Microsoft is taking another step towards cloud interoperability with today's launch of the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project. The Simple Cloud API gives PHP developers a set of programming interfaces for common operations to access cloud storage services across vendors.
The open source project is lead by Zend Technologies, sponsor of the open source Zend Framework. Along with Zend, Microsoft, IBM and Rackspace are among the co-founding partners in the open source initiative.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/22/20094 comments
Web development, once the Cinderella story at Microsoft, seems to be getting the royal treatment this year as new technologies and services continue to emerge at top speed. This week, the ASP.NET folks introduced a free Content Delivery Network for geo-located caching of ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery libraries.
To date, the CDN supports the September preview of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 (version 0909) and jQuery version 1.3.2. This latest version of the AJAX libraries, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 5, is available on CodePlex. It adds support for the ASP.NET UpdatePanel, among other client-side data improvements (dynamic and recursive templates).
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/17/20094 comments
A frequent question that developers ask Microsoft is whether the company has any plans to get Silverlight on the iPhone. Someone hit Scott Guthrie with this question during his Linked In .NET Users Group online talk late last month. Guthrie said, "Right now we don't have anything to announce."
Guthrie went on to point out that there are some cool games in Apple's AppStore that were built using Mono, the open source UNIX version of .NET. "It's possible right now to do .NET development," he said during the Linked In chat. "It is not really fully .NET --- but it is possible to use C# and .NET to build iPhone apps today."
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/15/20099 comments
Microsoft unveiled its Azure platform and cloud computing strategy to developers at its Professional Developers Conference last October. So what types of apps and services have developers built and tested on Azure?
The Windows Azure Gallery showcases numerous samples, but the majority are not line-of-business apps.
The first external Azure app from Microsoft appeared in beta in late June. Called Microsoft Hohm, it is designed to help consumers monitor their home energy consumption and ultimately save money. The free online beta app, which requires a Windows Live ID and zip code, is currently available only to U.S. residents.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/08/20096 comments
A few weeks ago, Scott Guthrie answered a wide array of developers' questions in a Linked .NET Users Group Webcast. Of particular interest was the timeframe of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 release. According to Guthrie, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET developer platform, the final beta of VS2010 and .NET 4 is expected in short order.
"That will be coming a little later this fall, so it is not that far away," he said. "We have hit the zero bug balance for our Beta 2 release last Friday [Aug. 21] so we are cranking away at that."
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/03/200910 comments
Timing can make or break you in many professions other than comedy. Releasing a major product on the Friday before your competitor’s must-attend conference is the attempted showstopper in the technology industry.
That scenario played out again last week. On Friday, Microsoft released its standalone hypervisor, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, to manufacturing on the eve of VMworld 2009, the annual event of market leading VMware, the virtual target in Microsoft’s crosshairs.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/01/20090 comments
As we head towards PDC09 and the commercialization of Windows Azure, Microsoft is apparently cutting the cord on some murky affiliations.
Last Friday, David Treadwell, the corporate VP of Live Platform Services, announced that the Live Framework CTP would end on September 8, 2009:
At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/25/20092 comments
"We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us."
I'm not sure where this quote came from originally, but it was the theme of the excellent but lengthy film in 1999 by Paul Thomas Anderson (of Boogie Nights fame) called Magnolia. The movie starts by re-telling three unexplained events (urban legends) in the 1930's and then interweaves several stories, among them the suffering of whiz kids that excel on game shows, the broken family of a morally corrupt game show host, and a sleazy "Seduce & Destroy" motivational speaker played by Tom Cruise, who attempts to make peace with his estranged, dying father. It sounds grim but if you've got three hours to kill, it's entertaining, thought provoking and well worth it.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/20/20092 comments
People are getting used to leaving their laptops behind and conducting all of their email, Internet and other mobile business on smartphones. Have you seen how fast some middle-aged business types can tap on tiny keyboards?
The trend hasn’t been lost on Microsoft, which announced a major alliance with Nokia on August 12. The companies will work to optimize Mobile Office apps for future Symbian devices, starting with Mobile Office Communicator Mobile in 2010 on the Nokia Eseries, which targets business professionals.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/18/20091 comments
The debate about using an object-oriented framework for Web development versus the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack anchored by a scripting language rages on. Last week, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Joe Stagner, who writes PHP and ASP.NET code and claims to love them both, blogged about his unofficial (non-Microsoft sanctioned) findings:
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/13/20094 comments
Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to get developers -- both native and managed coders -- on board the Windows 7 roll out.
Last week, along with the availability of the Windows 7 RTM (in English) to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, Microsoft released RTM versions of the Windows 7 SDK, Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework and the Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/11/20097 comments
Developers with an MSDN subscription can download the Windows 7 RTM in English today.
When I checked MSDN, a little before noon East Coast time, the Windows 7 release candidate was still the latest download. I'm guessing that the Windows 7 RTM will be made available later today.
Brandon LeBlanc of the Windows Team offered guidance on when developers and everyone else could expect to have access to the Windows 7 RTM in his Windows Team Blog post on July 21.
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Posted by Kathleen Richards on 08/06/20094 comments