InfoWorld

I’m an old Borland guy. I started using Borland tools in the early 1990s, from Turbo Pascal through Delphi. I dabbled in Paradox. I even tried to stick with Borland Office. I wandered through the Inprise years , and the Kylix endeavor , and I was actually a Borland employee during the CodeGear / Embarcadero migrations. You could write a book about the rise and fall of Borland. Suffice it to say t…

For a programming language that is prized for being convenient and easy, Python has some surprising barbs and sharp edges. Find out how a new pip flag can make it easier to work with project dependencies apart from the project itself. Get the skinny on why standalone Python programs are hard to assemble, and what you can do about it. See how Python’s new Installation Manager for Microsoft Windows…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that policymakers should keep lower-risk open-weight AI accessible while placing stricter safeguards around frontier systems, including mandatory testing and limits on China’s access to advanced computing and model capabilities. In a post outlining Anthropic’s position, Amodei said broad restrictions, including bans on Chinese open-weight models used by US bu…

For years, the public cloud was the default for new workloads because its convenience, elasticity, and breadth of services made sense. However, as AI’s strategic importance grows, its economics and infrastructure are changing. Tesla is one of the clearest examples of a company deciding that AI is too important, too expensive, and too central to its business to leave largely in the hands of a thir…

Last month I asked Claude’s Fable 5 model to read four 18th-century probate wills. It responded by fabricating a family. For more than 20 years, I’ve been chasing the parents of John Jacob Asay, born around 1725 near Burlington, New Jersey. I’ve been trying to connect him to Asays overseas. My working hypothesis links the New Jersey Asays to a Yorkshire family from Holderness that spelled the nam…

JetBrains has released Kotlin 2.4.20-Beta2, an update to the company’s multiplatform programming language that has emerged with capabilities ranging from the Wasmtime runtime to JavaScript functions and Swift accommodations. Kotlin 2.4.20-Beta2 was released July 2 . Among the new capabilities and improvements, the new release changes how Kotlin/Wasm handles top-level require() calls in @JsFun dec…

Microsoft Windows has improved massively as a developer environment over the past few years. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets you work seamlessly with Linux on Windows without the clunk and overhead of a VM. All of the popular software development tools that figure into common workflows exist in native Windows editions. And Microsoft has introduced a slew of developer amenities directly int…

With the rapid rise in the use of AI, large language models (LLMs), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the IT security landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. Recently, Anthropic previewed a new foundational model, Claude Mythos, that has shaken the cybersecurity community . Although Mythos is a general-purpose model, it has demonstrated a significant ability to handle computer security t…

Anthropic has introduced Claude Opus 5, an update to its hybrid reasoning model that promises improved performance on coding and knowledge tasks, more capable agents, and sharper professional work. Introduced July 24 , Claude Opus 5 provides greatly improved performance at the same cost as its predecessor, Opus 4.8, Anthropic said. Anthropic described Claude Opus 5 as a thoughtful and proactive m…

Model Context Protocol ( MCP ), the emerging standard for connecting AI models to external tools and enterprise data, is undergoing its biggest architectural overhaul yet. The latest release candidate , scheduled for release on July 28, removes protocol-level sessions in favor of a stateless architecture, a change which industry experts say is intended to make MCP easier to deploy across standard…

Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.130, an update to the code editor that brings several improvements to the Agents window, along with enhancements to the agent host and the terminal. VS Code 1.130 was released on July 22 , one week after VS Code 1.129 . Developers can access the release for Windows, Linux, or Mac from code.visualstudio.com . With the new release, the Agents window gets …

Enterprise software developers continue to be in danger of falling victim to slopsquatting, where AI coding tools hallucinate the existence of nonexistent libraries and hackers create malicious packages in response. The top AI coding tools are remarkably consistent in their hallucinations: Researcher Aleksandr Churilov found the same 127 fake package names generated by five different LLMs. Slopsq…

Over the past year, I had the same conversation with almost every team starting an AI initiative. Should we build on Semantic Kernel, AutoGen or Foundry? At first it felt like the most important architectural decision we’d make. Each framework had its own philosophy, each promised to be the foundation for enterprise AI, and picking the wrong one felt like an expensive mistake. I spent a lot of ti…

EF Core is Microsoft’s flagship ORM (object-relational mapper), the software layer that allows .NET developers to work with relational databases. The DbContext class is the core component of the EF Core framework for managing database operations. However, the DbContext class in EF Core is not thread-safe. Hence, if you share DbContext instances between multiple threads, you will often encounter d…

A new version of Python’s native package management tool, pip, will remove a limitation that has frustrated Python developers for years. If you wanted to install the dependencies for a given package, but not install the package itself, you were stuck. Either you had to extract the dependency list from the package and install it by hand, or you had to build the whole package anyway. Why was this a…