SD West 2008 For the second year in a row organizers at the Software Development Conference & Expo West felt the super sessions hosted by C++ legends Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter were worth some ink on the event agenda.

"There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they simply stopped advertising C++ sessions at this conference," Sutter told attendees. "And yet they found a curious thing: every year for four years, C++ was the strongest track at the show. With zero advertising! That says something about the market. That says that there are problems that C++ is solving."

Ajax developers are turning away from commercial development tools and opting for free, open source alternatives.

There is no small irony in the prospect that Apple's Macintosh - arguably the ultimate in closed and proprietary systems, at least until the Intel alliance - could become the open source development platform of choice.

Intel has followed Sun Microsystems by releasing development tools to optimize the performance of applications running on multi-core, multi-threaded chips.

Fresh off promising more focus on software during last month's JavaOne Conference, the chip giant has updated its C++ Professional Edition and Fortran Compiler Professional Editions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Borland Software has named a new chief executive for its unwanted CodeGear tools subsidiary, with incumbent Ben Smith exiting after barely four months.

One of the funnier sights at this year's CES was a video of a hamster ball. It wasn't any old rodent workout – this one was steering a robot. The hamster seemed to be having fun, and the developer was having a ball too...

Hands on Last month I looked at Qt, the popular C++ cross-platform framework which underpins the KDE desktop, and a whole lot more. This time, I'm continuing that same theme by taking a look at another cross-platform C++ library called Juce (OK, no jokes about Apple Juce!)

In my last article, I looked at one of the differences between the C++ and Java communities; the availability of application development frameworks that have a profound effect on programmer productivity. I mentioned specifically the Java example of Hibernate and tried to identify reasons why the Java community is more innovative with this type of code reuse.

Book review This pair of books brings together a variety of small but annoying puzzles mediated by Herb Sutter through the news:comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup.

Access dominates the PC platform and, over the years, has been used to create vast numbers of departmental databases. In their turn, many of these have slowly become mission critical and now need to be upgraded to a secure client-server engine.

Microsoft has pulled a developer award to a programmer linked to adware distribution one week after granting the accolade.

Column As an ardent C++ developer, I’m often traumatized by the amount of potentially useful software infrastructure that simply doesn't exist.

Column The use of “lambda” originates from functional programming and lambda calculus, where a lambda abstraction defines an unnamed function. Lambda functions or Lambdas in C++ are one of the more interesting things to look forward to in the next C++ standard; giving us the ability to treat functions as first class objects at last; composing them inline and treating them as class objects. Up until now we've scraped by with pointers to functions, and various libraries like Boost Lambda, both of which approaches suck.

Book review C++ is the most used language in that most lucrative of fields: financial engineering. Yet most of the people who use it for derivatives have no formal training in programming, and often use C++ as little more than C, or even as a mutant form of Fortran. The results are not always pretty.

I first read the lament to the capricity of programming in the title of this piece in Creative Computing, years before C was devised. But it’s still true that there is no way, not even one, of being absolutely sure that a value you set in C or C++ won’t change.

At the ACCU conference recently, one wag in the audience referred to Microsoft’s C++/CLI as “C++ divided by CLI”, which neatly summed up the prevailing mood. The 10,000 classes in .NET can’t work with ISO C++, and you may ask why anyone in their right mind would try to bring out a platform in this day and age that couldn’t talk directly to C++.

These days I do a bit of pimping (a.k.a. "quant headhunting" in polite company - a "quant" is a quantitative analyst doing high-value numerical analysis) for expensive people at banks. It may scare or delight you, but a lot of the financial markets are run off C++ with Excel VBA.

Borland Software has updated its Windows development environment, while stressing its continued commitment to delivering updated IDEs for developers.

Analysis Anyone hoping Borland Software's decision to exit the integrated development environment (IDE) game will meet the same fate as its plan (subsequently dumped) to re-invent itself as Inprise in 1998, is likely to be sorely disappointed.

Borland is famous for confusing its loyal fans; well, it sometimes confuses us. So, we asked David Intersimone and Jason Vokes to guide us through its roadmap, with particular reference to Delphi.

Adding to the choice of development tools for Apple Macintosh range, IBM is privately making two compilers available to its customers in beta form this week, The Register has learned.

Borland, after two years of coding, has lifted the lid on its latest C++ development toolkits. It says the offerings represent the industry's first multi-platform and multi-compiler development environments to ship for the language.

Letters Our recent etymological diversion Why Microsoft makes a complete hash out of C# prompted a huge response, more than 200 emails.

A terrific response to our James Gosling interview, and not one of you mentioned asparagus…

Subject: Why X ? A: X is free Sun wanted money

It's simple: Sun wanted money for NeWS

Java creator James Gosling was wearing a custom-made T-shirt for the opening day of the JavaOne show in San Francisco, a blue number which features Duke the Java mascot surfing across a watchface, trailing behind him what appears to be a bunch of blue asparagus.