I think the list of Thank You’s is 10 times longer than the article.  That’s how good this one is.  Enjoy!

Here’s a comparison to Microsoft SQL and Sybase:

	MySQL	Microsoft	Sybase
Product Line	MySQL	Microsoft SQL Server	Sybase ASE
Product Edition	Enterprise Edition (1-4 Socket Server)	Enterprise Edition	Enterprise Edition
Pricing Model	Per Server	Per Socket	Per Core
Software License (Per Unit)	$0	$27,495	$44,270
Annual Subscription, Support & Maintenance (Per Unit)	$5,000	$6,874	$9,739
Costs (see assumptions below in Customize, Notes)
Software License	$0	$439,920	$1,416,640
Subscription, Support & Maintenance (for 3 Years)	$60,000	$329,952	$934,944
Total Cost of Ownership
TCO (for 3 Years)	$60,000	$769,872	$2,351,584
TCO Savings
TCO Savings using MySQL (USD)		$709,872	$2,291,584
TCO Savings using MySQL (%)		92%	97%
Times more expensive than MySQL		12 x	39 x

You can view the working calculator here.

The tools selected:

LINQPad, LInQ Visualizer, SMTP4Dev, P/Invoke Interop Assistant , Regulator, Regex Editor Add-In, Fiddler, ProjectConverter, DevExpress CodeRush Xpress, VS10x Code Map v2, DPack, JScript Editor Extensions, XAML Styler, Code Metrics Viewer, Spell Checker, AllMargins, and VSGesture.

And a few more covered in previous articles:

Smart Paster, dynaTrace Ajax Edition and Ghost Doc, Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools, tangible T4 Code Editor, Open Data Protocol Editor and JavaScript Parser, VSCommands Lite, WCFProxyGenerator, wscf.blue and WCFMock

If those don’t keep you busy, you’re not trying hard enough!

All the links and summaries can be found in the original article here (and on page 22 of the hardcopy magazine).  Don’t miss the Toolapalooza!

Speaking of growing faster, here is Evernote’s registered user growth since our closed Beta period:

It took us 446 days to reach our first million users. The next million took 222 days. The next one 133 days, then 108, then 83. We shot up from 5 to 6 million users in just 52 days. That comes out to more than 19,000 new people signing up for Evernote each day. To put this number in perspective, we could fill up every single seat of San Francisco’s AT&T Park (home of the World Champion Giants) with new users every two days.

How do you programmatically make a phone call with that shiny new phone?

It’s easy, thanks to the Apple engineers!  They wisely chose to implement (the very useful) RFC 3966.  Here’s an excerpt from that Request for Comments (RFC) document:

This document defines the URI scheme “tel”, which describes resources
identified by telephone numbers. A telephone number is a string of
decimal digits that uniquely indicates the network termination point.
The number contains the information necessary to route the call to
this point. (This definition is derived from [E.164] but encompasses
both public and private numbers.)

The termination point of the “tel” URI telephone number is not
restricted. It can be in the public telephone network, a private
telephone network, or the Internet. It can be fixed or wireless and
address a fixed wired, mobile, or nomadic terminal. The terminal
addressed can support any electronic communication service (ECS),
including voice, data, and fax. The URI can refer to resources
identified by a telephone number, including but not limited to
originators or targets of a telephone call.

The “tel” URI is a globally unique identifier (“name”) only; it does
not describe the steps necessary to reach a particular number and
does not imply dialling semantics. Furthermore, it does not refer to
a specific physical device, only to a telephone number.

You can view the complete RFC 3966 document here.

And, here’s your answer:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"tel://8005551212"]];

The report is a “must read” if you work with cloud service providers.  It is available in PDF form for download here.

From the report:

Following is a summary of the most salient findings from our study of cloud computing providers. We expand upon these findings in the next section of the paper.

•  The majority of cloud computing providers surveyed do not believe their organization views the security of their cloud services as a competitive advantage. Further, they do not consider cloud computing security as one of their most important responsibilities and do not believe their products or services substantially protect and secure the confidential or sensitive information of their customers.
• The majority of cloud providers believe it is their customer’s responsibility to secure the cloud and not their responsibility. They also say their systems and applications are not always evaluated for security threats prior to deployment to customers.
• Buyer beware – on average providers of cloud computing technologies allocate10 percent or less of their operational resources to security and most do not have confidence that customers’ security requirements are being met.
• Cloud providers in our study say the primary reasons why customers purchase cloud resources are lower cost and faster deployment of applications. In contrast, improved security or compliance with regulations is viewed as an unlikely reason for choosing cloud services.
• The majority of cloud providers in our study admit they do not have dedicated security personnel to oversee the security of cloud applications, infrastructure or platforms.
• Providers of private cloud resources appear to attach more importance and have a higher level of confidence in their organization’s ability to meet security objectives than providers of public and hybrid cloud solutions.
• While security as a “true” service from the cloud is rarely offered to customers today, about one-third of the cloud providers in our study are considering such solutions as a new source of revenue sometime in the next two years.

Just announced: Amazon Relational Database Service allows you to “deploy multiple editions of Oracle Database 11g in minutes with cost-efficient and re-sizable hardware capacity”.

Here’s their summary:

Amazon RDS frees you up to focus on application development by managing time-consuming database administration tasks including provisioning, backups, software patching, monitoring, and hardware scaling.

You can run Amazon RDS for Oracle under two different licensing models – “License Included” and “Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL)”. In the “License Included” service model, you do not need separately purchased Oracle licenses; the Oracle Database software has been licensed by AWS. “License Included” pricing starts at $0.16 per hour, inclusive of software, underlying hardware resources, and Amazon RDS management capabilities. If you already own Oracle Database licenses, you can use the “BYOL” model to run Oracle deployments on Amazon RDS, with rates starting at $0.11 per hour. The “BYOL” model is designed for customers who prefer to use existing Oracle database licenses or purchase new licenses directly from Oracle.

You can take advantage of hourly pricing with no upfront fees or long-term commitments. In addition, you also have the option to purchase Reserved DB Instances under one or three year reservation terms. With Reserved DB Instances, you can make low, one-time, upfront payment for each DB Instance and then pay a significantly discounted hourly usage rate, achieving up to 48% net cost savings.

Pricing information is available here.

Developing with the framework follows the typical 80/20 rule… You can bang out about 80% of your interface in 20% of the time, but the final touches… that last 20% that turns a prototype into a commercial tool… takes the other 80%.  Overall, if you have low-level control over the server and installed packages, Vaadin is a reasonable solution.  It is powerful and the developer community is active and engaged.

If you’ve never worked with Vaadin, help is now here.  The DZone Team just released a refcard that is a decent introduction and streamlines some of the concepts for the uninitiated.  Of particular value is the efficiently-spaced class diagram.  Here’s the description from their email notification:

Vaadin: A Familiar Way to Build Web Apps with Java

With the Vaadin Framework you don’t need to worry about HTML, Javascript, the browser, or RPC.

This week’s refcard shows you how to create an application using Vaadin. It will also walk you through the server-side components, layout components, themes, data binding, and more.

You can download the refcard here.

Here’s their spin:

What’s Cool about dotPeek?

1. Decompiling .NET 1.0-4.0 assemblies to C#
2. Quick jump to a specific type, assembly, symbol, or type member
3. Effortless navigation to symbol declarations, implementations, derived and base symbols, and more
4. Accurate search for symbol usages
   with advanced presentation of search results
5. Overview of inheritance chains
6. Support for downloading code from source servers
7. Syntax highlighting
8. Complete keyboard support
9. dotPeek is free!

You can download it here.

Here’s Microsoft’s spin:

Join Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Marketing, Robert Wahbe and Corporate Vice President, Visual Studio, Jason Zander, as they showcase a broad array of technology during the Tech·Ed 2011 Keynote Address. If you missed it live, the video is available to watch on-demand now.

And some interesting facts from one of the keynote slides:

10,000 Attendees

84 Countries

800 Microsoft Participants

551 Unique Sessions

350 Hands-On Labs

1st Ever – Live Streaming Sessions

A few segments went a little long for this viewer, but, overall, it is a good blend of developer and marketing content across a variety of products and services.

View the keynote here.