This year has been tough on live events, so I am happy to report that Microsoft has opened registration for PDC09 this week.
The major announcement at PDC will be the commercial release of the Windows Azure Platform, according to Microsoft, although Windows 7 will certainly get lots of attention. Could Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 get released? The show usually serves up some surprises but Windows Azure and Windows 7 require .NET 3.5 so the timing may be awkward.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/04/20090 comments
On Monday Microsoft released an enhanced version of .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 called STM.NET that enables software transactional memory. The project, which originated in Microsoft Research Cambridge, provides a mechanism that improves isolation of shared states in concurrency without degrading performance.
Available on MSDN DevLabs for C# programmers, the "experimental" STM.NET "frees developers from worrying about the mechanics of fine-grained locking and synchronization in multithreaded applications by providing transactional semantics for reading and writing to memory," says DevDiv's Senior Vice President Soma "S" Somasegar in a blog posting. He goes on to explain how STM.NET works:
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/30/20092 comments
This week Microsoft is officially taking submissions to begin to certify qualified apps for its upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The launch of the app store will coincide with the release of Windows Mobile 6.5 phones from companies like HTC, LG and Orange later this year.
With the Apple app store operating at full throttle, Microsoft needs to get developers worldwide excited about building Windows Mobile apps, despite a platform that lags behind on key features, notably multi-touch, not expected until Windows Mobile 7. An interim release, Windows Mobile 6.5 offers a new interface with the Marketplace app built-in, IE Mobile 6 and a free My Phone sync service.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/28/200915 comments
Microsoft released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to manufacturing on Wednesday, three months prior to the planned Oct. 22 retail launch. Windows 7 could be auspicious for the Windows team after the blight of Vista, but developers need to help Microsoft sell it with compatible apps and must-have software.
The arrival of a new OS can exercise dev teams' mettle. In the case of Vista, the initial lack of drivers and a compatibility quagmire quickly snowballed into the widely held perception that for many companies, upgrading to the new OS was more trouble than it was worth.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/23/200911 comments
Earlier this month, RDN Express asked if Silverlight was ready for business.
Paul from Minneapolis commented:
"I agree that Silverlight is coming along nicely. However, it is still a work-in-progress. I'm designing a global SL 3 app that talks to several back-end systems. Items still needed: print and webcam/audio support, being able to set starting paths for the file dialogs. SL's security sandbox needs to provide for intranet zones if we are to be building business apps. I'm incorporating Telerik's SL controls to satisfy requirements such as right-click menus, a 'real' grid, a rich-text control, etc."
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/21/20091 comments
The meter will start running for Windows Azure in November. Microsoft outlined the long-anticipated pricing model for its cloud computing platform at its Worldwide Partners Conference (WPC) in New Orleans today.
The Azure business model primarily consists of pay-per-usage or subscription-based pricing with a myriad of service-level agreements (SLAs). It offers several options -- the consumption-based pricing is similar to that of Amazon EC2 -- and a few surprises such as charging for "message operations." End-to-end service pricing, outside of the subscription model, appears hard to forecast.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/14/20091 comments
When Google debuted its Chrome browser last fall, it was clear that an operating system wasn't far behind. On Tuesday, the company
made it official
.
The Google Chrome OS, described by the company as "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel," will be made available as open source code later this year. Google has had undeniable success in the browser wars, reporting that 30 million people use the Chrome browser on a regular basis.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/09/20093 comments
Microsoft is expected to launch Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3 at an event in the San Francisco Bay Area this Friday. I lived on Russian Hill for four glorious years in the early '90s and I can definitely relate to Jack London's description of his youth in this magnificent city:
"You look back and see how hard you worked and how poor you were, and how desperately anxious you were to succeed, and all you can remember is how happy you were."
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 07/07/200919 comments
Outlook's rendering of HTML e-mail in Word came under fire again this week on Twitter after David Grenier wrote a blog entitled "Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010 -- enough is enough" and launched a tweet campaign on FixOutlook.org. So far, 20,000 and counting....
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 06/25/20091 comments
Yesterday, Microsoft's Brian Harry announced that the company is discontinuing eScrum, the Scrum process template for Team Foundation Server (TFS) developed by a Microsoft team outside of the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) group.
"[T]he eScrum download is going to be removed in a few weeks and I don't expect there will be any further updates," explained Harry, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and lead of TFS, in his blog. "If there is some reason this change is going to cause you undo hardship, please contact me and we'll see if there's some way to get you access to the eScrum source so that you can maintain it yourself."
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 06/11/20094 comments
Microsoft is finally getting the message about the .NET community's interest in test-driven development (TDD). The result is some cool functionality in the new editor in the upcoming IDE.
By now, everyone is familiar with the ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) pattern, a framework that Microsoft swiftly developed after the alarming enterprise interest in Ruby on Rails. ASP.NET MVC Version 1 was released at MIX09 in March but it isn't in Visual Studio (VS) 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 1.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 06/09/200910 comments
This morning, as I watched the JavaOne keynote given by Microsoft's Steven Martin and reps from both Sun and Microsoft, I couldn't help thinking about the elephant in the room.
Would Microsoft be on that stage, and a JavaOne sponsor, if it had known that Oracle was buying Sun? And with Larry Ellison lurking, ready to promote his company's proprietary platform (before Sun) and torpedo that of his long-standing nemesis, Bill Gates? All this at an open source conference? It's kind of surreal -- like Ralph Nader hosting a show on the Fox channel.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 06/04/20090 comments