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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) needs sophisticated software to analyse the massive amounts of data the experiment generates.

Root is 2.5 million lines of C++, which offers a data analysis framework used by physicists working on the LHC experiment. I recently spoke to Axel Naumann, who works as part of the six-person team, developing Root for 10,000 users worldwide.

I spoke to Greg Lambert, chier fechnical architect at ChangeBase, about application comaptibility. Compatibility is not only about getting things to work on Windows. Hypervisors can also pose app compatibility issues. And, as I mentioned in recent posts, browsers like IE9  can also present problems.

Over the next 20 years, software engineers will become much more formal, so we can depend on developers to produce code that is resilient to cyber attack."

With this week's Microsoft Patch Tuesday update, we see the largest collection of updates ever delivered by Microsoft in a single Patch Tuesday release with 17 updates having the following rating; 2 Critical, 14 Important and 1 Moderate. Aside from the significant number of Security and Application updates with this Patch Tuesday release cycle, we see a moderate number of issues affecting a small number of applications. The ChangeBASE team recommends a particular focus on the Microsoft Security Update MS10-106 as it raised a significant number of issues on the AOK sample server platform portfolio.

Here is a sample of the results for one application and a summary of the Patch Tuesday results for one of our AOK Sample databases:

And here is a sample AOK Summary report for a sample database where the AOK Patch Impact team has run the latest Microsoft Updates against a small application portfolio:

You can read a full analysis of the AOK Patch Impact Testing Summary here.

The 22nd of October 2009 represented one of the most eagerly anticipated dates in the history of desktop computing. The launch of Windows 7 promised easier, faster and more secure computing for all. And, boy oh boy, did Windows 7 deliver.

Over the past 12 months, we've worked with more than 200 global organisations to assist them in their Windows 7 migrations and during this time, we've started to see a number of emerging trends.

To celebrate the anniversary of Windows 7, we've put together a brief report, which you can request a copy of here. In the report we look at the emerging application compatibility trends, the primary issues and give some suggestions on how organisations can best approach their Windows 7 migration.

Over the past 12 months I experienced a number of situations with organisations that have made me really think again. Here is a quick synopsis of those surprises:

• Windows 7 adoption rates have been higher than expected, which has been led by 64-bit as the primary delivery platform.
• The introduction of IE8 has added another layer of complexity into the migration. Organisations need to address compatibility issues for core web applications and browser presentation and rendering issues for internal and external websites and portals.
• Virtualisation has not been embraced as quickly as expected and organisations are looking towards a hybrid model of virtualised platforms to suit application capabilities
• Windows 7 migration is easier than previous migrations, such as XP to Vista
• Shims are not the answer to application compatibility issues
• You need a level of technical expertise to fully use Microsoft's application compatibility issue fixes

And, as you have probably seen already, we are still seeing the same top five application compatibility issues across all verticals and industry sectors including:

Application Compatibility Update

With this Microsoft Patch Tuesday update, we see the largest collection of updates ever delivered by Microsoft in a single Patch Tuesday release. In total, there are 16 updates with the following rating; 2 Critical, 12 Important and 2 Moderate. Aside from the significant number of Security and Application updates with this Patch Tuesday release cycle, we also see a significant number of applications dependent on this large tranche of changes. The ChangeBase team recommends that the testing cycle for these particular releases is especially thorough due to application dependencies on almost all of the security patches included in this release. Given the nature of the changes and updates included in each of these patches, most systems will require a reboot to successfully implement any and all of the patches and updates released in this October Patch Tuesday release cycle.

Here is a sample of the results for one application and a summary of the Patch Tuesday results for one of our AOK Sample databases.

The month of September sees nine Security bulletin updates that tackle a total of 13 vulnerabilities for Windows, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. With these nine updates, we see four rated as Critical and the remaining five updates rated as Important. We have included a sample screen-shot from the ChangeBASE AOK Workbench application that depicts one of the issues raised by one these Microsoft patches:

MS10-0063: Vulnerability in Unicode Scripts Processor Could Allow Remote Code Execution 

Testing Summary

Security Update Detailed Summary

What's interesting to me is the fact that eight out of the 14 patches are ranked as critical. This further highlights the need for companies to be extra vigilant during the holiday session. Once again this is an area which organisations can't avoid or be complacent about. It will be all hands to the pump on Wednesday and we'll be issuing the ChangeBASE AOK Patch report as usual to highlight any application compatibility issues that the updates might cause.