Dec
9

Per-Proc Licensing… going the way of the Dodo ?

By Gerry V

A popular server licensing model is what licensing specialists refer to as “Per-Proc” or a model based on charging a separate Processor license for each processor that is located in the server. Additionally, under this model with a Microsoft Sever product, the customer is not required to purchase Client Access Licenses or “CAL’s,” and with a database server like Microsoft SQL, this is an attractive feature to many enterprises.

So everything is great, right ? Not so fast… 2007 has brought us the shiny new multicore desktops servers (yes, this author is writing this entry on a quad-core Intel chipset) bringing us greater multi-tasking performance, better graphics benchmarks and photo-realistic video games - however, its all one server or one desktop and one chipset so certainly we simply pay for one license, right?. The short answer is no. The software publishers see the multi-core as multiple licenses, so indeed the performance benefits come at a greater licensing price. Some customers have become very vocal about this seemingly inequitable structure - the “per-proc” model is so attractive to certain applications, especially web database applications that are pounded by end-users who may or may not have the appropriate CAL.

Ultimately this issue is still unresolved and the licensing specialists and Large Account Resellers are slugging it out. Don’t be surprised if we see some sweeping changes in the per-proc structure.

Filed Under Database, Developer, General, Servers & Infrastructure, Technology |

Oct
24

AJAX Stats Created Using AJAX View

By Mike G

Curious about the performance of the Javascript / AJAX on your page? Microsoft Research has created Ajax View, which allows you to gather performance data about what’s going on in your web application as it runs in the browser. This is an easy to use tool and you can have it up and running in minutes.

Download the app and access the help files here:

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ajaxview/

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Filed Under AJAX, Developer, Web Technologies |

Oct
19

Next Gen Frontpage?

By Mike G

Microsoft just released a public beta of Popfly (www.PopFly.com), which is an online, Silverlight based, web page design tool aimed at the home user. You can do all the standard stuff: add images, text, rss feeds, etc. But mentioned at the bottom of the description page is this little nugget:

“In addition, Popfly offers a powerful web programming environment and social network so you can bring in new data sources, create new ways to display information, or even create and share full Visual Studio projects.”

At this point, Popfly is not a hosting environment, but it is more of a source code repository for Visual Studio Express projects (There’s even a plug in for Visual Studio). However, that may change in the future:

“The team is working on enabling Visual Studio Express users to publish not only source code, but completed projects with support for hosting Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation and Web client projects (HTML, CSS, AJAX, and Silverlight) directly from Visual Studio”

Filed Under Developer, FrontPage |