Best of the blogs: So I’m a day late getting to this one, but Paul Venezia has an idea worth inclusion and consideration.”I hereby propose that April 25th become IT Appreciation Day. The last Friday in July is SAAD, but maybe it’s time to branch out and include the whole group,” he writes in More on trusting your IT staff. Columnists’ corner: Cross-platform productivity? Perhaps. To strike a blow to religious freedom? Indeed. But, there is more to virtualization than just serving as a tool of convenience for individual developers, writes Tom Yager in The virtualization myth. SOA: David Linthicum discusses a new term in the SOA realm: service-oriented connectivity. “Instead of dealing with the extraction and publication of simple information to source or target systems, service-oriented adapters have to abstract services or application behavior as well.” The news beat: Costs associated with its Nextel acquisition and integration hit Sprint’s profits. Microsoft attacks an EU ruling on server code. And the BBC takes on-demand to heart. Software Development