Technology - InfoWorld

San Francisco - Palm has stayed very quiet since its releases of the Palm Pre and Pixi devices this summer, which debuted the WebOS that was at one point seen as a key rival to Apple's iPhone. Other than back-and-forth fights with Apple on the WebOS's ability to sync to iTunes, which Apple has repeatedly disabled, and an announcement that the WebOS SDK would finally be opened up to rank-and-file developers in December, Palm has declined to talk.

San Francisco - They say you can tell a lot about a person by the tools they bring to the job. If you're a professional plumber or a carpenter, people will expect you to carry the right tools for the task at hand. The same holds true for IT pros. Those in the know will judge you by the depth and sophistication of the technical toolkit you bring to a support call.

San Francisco - Microsoft, which has been pursuing concurrent improvements for its Visual Basic and C# programming languages, plans to open up compilers for the languages and add capabilities for asynchronous programming and immutability.

San Francisco - Microsoft is set to move its Windows Azure cloud platform to a a commercial production stage, Microsoft officials said on Tuesday.

San Francisco - Large, global companies have eliminated 300,000 IT jobs in 2009, according to the consultancy Hackett Group. Back-office jobs in general fell 630,000 -- three times the average annual job loss from 2000 to 2007. The firm doesn't expect 2010 to see a turnaround for such positions, and instead forecasts an "extended jobless recovery."

San Francisco - JetBrains this week unveiled an upgrade to its IDE for developing Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications, adding more code refactoring capabilities.

San Francisco - SharePoint 2010, the newly announced upgrade to Microsoft's popular Web and collaboration platform, is receiving a thumbs-up from developers pleased with the product's capabilities, including its use of Visual Studio as a tool for building SharePoint applications.

San Francisco - Adobe Systems will offer on Tuesday beta versions of upgrades to its core Flash Player and Adobe AIR technologies, with Adobe touting mobile device accommodations for the Flash Player.

San Francisco - Microsoft announced on Monday the release and open-sourcing of its .Net Micro Framework 4.0, which provides a .Net-based development and execution environment for small devices. But the TCP/IP stack and cryptography stack were omitted  from the open source effort.

San Francisco - Klocwork will ship later this month version 9.0 of its Insight Pro product for source code analysis, which the company says offers capabilities for agile programming projects.

San Francisco - We all know what buzz is: It's noise. And here at InfoWorld, one of our self-appointed tasks is to extract the signal from that noise, to separate the stuff valuable to IT professionals from that which is popularly considered a big deal.

San Francisco - AWS (Amazon Web Services) unveiled this week an SDK (software development kit) intended to make it easier for developers to build Microsoft .Net applications that can access the AWS platform for cloud computing.

San Francisco - WSO2 will launch on Monday WSO2 Cloud Platform, for extending SOA into cloud computing.

San Francisco - As the number of truly smart smartphones continues to grow, choosing the right device for your personal or business use is increasingly difficult. It's no longer a clear choice between Apple's consumer-oriented iPhone and Research in Motion's enterprise-oriented BlackBerry.

San Francisco - Surprisingly good news abounds, despite it being Friday the 13th.

San Francisco - With a full schedule on tap, the 2009 Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) next week will tout efforts ranging from the company's Windows Azure cloud platform to plans for programming languages

San Francisco - The latest Android 2.0-based "iPhone killer" won't kill the iPhone or the BlackBerry -- and the cheaper HTC Droid Eris is the new smartphone that I think Apple should be concerned about.

San Francisco - Here we go again: Another swaggering company claims to have the iPhone killer. This time, it's Motorola and Verizon Wireless, with the Droid. You've seen the "Droid does" campaign, but let's cut to the chase: The Motorola Droid does not do that much. It's a real letdown after all the hype, with some amazingly dumb design decisions, such as lack of a multitouch screen (no gesture support) and a hard-to-use keyboard.

San Francisco - Sun Microsystems' Zembly project, which provided an environment for building and hosting social applications, will be suspended on November 30, according to a posting on the Zembly blog.