count on anyone stopping to learn an application is over”.

The Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) is the modified Rational Unified Process for the enterprise need, adopted RUP to software development process at enterprise level. The original source is ‘The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process’ book by Scott W. Ambler, John Nalbone, and Michael J. Vizdos.

Book short description: This book describes the fundamentals of the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), an extension of the IBM/Rational Unified Process (RUP) that helpsmake it a full IT lifecycle. This is a “how to” guide usingreal-world experiences and examples for the practitioner. Enterprise Unified Process is built onbeing an add-on to the RUP, instead of a detractor.

Also we introducing you ‘Introduction to the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP)’, the whitepaper summarized the book The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process, published by Prentice Hall PTR, February 2005.

“Your organization likely has several software projects that it’s currently managing. You likely have some systems that you are currently operating and supporting in production. The actual focus of most organizations isn’t on the development of a single project, it’s on the development, operation, support, and maintenance of a collection of systems”, says Scott W. Ambler.

The often case is when you have the software that are in production and you have an active development phase.

“This implies that processes for operations, support, and maintenance efforts need to be added to the RUP. Second, to be sufficient for today’s organizations the RUP also needs to add support for the management of a portfolio of projects, something other processes have called programme, multi-project, infrastructure management, or enterprise management”. So at the picture below you can see ‘The enhanced lifecycle for the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP)’:

During times the Enterprise Unified Process was enhanced with the “Production” and “Retirement” phases, and it was added the enterprise disciplines such as “Enterprise Business Modeling”, “Portfolio Management”, “Enterprise Architecture”, “Strategic Reuse”, “People Management”, “Enterprise Administration”, and “Software Process Improvement”. See the picture ‘The Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) lifecycle v2004′

Conclusion

The detailed information about new disciplines can be found at whitepaper ‘Introduction to the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP)‘. More information about Enterprise Unified Process you can find at the book ‘The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process‘. SoftElegance is the software development company able to implement the best Enterprise Unified Process practices for your organisation and to be outsourcing partner for your IT department.

If you’re a company that doesn’t normally specialise in software development, but you want to get some branded programs out there for the public or the industry you’re connected to to use, you may not be ideally set up to build that software, and that’s where outsourcing becomes a smart choice.

Whether you’re designing new phone software to appeal to those browsing handsets on o2.co.uk or you’re a financial advice firm that wants to offer its clients helpful software and digital tools, then an outsourced software developer can add their expertise and insight, while at all times remaining under your command.

You’re the client, and your vision is key to the software that is eventually built. So if you’re worried that the outcome will not look anything like the software you wanted, fear not – good developers know that liaising with their client constantly throughout the development process is one of their main priorities – otherwise they’d never get any work.

So how do you go about finding the right company? Well, their portfolio is usually a good start, as you can swiftly get a feel for what sort of clients they tend to work with, and what the software they produce looks like once it’s finished. Once you’ve found a company that look like they could really add value to your business, get in touch and start enquiring about costs and turnaround times.

The best result possible is a decades-long partnership, or even a merger, with said company. The worst? A poor result, and you go somewhere else. No harm, no foul. So get out there, and start talking to people – who knows, you might become just as well known for great software as you are for great services and other products.

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total $3.8 trillion in 2012, a 3.7 percent increase from 2011, according to the latest outlook by Gartner, Inc. In 2011, worldwide IT spending totaled $3.7 trillion, up 6.9 percent from 2010 levels.

Gartner is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company published it’s forecast “Gartner Says Worldwide IT Spending to Grow 3.7 Percent in 2012“.

Gartner has revised downward its outlook for 2012 global IT spending from its previous forecast of 4.6 percent growth. All four major technology sectors computing hardware, enterprise software, IT services and telecommunications equipment and services are expected to experience slower spending growth in 2012 than previously forecast, but it still grow comparing to 2011.

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)

Source: Gartner (January 2012)

As outsourcing software development company we are attended at Tellago’s Webinar “Using the Cloud to Enable the Next Generation of Mobile Enterprise Applications“. This suppose to be one of the most popular ASP.NET author’s Webinar.

The Webinar is scheduled on Wednesday, January 11, 9:00PM – 10:00PM Kiev time.

“The ability of building mobile applications that surface business capabilities is at the top of the list of most CIOs. However, a true enterprise mobility experience requires capabilities such as AD authentication, secure data sharing, application provisioning, device management, analytics and many others infrastructure elements that will make you mobile applications enterprise ready”, wrote Jesus Rodriguez on his weblog.

Enterprise mobility is on top of the priority list of most organizations nowadays. However, the dream of the mobile enterprise is permeated with challenges in areas such as identity, device management, application management, and data sharing among many others. In recent years, the evolution of cloud infrastructures has become an ideal vehicle to address most of these challenges and enable the next generation of mobile applications in the enterprise.

This session will provide a real world perspective on the best practices, technologies and challenges of enabling mobile applications in the enterprise. The session will highlight how to use today’s mobile and cloud technologies to enable capabilities such as management, security, device provisioning, data sharing, messaging among other key aspects of the mobile enterprise. We will explore these capabilities within the context of the lessons learned in real world implementations and will focus on established and emerging technologies that will become the foundation of mobile enterprise solutions.

To register for ‘Using the Cloud to Enable the Next Generation of Mobile Enterprise Applications’ webinar go to GoToMeeting website.

Here is the most popular articles from SoftElegance blog. Introducing you the 9 most readable articles from our blog.

In 2011 we got more than 10 000 pageviews and around 6 000 unique visitors. Thank you for reading us and we will keep inform you about latest news and trends in IT world in 2012.

#1 Using Synchronous PageMethod Custom Validator Control and jQuery calls of ASP.NET AJAX’s PageMethods

This is success story of using Synchronous PageMethod Custom Validator Control in enterprise application development. Instead of using standard Synchronous JavaScript call we’ve expanded it to using jQuery.

#2 Project Roslyn or Compiler-as-a-Service. Bringing flexibility of dynamic languages to C#

Codename Roslyn project it’s a new type of compiler that will bring the flexibility of dynamic languages to C# and Visual Basic. Roslyn will be released as CTP (Community Technology Preview) by researchers from Microsoft.

#3 XEN Success Story: Windows Server 2008 R2 on XEN 4.0

SoftElegance has successfully lanced XEN 4.0.0 on OpenSUSE 11.3

#4 TweetSharp – .NET library for microblogging, v2.0 not only for ASP.NET developers

TweetSharp is a .NET library for microblogging platforms that allows to write short expressions that convert automatically to web queries and fly to Twitter on your behalf.

#5 Converting the solution to .NET Framework 4.0

The goal is to run the solution or project written with .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 in to Visual Studio 2010 with .NET Framework 4.0.

#6 Big Data analysis and R programming language

The one of the latest and most promising IT trends today is Big Data analysis. Big Data are datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools.

#7 Upstream IT Reference Architecture and RUP Software Development

Today’s oil and gas industry needs a common IT reference architecture for use by upstream organizations, system integrators (Sis), solution providers and software development companies.

#8 The Top 10 Business Technology Trends To Watch: 2012 To 2014

Forrester’s research for Enterprise Architecture Professionals. Business Intelligence tools, mobile apps and cloud application platforms are areas that will evolve and create significantly more business value between today and 2014.

#9 UnifiedPOS implementation in POS for .NET

SoftElegance has successfully tested the implementation of UnifiedPOS in Microsoft POS for .NET v1.12. The issue is that the latest specification is from July 2008 and there is no official support of Visual Studio 2010 and Windows 7.

Originally posted by Stephanie Overby, freelance writer, for CIO.com “12 IT Outsourcing Predictions for 2012“.

“In 2011, the IT outsourcing industry was marked by smaller deals, leery customers, profit-squeezed IT service providers and a lot of cloud computing talk. Much of that could continue next year, but as 12 predictions for 2012 indicate, you can expect some new IT outsourcing developments”.

#1. 2012 Will Be a Mixed Bag of M&A Activity

“Outsourcing providers will shy away from mega-mergers,” says Phil Fersht, founder of outsourcing analyst firm HfS Research, due to a shortage of attractive second-tier providers capable of delivering more than added scale.

#2. Outsourcing Buyers Take it Slowly

That recovery we were all looking forward to in 2012? It’s delayed. Many outsourcing decisions will likewise be postponed. “Threat of recession will hold back one-in-four buyers from signing contracts until current economic uncertainty lifts,” says Fersht of HfS Research. “And a rocky economy isn’t helping drive definitive behavior, with three-quarters buyers expecting either little change in focus when it comes to outsourcing, or they simply do not know what they are going to do.”

#3. The Cloud Comes Down to Earth

The good news, says Shaw Helms, a partner at the outsourcing practice of K&L Gates, is that “by the end of 2012, the buzz around ‘cloud’ will have significantly died down.” IT leaders and managers will be looking more critically at cloud computing risks and being more critical of its value. “IT departments will no longer be getting pressure from the C-Suite to implement cloud computing without a thoughtful evaluation of the alternatives”.

#4. IT Service Buyers Look Beyond Labor Arbitrage

Outsourcing customers still want to keep costs low when they farm out IT services. But next year, they’ll want more—increased global flexibility or better technology, for example, says Fersht. The only problem is that their IT service providers will still be reading from the labor arbitrage handbook. “Providers will still be overly focused on cost reduction for their clients, as opposed to process improvement and innovation,” Fersht says.

#5. IT Outsourcing Deals Gets Small

In 2012, profit margin will trump deal size for the first time, “Service providers looking for market share are becoming increasingly willing to cannibalize their revenue by introducing pricing models based on consumption and business outcomes,” says John Lytle, consulting director for outsourcing consultancy Compass.

#6. IT Offshore Providers Take Over Infrastructure Outsourcing

Offshore service providers have been slowly but surely building the infrastructure capabilities in hopes of moving beyond application development and maintenance work. This year, that effort pays off. “2012 will see a number of companies that have relied almost exclusively on U.S.-based IT infrastructure providers continue to shift business to offshore companies,” says Steve Martin, partner with outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon.

#7. IT Outsourcers Embrace Riskier Models

Pricing pressures will continue to squeeze provider margins, especially offshore. To support growth and profitability, vendors will have to consider innovative—and risky—engagement models such as joint ventures including customer-specific innovation labs and dedicated centers of excellence, according to Everest Group.

#8. Application Development Migrates Stateside

Financial services firms, for example, have provisioned the maintenance of scores of lines of code from offshore providers in the last decade. But in 2012, they may begin to question the offshore model. “There will be a retraction in application maintenance outsourcing going offshore as big financial services firms finally recognize how to merge quality and cost metrics,” says Michael Engel, managing partner, HfS Consulting at HfS Research.

#9. IT Security Takes Center Stage

Sometime in the next year, a large IT service provider is going to be humiliated by a public hack of a client’s systems, predicts Ruckman of Sanda Partners. “2012 will be the year of security,” he says. “Outsourcing companies are going to look for new and better ways to protect their data and their customers.

Here is an interview with Informatica‘s executives about the changes in cloud computing and big data in upcoming 2012. As outsourcing software development company we are always watching the latest technologies predictions, we are always up-to-date with IT trends. So it’s really useful SandHill.com’s interview.

“First, cloud will move out of the consideration phase and into implementation more broadly in the enterprise including within the federal government. And more IT organizations will make the shift from cost center to profit center, in part due to the adoption of cloud computing.”

Darren Cunningham is Vice President, Marketing at Informatica. Chris Boorman is Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Enablement and Education at Informatica.

The most interesting from “Informatica Predicts Changes in Cloud and Big Data in 2012“.

SandHill.com: Will we see increasing adoption of the public cloud in 2012?

Darren Cunningham: Gartner predicts that cloud computing will grow to 20 percent or more of the total IT budget by 2013 and by the end of 2016 more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud. At Informatica, we believe that in 2012, hybrid environments will be the norm, and organizations will need to access and analyze the data in these IT environments, spanning traditional on-premise and private and public cloud holistically.

SandHill.com: In what new ways will companies exploit Big Data solutions to achieve greater competitive advantages next year?

Chris Boorman: Regulatory compliance, risk management and a push for customer-centricity will continue to be drivers of organizations understanding and improving the state of their data. However, Gartner predicts that, “Through 2015, more than 85% of Fortune 500 organizations will fail to effectively exploit big data for competitive advantage.” We at Informatica believe that despite continued hype about big data, the majority of organizations will still struggle to realize one percent of the potential value of the data to which they have access.

SandHill.com: What impact will the cloud have on Big Data solutions in the coming year?

Darren Cunningham: We believe that as more and more customer data “lives” in disparate cloud environments, companies will face more challenges with the quality of their data. Despite the bounty of valuable customer insights that sit in the cloud, it will get harder rather than easier to get the much-desired single view of their customers to inform customer-centric marketing strategies.

Tiobe survey has C# nipping at C++’s heels in popularity, but C++ holds edge in growing mobile development field. SoftElegance as software development company with the primary .NET Framework skills has C# as the main programming language.

In a release this week of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, which gauges the popularity of different languages, C# was ranked fourth, used by 8.205 percent of developers, barely behind C++, used by 8.252 percent. C++ has been consistently ranked third in the index since 2001.

Throwing up a potential roadblock to C#’s rise is that C++ offers better performance and thus is better for mobile applications, said Paul Jansen, Tiobe managing director. “If you look at the current trends, C# will surpass C++ in the next couple of months. But there might be a chance that C++ is strong enough to stay atop of C# because it is better for mobile application development.”

Originally posted at InfoWorld.com as “C# wins developers, but Java still reigns” — Tiobe survey has C# nipping at C++’s heels in popularity, but C++ holds edge in growing mobile development field