MS Open Tech is pleased to announce a new series of videos on Channel 9 that covers MongoDB topics for developers working on Windows Azure and Windows. Each video in the series features insights from one of the MongoDB experts at 10gen, the leader in MongoDB development, support, training and consulting.
The first three videos in the series have been posted, and more are coming soon. Here’s what has been covered in the first videos in the series …
MongoDB Overview with Jared Rosoff provides a high-level overview of the approach that MongoDB takes for delivering highly scalable read and write operations. If you’re entirely new to MongoDB, this is the place to start. MongoDB is one of many database platforms that are often grouped together as “NoSQL databases,” but each NoSQL database has its own unique philosophy and personality. In this video, you’ll get a feel for MongoDB’s personality.
MongoDB Replica Sets with Sridhar Nanjundeswaran covers the key concept at the heart of MongoDB scalability: replica sets, which are groups of MongoDB servers that can provide high availability and performance even in the face of failures at the network and hardware level. MongoDB replica sets are easy to set up and deploy, and Sridhar sets up a simple replica set from scratch and then shows how it gracefully handles various failover scenarios
MongoDB C#/.NET Driver with Robert Stam is a hands-on look at how to do common database operations in C# through use of the C#/.NET driver from 10gen. Robert is the developer of the driver, and in this video he shows how to create, read, update and delete documents in MongoDB collections.
MS Open Tech has been working closely with 10gen to improve the MongoDB experience on Windows Azure, and we’re working together on a variety of new initiatives to continue on that path. Future videos will cover the results of that work, as well as advanced topics related to the current videos (for example, Linq support in the C#/.NET driver) and other topics of interest to developers who are working with MongoDB on Windows Azure.
Stay tuned, and if there are MongoDB/Azure topics you’d be interested in seeing covered in this series please let us know!
Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software, SAP AG, and WSO2 have submitted a proposal to OASIS to begin the formal standardization process for OData. You can find all the details here, and OData architect Pablo Castro also provides some context for this announcement over on the OData.org blog. It’s an exciting time for the OData community!
OData is a REST-based web protocol for querying and updating data, and it’s built on standardized technologies such as HTTP, Atom/XML, and JSON. If you’re not already familiar with OData, the OData.org web site is the best place to learn more.
Many organizations are already working with OData, and it has proven to be a useful and flexible technology for enabling interoperability between disparate data sources, applications, services, and clients. Chris Woodruff has a blog post this week that lists many OData implementations, and as he explained in a post last week, “By having data that is easy to consume and understand organizations can allow their customers and partners (via the developers that build the solutions using one or more of the available OData libraries) to leverage the value of curated data that the organization owns.” Many organizations are already pursuing that vision – as Ralf Handl of SAP AG told us at a recent OData meetup, “my job is relatively simple: I want to put OData into all of our products.”
We support OData in many Microsoft products and services, and the list is growing longer all the time. This includes OData consumers such as Microsoft Excel (via the free PowerPivot add-in) as well as OData producers such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Windows Server supports OData, and Windows Azure provides OData support in many areas, including Windows Azure Storage Table Service, Windows Azure Marketplace, and ACS Management Service. We’re also making many Microsoft data sources available in OData format. For example:
A variety of OSS technologies can benefit from OData support, and our team has delivered tools to make it easy for OSS developers to expose data as OData from a variety of platforms. Earlier this year we announced Open Source OData Tools for MySQL and PHP Developers, including the OData Producer Library for PHP and the OData Connector for MySQL. We’re continuing to work closely with various OSS communities on OData support, and we’ll be releasing information soon on new ways to provide OData feeds from popular OSS frameworks and applications.
OData’s query syntax is straightforward from a developer’s perspective. For example, here’s a query that you can use in any browser to return the count of the number of products in the sample Northwind database OData feed on OData.org:
http://services.odata.org/Northwind/Northwind.svc/Products/$count
In a typical application, that query would be generated behind the scenes, and the returned result would be rendered in a nicely formatted manner as appropriate for the particular application.
To enable those sorts of scenarios, developers need OData support for the languages, framework, and tools that they’re already using. Many developer tools already offer OData support. Here are a few examples:
As you can see, the OData ecosystem is growing, and awareness of OData is growing with it. At the OData meetup earlier this year, we heard from many people who are finding innovative ways to use OData in their organizations to improve customer service, enable new scenarios, and increase efficiency. Anant Jhingran of APIgee stated in his presentation at the meetup that “if data isn’t your core business, then you should give it away.” It was a provocative statement, and for those who share that philosophy, OData is a great tool for making it easier to share data.
If you’re interested in implementing OData or contributing to the OData standard, now’s the time to get involved. You can work with the odata.org community to help drive awareness and share implementation experiences, or join the OASIS OData technical committee (OData TC) to contribute to the standard. The OData TC will be a vibrant and diverse group of people – just like the community who got us here today – working together to open up data sources in a standardized way. As Pablo stated in his blog post, the main value of OData is not any particular design choice, but the fact that enough people agree to the same pattern, thus removing friction from sharing data across independent producers and consumers. The first TC call will be in late July, so there’s still plenty of time to get involved if you’d like to be part of the team that will be helping OData evolve.
Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard to get OData to this important step on the journey to standardization! We’re looking forward to working with the community to develop OData into a formal standard through OASIS.
Doug MahughSenior Technical EvangelistMicrosoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. has just published an initial open source prototype implementation of HTTP Speed+Mobility. The prototype is available for download on html5labs.com, where you will also find pointers to the source code.
The IETF HTTPbis workgroup met in Paris at the end of March to discuss how to approach HTTP 2.0 in order to meet the needs of an ever larger and more diverse web. It would be hard to downplay the importance of this work: it will impact how billions of devices communicate over the internet for years to come, from low-powered sensors, to mobile phones, to tablets, to PCs, to network switches, to the largest datacenters on the planet.
Prior to that IETF meeting, Jean Paoli and Sandeep Singhal announced in their post to the Microsoft Interoperability blog that Microsoft has contributed the HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal as input to that conversation.
The prototype implements the websocket-based session layer described in the proposal, as well as parts of the multiplexing logic incorporated from Google’s SPDY proposal. The code does not support header compression yet, but it will in upcoming refreshes.
The open source software comprises a client implemented in C# and a server implemented in Node.js running on Windows Azure. The client is a command line tool that establishes a connection to the server and can download a set of web pages that include html files, scripts, and images. We have made available on the server some static versions of popular web pages like http://www.microsoft.com and http://www.ietf.org, as well as a handful of simpler test pages.
We invite you to inspect the open source code directly in order to familiarize yourself with how everything works; we have also made available a readme file at this location describing the various options available, as well as the meaning of the output returned to the console.
So, please download the prototype, try it out, and let us know what you think: every developer is a stakeholder in the HTTP 2.0 standardization process. We look forward to hearing your feedback, and to applying it to upcoming iterations of the prototype code.
Adalberto Foresti Senior Program Manager Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
The past few weeks have been very busy in our offices as we announced the creation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Now that the dust has settled it’s time for us to resume our regular cadence in releasing code, and we are happy to share with you the very first deliverable from our new company: a new and significant iteration of our work on Redis on Windows, the open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store.
The major improvements in this latest version involve the process of saving data on disk. Redis on Linux uses an OS feature called Fork/Copy On Write. This feature is not available on Windows, so we had to find a way to be able to mimic the same behavior without changing completely the save on disk process so as to avoid any future integration issues with the Redis code.
The version we released today implements the Copy On Write process at the application level: instead of relying on the OS we added code to Redis so that some data structures are duplicated in such a way that Redis can still serve requests from clients while saving data on disk (thus achieving the same effect of Fork/Copy On Write does automatically on Linux).
You can find the code for this new version on the new MS Open Tech repository in GitHub, which is currently the place to work on the Windows version of Redis as per guidance from Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original author of the project. We will also continue working with the community to create a solid Windows port.
We consider this not to be production ready code, but a solid code base to be shared with the community to solicit feedback: as such, while we pursue stabilization, we are keeping the older version as default/stable on the GitHub repository. To try out the new code, please go to the bksavecow branch.
In the next few weeks we plan to extensively test the code so that developers can use it for more serious testing. In the meantime, we will keep looking at the ‘save on disk’ process to find out if there are other opportunities to make the code perform even better. We will promote the bksavecow branch to master as soon as we (and you!) are confident the code is stable.
Please send your feedback, file suggestions and issues to our GitHub repository. We look forward to further iterations and to working with the Redis community at large to make the Windows experience even better.
Claudio Caldato
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
Starting today, the Metro style theme for JQuery Mobile, the popular open source mobile user interface framework, is available for download on GitHub and can be used as a NuGet package in Visual Studio.
The theme enables HTML5 pages to adapt automatically to the Metro design style when rendered on Windows Phone 7.5. The Metro style theme is open source and available for download here. This new Metro style theme’s development was sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. working closely with Sergei Grebnov, an Apache Cordova committer and jQuery Mobile developer.
The theme looks just gorgeous, doesn’t it?
The CSS and Javascript theme adapts to the current theme used in Windows Phone and applies the right styling to the jQuery Mobile controls.This allows mobile HTML5 web sites and hybrid applications to naturally integrate into the Windows Phone Metro style experience. This offers developers the choice of rapidly integrating the theme into their existing application but also to contribute to this open source project through GitHub.
You can see an extensive demo of the theme on this page and you can learn more on this site where we are publishing new articles, references and source code sample for developing with Apache Cordova and the Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile.
This is another milestone in our continuous engagement with the community. Our team has been working closely with the Windows Phone division to support the mobile HTML5 and JavaScript open source communities over the last year to bring popular open source projects to Windows Phone:
We believe it is important for developers to have choices when targeting Windows Phone, and we also want them to be able to deliver a good experience to the users of their applications, especially when making the choice of using Web standards (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) to target multiple mobile platforms by picking solutions such as Apache Cordova.
To do so, developers already enjoy a selection of Apache Cordova Plugins that give their application a Windows Phone touch such as Social Share, Bing Map launcher and Live Tile. Now developers can use the new open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile to give their mobile apps and websites the Metro style look and feel, and offer the final users an experience similar to the one they get with native applications.
As usual we are very interested in hearing from developers and gathering feedback about the experience of developing HTML5-based applications and websites on Windows Phone. Let us know what other features, tools and frameworks you’d like to see.
Abu Obeida Bakhach Program Manager Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
I am really excited to be able to share with you today that Microsoft has announced a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., to advance the company’s investment in openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source.
My existing Interoperability Strategy team will form the nucleus of this new subsidiary, and I will serve as President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
The team has worked closely with many business groups on numerous standards initiatives across Microsoft, including the W3C’s HTML5, IETF’s HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS, and in many open source environments such as Node.js, MongoDB and Phonegap/Cordova.
We help provide open source building blocks for interoperable cloud services and collaborate on cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS; support developer choice of programming languages to enable Node.js, PHP and Java in addition to .NET in Windows Azure; and work with the PhoneGap/Cordova and jQuery Mobile and other open source communities to support Windows Phone.
It is important to note that Microsoft and our business groups will continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a variety of ways, including working with many open source foundations such as Outercurve Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and many standards organizations. Microsoft Open Technologies is further demonstration of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to interoperability, greater openness, and to working with open source communities.
Today, thousands of open standards are supported by Microsoft and many open source environments including Linux, Hadoop, MongoDB, Drupal, Joomla and others, run on our platform.
The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined manner. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft’s proprietary development processes and the company’s open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities.
This structure will make it easier and faster to iterate and release open source software, participate in existing open source efforts, and accept contributions from the community. Over time the community will see greater interaction with the open standards and open source worlds.
As a result of these efforts, customers will have even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments.
I look forward to sharing more on all this in the months ahead, as well as to working not only with the existing open source developers and standards bodies we work with now, but with a range of new ones.
Thanks,
Jean
BuildNewGames.com, a new site to make building web games easier for developers using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, is now live!
Along with a new partnership with Bocoup, Microsoft announced @ JSConf the launch of this new site.
You can read the post from Justin Garret, Senior Product Manager in the IE team, announcing the partnership and the new site launch.
Over the next few months, the site will feature 50 tutorials ranging from the coding basics of games all the way to how to make money across a range of platforms. Follow @buildnewgames or @IE for the latest.
Developers want to be able to write code that works reliably in all modern browsers, including ie10/9, Chrome and Firefox, along with mobile browsers, resulting in a complex test matrix and higher development costs. Through standards bodies leadership and practical learning, Microsoft wants to help Web developers have an easier time targeting various browsers at once, allowing them to concentrate on innovating and delivering an outstanding Web and gaming experience to final users.
BuildNewGames.com already features technical articles on Animation, Compositing, Graphics, Mobile, SVG, Sprites, Tools, WebSockets.
Developing games is becoming lots of fun again!
This week begins face to face meetings at the IETF on how to approach HTTP 2.0 and improve the Internet. How the industry moves forward together on the next version of HTTP – how every application and service on the web communicates today – can positively impact user experience, operational and environmental costs, and even the battery life of the devices you carry around.
As part of this discussion of HTTP 2.0, Microsoft will submit to the IETF a proposal for “HTTP Speed+Mobility." The approach we propose focuses on all the web’s end users – emphasizing performance improvements and security while at the same time accounting for the important needs of mobile devices and applications.
Why HTTP 2.0?
Today’s HTTP has historical limitations based on what used to be good enough for the web. Because of this, the HTTPbis working group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has approved a new charter to define HTTP “2.0” to address performance limitations with HTTP. The working group’s explicit goal is to keep compatibility with existing applications and scenarios, specifically to preserve the existing semantics of HTTP.
Why this approach?
Improving HTTP starts with speed. There is already broad consensus about the need to make web browsing much faster.
We think that apps—not just browsers—should get faster too. More and more, apps are how people access web services, in addition to their browser.
Improving HTTP should also make mobile better. For example, people want their mobile devices to have better battery life. HTTP 2.0 can help decrease the power consumption of network access. Mobile devices also give people a choice of networks with different costs and bandwidth limits. Embedded sensors and clients face similar issues. HTTP 2.0 can make this better.
This approach includes keeping people and their apps in control of network access. Specifically, the client remains in control over the content that it receives from the web. This extends a key attribute of the existing HTTP protocol that has served the Web well. The app or browser is in the best position to assess what the user is currently doing and what data is already locally available. This approach enables apps and browsers to innovate more freely, delivering the most relevant content to the user based on the user’s actual needs.
We think that rapid adoption of HTTP 2.0 is important. To make that happen, HTTP 2.0 needs to retain as much compatibility as possible with the existing Web infrastructure. Awareness of HTTP is built into nearly every switch, router, proxy, load balancer, and security system in use today. If the new protocol is “HTTP” in name only, upgrading all of this infrastructure would take too long. By building on existing web standards, the community can set HTTP 2.0 up for rapid adoption throughout the web.
Done right, HTTP 2.0 can help people connect their devices and applications to the Internet fast, reliably, and securely over a number of diverse networks, with great battery life and low cost.
How?
The HTTP Speed+Mobility proposal starts from both the Google SPDY protocol (a separate submission to the IETF for this discussion) and the work the industry has done around WebSockets.
SPDY has done a great job raising awareness of web performance and taking a “clean slate” approach to improving HTTP to make the Web faster. The main departures from SPDY are to address the needs of mobile devices and applications.
Looking ahead
We are looking forward to a vigorous, open discussion within the IETF around the design of HTTP 2.0. We are excited by the promise of an HTTP 2.0 that will serve the Internet for decades to come. As the effort progresses, we will continue to provide updates on this blog. Consistent with our other web standards engagements, we will also provide early implementations of the HTTP 2.0 specification on the HTML5 Labs site.
- Sandeep Singhal, Group Program Manager, Windows Core Networking
- Jean Paoli, General Manager, Interoperability Strategy
I am excited to share some great news about how we are opening up the SQL Server data platform even further with expanded interoperability support through new tools that allow customers to modernize their infrastructure while maximizing existing investments and extending virtually any data anywhere.
The SQL Server team today introduced several tools that enable interoperability with SQL Server 2012.
These tools help developers to build secure, highly available and high performance applications for SQL Server in .NET, C/C++, Java and PHP, on-premises and in the cloud.
These new tools include a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client, a SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, backward compatibility with ADO.Net and the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 and PHP Driver 3.0.
You can find more information on all this goodness on the SQL Server blog here.
The success of the recent Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards ceremony was buoyed by the move of its Drupal-based website hosted on internal Linux servers to one hosted on Windows Azure.
The SAG Awards site is a highly visible, high-traffic website running on Drupal. Hosting it on Azure provides a scalable, public cloud environment for SAG team. They can tune up or down the compute and storage requirements according to expected website loads, thereby getting a more scalable, manageable and cost-effective solution for running their site.
SAG also gets the benefits of PaaS – no need to manage the operating system patches, virtual machine images, network topology etc. This is particularly useful for SAG as the site has stable traffic for nine months, but which spikes for the three months from when award nominations open to the night of the event itself.
The SAG Awards site was previously hosted on internal Linux boxes. In previous years, performance was negatively impacted by site outages and slow performance during peak-usage days, with SAG having to consistently upgrade their hardware to meet demand for those days. That upgraded hardware was then not optimally used during the rest of the year.
The usage pattern for the SAG Awards site fluctuates, but spikes between November and February when the site is used for SAG award nominations in early November to the actual announcement of nominations in in mid-December. Peak usage is on the night of the awards ceremony where multiple uploads of pictures, news articles, and site visits happen.
What is even more impressive is that both visits and page views almost doubled on the night of the event. In 2011, some 222,816 people visited the site and 434,743 pages were viewed, while this year there were some 325,303 site visits and 789,310 page views, reflecting the stability and performance of the site on Windows Azure.
Microsoft started working with the SAG Awards team in May 2011, when their CIO Erin Griffin joined the Interoperability Executive Council (IEC) - founded by Microsoft in 2006 with a goal of identifying the industry’s greatest areas of need and to work together to create solutions - and attended a council meeting.
In September Mike Story, SAG’s chief architect, attended an IEC work stream meeting and asked for Microsoft’s support in porting the site to Azure. The Business Platform Division’s Customer Experience (CAT) team, the Interoperability group and Windows Azure all started working with SAG in early October and, on December 20, 2011, the site went live on Windows Azure.
“We moved to Windows Azure after looking at the services it offered,” said Erin Griffin, CIO at SAG. “Understanding the best usage scenario for us took time and effort, but with help from Microsoft, we successfully moved our site to Windows Azure and the biggest traffic day for us went off with flying colors.”
This is just one real world outcome from the IEC, which has counseled Microsoft on many interoperability topics and introduced a number of real world scenarios for discussion. The IEC, working together with Microsoft, has developed a number of solutions for these scenarios, with this one for the SAG Awards being the latest.
Curt Peterson, Microsoft’s Principal Group Program Manager, BPD Customer Experience, notes that the success of Sunday’s SAG Awards ceremony underscores how Windows Azure is a scalable, open Cloud platform ready for production use. “We are committed to making it easier for all our customers to use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure,” he says.
To enable more interoperability scenarios, Microsoft has released today two open source tools that provide support for the Open Data Protocol (OData) for PHP and MySQL developers working on any platform.
The growing popularity of OData is creating new opportunities for developers working with a wide variety of platforms and languages. An ever increasing number of data sources are being exposed as OData producers, and a variety of OData consumers can be used to query these data sources via OData’s simple REST API.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the latest releases of two open source tools that help PHP developers implement OData producer support quickly and easily on Windows and Linux platforms:
These tools are written in platform-agnostic PHP, with no dependencies on .NET.
OData Producer Library for PHP
Last September, my colleague Claudio Caldato announced the first release of the Odata Producer Library for PHP, an open-source cross-platform PHP library available on Codeplex. This library has evolved in response to community feedback, and the latest build (Version 1.1) includes performance optimizations, finer-grained control of data query behavior, and comprehensive documentation.
OData can be used with any data source described by an Entity Data Model (EDM). The structure of relational databases, XML files, spreadsheets, and many other data sources can be mapped to an EDM, and that mapping takes the form of a set of metadata to describe the entities, associations and properties of the data source. The details of EDM are beyond the scope of this blog, but if you’re curious here’s a simple example of how EDM can be used to build a conceptual model of a data source.
The OData Producer Library for PHP is essentially an open source reference implementation of OData-relevant parts of the .NET framework’s System.Data.Services namespace, allowing developers on non-.NET platforms to more easily build OData providers. To use it, you define your data source through the IDataServiceMetadataProvider (IDSMP) interface, and then you can define an associated implementation of the IDataServiceQueryProvider (IDSQP) interface to retrieve data for OData queries. If your data source contains binary objects, you can also implement the optional IDataServiceStreamProvider interface to handle streaming of blobs such as media files.
Once you’ve deployed your implementation, the flow of processing an OData client request is as follows:
These processing steps are the same in .NET as they are in the OData Producer Library for PHP, but in the .NET implementation a LINQ query is generated from the parsed request. PHP doesn’t have support for LINQ, so the producer provides hooks which can be used to generate the PHP expression by default from the parsed expression tree. For example, in the case of a MySQL data source, a MySQL query expression would be generated.
The net result is that PHP developers can offer the same querying functionality on Linux and other platforms as a .NET developer can offer through System.Data.Services. Here are a few other details worth nothing:
For a deeper look at some of the technical details, check out Anu Chandy’s blog post on the OData Producer Library for PHP or see the OData Producer for PHP documentation available on Codeplex.
OData Connector for MySQL
The OData Producer for PHP can be used to expose any type of data source via OData, and one of the most popular data sources for PHP developers is MySQL. A new code generator tool, the open source OData Connector for MySQL, is now available to help PHP developers implement OData producer support for MySQL databases quickly and simply.
The OData Connector for MySQL generates code to implement the interfaces necessary to create an OData feed for a MySQL database. The syntax for using the connector is simple and straightforward:
php MySQLConnector.php /db=mysqldb_name /srvc=odata_service_name /u=db_user_name /pw=db_password /h=db_host_name
The MySQLConnector generates an EDMX file containing metadata that describes the data source, and then prompts the user for whether to continue with code generation or stop to allow manual editing of the metadata before the code generation step.
EDMX is the Entity Data Model XML format, and an EDMX file contains a conceptual model, a storage model, and the mapping between those models. In order to generate an EDMX from a MySQL database, the OData Connector for MySQL needs to be able to do database schema introspection, and it does this through the Doctrine DBAL (Database Abstraction Layer). You don’t need to understand the details of EDMX in order to use the OData Connector for MySQL, but if you’re curious see the .edmx File Overview article on MSDN.
If you’re familiar with EDMX and wish to have very fine-grained control of the exposed OData feeds, you can edit the metadata as shown in the diagram, but this step is not necessary. You can also set access rights for specific entities in the DataService::InitializeService method after the code has been generated, as described below.
If you stopped the process to edit the EDMX, one additional command is needed to complete the generation of code for the interfaces used by the OData Producer Library for PHP:
php MySQLConnector.php /srvc=odata_service_name
Note that the generated code will expose all of the tables in the MySQL database as OData feeds. In a typical production scenario, however, you would probably want to fine-tune the interface code to remove entities that aren’t appropriate for OData feeds. The simplest way to do this is to use the DataServiceConfiguration object in the DataService::InitializeService method to set the access rights to NONE for any entities that should not be exposed. For example, you may be creating an OData provider for a CMS, and you don’t want to allow OData queries against the table of users, or tables that are only used for internal purposes within your CMS.
For more detailed information about working with the OData Connector for MySQL, refer to the user guide available on the project site on Codeplex.
These tools are open-source (BSD license), so you can download them and start using them immediately at no cost, on Linux, Windows, or any PHP platform. Our team will continue to work to enable more OData scenarios, and we’re always interested in your thoughts. What other tools would you like to see available for working with OData?
I am pleased to announce the beta release of the Windows Phone Toolkit for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Built by Microsoft as an open source project, this toolkit provides developers with a speed dial that lets them quickly connect and integrate Windows Phone applications with AWS (S3, SimpleDB, and SQS Cloud Services)
To create cloud-connected mobile applications, developers want to have choice and be able to reuse their assets and skills. For developers familiar with AWS, whether they’ve been developing for Android, iOS or any other technology, this toolkit will allow them to comfortably port their applications to the Windows Phone Platform.
Terry Wise, Director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services, welcomes the release of the Windows Phone Toolkit for Amazon Web Services to the Developer community.
“Our approach with AWS is to provide developers with choice and flexibility to build applications the way they want and give them unlimited storage, bandwidth and computing resources, while paying only for what they use. We welcome Windows Phone developers to the AWS community and look forward to providing customers with new ways to build and deploy Windows Phone applications,” he says.
Jean Paoli, General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, adds that Windows Phone was engineered from the get-go to be a Cloud-friendly phone.
“The release of the Windows Phone Toolkit for AWS Beta proves that Microsoft’s goal of building a Cloud-friendly phone is true across vendor boundaries. It literally takes minutes to create a Cloud-ready application in C# with this toolkit. We look forward to this toolkit eventually resulting in many more great apps in the rapidly growing Windows Phone marketplace,” he said.
Developers can download the toolkit , along with the complete source code under the Apache license. A Getting Started guide can be found on the Windows Phone Interoperability Bridges site along with other resources.
And as always your feedback on how to improve this beta is welcome!