microsoft-alternatives

What is the best alternative to Microsoft Visio for UML diagramming?

I need to make some UML diagrams. What is the best alternative on both Windows and OS X? ...

Does anyone know of a good alternative to Pipe Viewer for Windows Platform?

If you do not know what Pipe Viewer is (I did not know about it until 5 minutes ago), then this blog does a good job giving a brief introduction to it with some examples. I write a lot of Perl Scripts as an ETL developer and a lot of times, the files that I work with take really long time to operate with (unzipping, moving, etc). Therefo...

Alternative Asp.net designer/IDE?

Are there alternatives to Visual Studio 2008/Visual Web Developer Express for developing ASP.Net applications? ...

is there any replacement of Access?

I am a programmer, and my father uses Access to collect the patients information (my father is a doctor), He wants me to teach him how to use it. I don't like Access (I'm a linux guy), and I cannot find any replacement of it. Do you guys know of any? (it must be easy enough for my father to use) ...

Why would I want to use anything other than WCF?

After completing several small projects with WCF, I'm quite happy with what it can do. However, having spent a brief amount of time looking into the alternatives, I'm struggling to find exactly what benefits/drawbacks I would experience from using Java based web services such as AXIS2 or Metro? Obviously open-source is perhaps one of t...