Jeff Cogswell

When Microsoft originally released its .NET run-time and framework, programming for Windows became much easier. You got to choose from some favorite languages (C++, a Java-similar language called C# and Visual Basic), but by choosing .NET you were effectively locking yourself into the Windows platform. If you were thinking about portability, you had to look […]

What would a possible IBM acquisition of Sun Microsystems mean to the database software these two companies provide? eWEEK Labs has looked at the overall picture, and here I drill down into the database space. Last year, Sun acquired MySQL, which is the maker of the open-source database MySQL. Although involved in the open-source PostgreSQL […]

I Have Seen the Future of Database, and It Is … by Jeff Cogswell The Cloud The biggest thing we’ll see by far in the next year or two is an increasing amount of database storage moving “into the cloud.” We’re already seeing it, but we’ll see more of this moving forward. Databases will be […]

This is the first of several articles about Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform that was rolled out in 2008. Azure is quite large, and during the next year we’re going to see several entire books written about Azure. In other words, there’s far too much to fit into a single article. However, I do want […]

eWEEK Labs Takes a First Look at the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform by Jeff Cogswell New Project Types Azure Tools for Visual Studio create new project types that you can use in Visual Studio. Two Projects When you create a Cloud Service, the wizard creates two different projects for you. Development Storage The first time […]

In December, Amazon released the beta version of its SimpleDB product. SimpleDB is part of a suite of tools making up the Amazon Web Services, or AWS. It has been in the works for quite some time; indeed, Amazon created an early program that people were signing up for a year earlier. Over that year, […]

eWEEK Labs Walk-through: Amazon SimpleDB eWEEK Labs Walk-through: Amazon SimpleDBBy Jeff Cogswell No Title The C# samples for SimpleDB include a full solution containing the class library and samples. The class library itself is quite simple but could easily be replaced by a more sophisticated one. No Title The samples show every step, such as […]

It was bound to happen: As more and more Web technologies are released, some will grow and mature, while some will disappear. And some will start to come together. Take the case of Zoho Creator and Google App Engine. For those of you who haven’t yet tried out Zoho Creator (which has been out for […]

eWEEK Labs Looks at Google App Engine By Jeff Cogswell No Title Giftag is an online social-networking site focused on the sharing of gift wishlists. This site is powered by Google App Engine and is a good demonstration of Google’s Datastore database capabilities. No Title The GAE SQL Designer is a nice Web-based SQL design […]

When I first became aware of Google App Engine, I was skeptical. It seemed to have some severe shortcomings that would make it unable to match up to competitors, especially Amazon Web Services. These perceived shortcomings included the fact that your Google applications do not have access to an entire virtual server setup in the […]