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!
We are excited to be attending and participating at Node Summit in San Francisco this week.
Among those Microsoft staffers on site are Server & Tools Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie - who participated on a panel about Platform as a Service this morning and also gave a keynote address - and Gianugo Rabellino, the Senior Director for Open Source Communities, who was on a panel discussing the importance of cross-platform.
You can read more about Scott's keynote on the Windows Azure blog here.
As you may know, in December Microsoft announced that it was adding support for Node.js to the Windows Azure platform, which allows developers to easily take advantage of the powerful capabilities of Windows Azure with simple tools and a new open source SDK.
As this work continues inside of Microsoft as well as with the Node.js community and our partner ecosystem, new and exciting capabilities are coming available allowing Node.js developers to have great experiences on the Windows platform.
Today, during his keynote, Scott Guthrie demonstrated how easy it is to get up and running with Node.js on Windows and Windows Azure, while our partners at Cloud9 showcased new tooling experiences that provide even greater flexibility to Node.js for developers who want to build for Windows Azure.
Microsoft has been closely partnering with Joyent for some time now to port Node.js to Windows. We have built an IO abstraction library with them that can be used to make the code run on both Linux and Windows.
We also recently released the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source, available on Github. These libraries are the perfect complement to our recently announced contributions to Node.js and provide a better Node.js experience on Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Developer Center provides documentation, tutorial, samples and how-to guides to get started with Node.js on Windows Azure.
The Joyent team also recently updated the Node Package Manager for Windows (NPM) code to allow use of NPM on Windows. NPM is an essential tool for Node.js developers so now having support for it on Windows we have a better development experience on Windows.
We are also working with the Joyent team on improving the development experience by leveraging the power of Microsoft Development tools and documentation that will make easier for developers to use Node.js APIs.
And, relatedly, we have also been working closely with 10Gen and the MongoDB community in the past few months, and MongoDB already runs on Windows Azure. If you’re using the popular combination of Node.js and MongoDB, a simple straightforward install process will get you started on Windows Azure. You can learn more here.
Our interest in, and support for Node.js is just one of the ways in which Windows Azure is continuing on its roadmap of embracing Open Source Software tools developers know and love, by working collaboratively with the open source community to build together a better cloud that supports all developers and their need for interoperable solutions based on developer choice.
As Microsoft continues to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities.
We also clearly understand that there are many different technologies that developers may want to use to build applications in the cloud: they want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.
All of this delivers on our ongoing commitment to provide an experience where developers can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know, enable greater customer flexibility for managing and scaling databases, and making it easier for customers to get started and use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure.
Good news for all you Java developers out there: I am happy to share with you the availability of Windows Azure libraries for Java that provide Java-based access to the functionality exposed via the REST API in Windows Azure Service Bus.
You can download the Windows Azure libraries for Java from GitHub.
This is an early step as we continue to make Windows Azure a great cloud platform for many languages, including .NET and Java. If you’re using Windows Azure Service Bus from Java, please let us know your feedback on how these libraries are working for you and how we can improve them. Your feedback is very important to us!
You may refer to Windows Azure Java Developer Center for related information.
Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers and we believe these libraries will enable Java applications to more easily connect to Windows Azure, in particular the Service Bus, making it easier for applications written on any platform to interoperate with each another through Windows Azure.
Thanks,
Ram Jeyaraman
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft’s Interoperability Group
As Microsoft continues to deliver on its commitment to Interoperability, I have good news on the Open Source Software front: today, the OData Library for Objective-C project was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery.
This means that OData4ObjC, the OData client for iOS, is now a full, community-supported Open Source project.
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for communications between client devices and RESTful web services, simplifying the building of queries and interpreting the responses from the server. It specifies how a web service can state its semantics such that a generic library can express those semantics to an application, meaning that applications do not need to be custom-written for a single source.
The Outercurve Foundation already hosts 19 OSS projects and, as Gallery Manager Spyros Sakellariadis notes in his blog post, this is the gallery’s second OData project, the first being the OData Validation project contributed last August.
“With this new assignment, we expect to involve open source community developers even more in the enhancement of seminal OData libraries,” he said.
Microsoft Senior Program Manager for OData Arlo Belshee notes in his blog post that the Open Sourcing of the OData client library for Objective C will enable first-class support of this important platform. “Combined with exiting support for Android (Odata4j, OSS and Windows Phone (in the odata-sdk by Microsoft), this release provides strong, uniform support for all major phones,” he said.
In assigning ownership of the code to the Outercurve Foundation, the project leads are opening it up for community contributions and support. “They firmly believe that the direction and quality of the project are best managed by users in the community, and are eager to develop a broad base of contributors and followers,” Belshee said.
As Microsoft continues to build and provide Interoperability solutions, Sakellariadis thanked the Open Source communities for their continued support, noting that together “we can all contribute to achieving a goal of device and cloud interoperability, of true openness.”
Congratulations to all the people involved in the PhoneGap community for the recent release of version 1.3 of their HTML5 open source mobile framework.
This release includes many new features, and you can find more details here. You may remember that we announced back in Sept that Microsoft was helping to bring Windows Phone support in PhoneGap: I am happy to say we can now checkthis box!
We’re also pleased to note that all features in PhoneGap 1.3 are now supported for Windows Phone, as you can see on their site here.
Also, beyond the core PhoneGap features, developers can enjoy a selection of PhoneGap plugins that support social networks - including Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Twitter - and a solid integration into Visual StudioExpress for Windows Phone.
We have also developed further plugins to give HTML5 developers a feel for Windows Phone’s unique features like Live Tile Update and Bing Maps Search.
Please check out Jesse MacFadyen’s blog, PhoneGap’s dev lead, on his experiences developing PhoneGap on Windows Phone.
For more technical details of using the framework, see Glen and Jesse’s technical walk thru blogs. For a quick a spin of what PhoneGap and Visual Studio allow you to do, see this WP7 and Android camera app created in 3 minutes! Bits are located here; plugins are here.
Looking ahead:
As mentioned in PhoneGap’s announcement blog post, the next PhoneGap 1.4 release will be from the Cordova incubation project at Apache. We at Microsoft are proud to be members of this project and to offer technical resources. We welcome the involvement of Adobe, IBM and RIM and look forward to collaboratively growing PhoneGap at its new home in Apache while helping evolve an open web for any device.
Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 in IE9 has been instrumental in achieving this level of support. We are also building on our HTML5 investment through initiatives like bringing jQuery Mobile support as we outlined fewweeks ago. Partnering with open source communities to bring this level of openness continues to be an important goal here at Microsoft.
So, stay tuned for more news on our support for popular mobile open source frameworks on WP7.5!
Abu Obeida Bakhach
Interoperability Strategy Program Manager
Today Microsoft is hosting the Learn Windows Azure broadcast event to demonstrate how easy it is for developers to get started with Windows Azure. Senior Microsoft executives like Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, Mark Russinovich and others will show how easy it is to build scalable cloud applications using Visual Studio. The event is be broadcasting live and will also be available on-demand.
For Java developers interested in using Windows Azure, one particularly interesting segment of the day is a new Channel 9 video with GigaSpaces. Their Cloudify offering helps Java developers easily move to their applications, without any code or architecture changes, to Windows Azure
This broadcast follows yesterday’s updates to Windows Azure around an improved developer experience, Interoperability, and scalability. A significant part of that was an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure, which are the latest incremental improvements that deliver on our commitment to working with developer communities so that they can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know.
We understand that developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice. In keeping with that, we are extremely happy to be delivering new and improved experiences for popular OSS technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached on Windows Azure.
You can find all the details on the full Windows Azure news here, and more information on the Open Source updates here.
As Microsoft’s Senior Director of Open Source Communities, I couldn’t be happier to share with you today an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure.
As we continue to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities. We’ve spent a lot of time listening, and we have heard you loud and clear.
We understand that there are many different technologies that developers may want to use to build applications in the cloud. Developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.
In keeping with that goal, we are extremely happy to be delivering new and improved experiences for Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached on Windows Azure.
This delivers on our ongoing commitment to provide an experience where developers can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know, enable greater customer flexibility for managing and scaling databases, and making it easier for customers to get started and use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure.
Here are the highlights of today’s announcements:
In addition to all this great news, the Windows Azure experience has also been significantly improved and streamlined. This includes simplified subscription management and billing, a guaranteed free 90-day trial with quick sign-up process, reduced prices, improved database scale and management, and more. Please see the Windows Azure team blog post for insight on all the great news.
As we enter the holiday season, I’m happy to see Windows Azure continuing on its roadmap of embracing OSS tools developers know and love, by working collaboratively with the open source community to build together a better cloud that supports all developers and their need for interoperable solutions based on developer choice.
In conclusion, I just want to stress that we intend to keep listening, so please send us your feedback. Rest assured we’ll take note!
I am thrilled to announce the availability of a new specification called SQL Database Federations, which describes additional SQL capabilities that enable data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) for scalability in the cloud.
The specification has been released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. With these additional SQL capabilities, the database tier can provide built-in support for data sharding to elastically scale-out the data. This is yet another milestone in our Openness and Interoperability journey.
As you may know, multi-tier applications scale-out their front and middle tiers for elastic scale-out. With this model, as the demand on the application varies, administrators add and remove new instances of the front end and middle tier nodes to handle the workload.
However, the database tier in general does not yet provide built-in support for such an elastic scale-out model and, as a result, applications had to custom build their own data-tier scale-out solution. Using the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification the database tier can now provide built-in support to elastically scale-out the data-tier much like the middle and front tiers of applications. Applications and middle-tier frameworks can also more easily use data sharding and delegate data tier scale-out to database platforms.
Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers, and so the publication of SQL Database Federations specification under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise will enable applications and middle-tier frameworks to more easily use data sharding, and also enable database platforms to provide built-in support for data sharding in order to elastically scale-out the data.
Also of note: The additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification are now supported in Microsoft SQL Azure via the SQL Azure Federation feature.
Here is an example that uses Microsoft SQL Azure to illustrate the use of the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification.
-- Assume the existence of a user database called sales_db. Connect to sales_db and create a federation called orders_federation to scale out the tables: customers and orders. This creates the federation represented as an object in the sales_db database (root database for this federation) and also creates the first federation member of the federation.
CREATE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id BIGINT RANGE) GO
-- Deploy schema to root, create tables in the root database (sales_db)
CREATE TABLE application_configuration(…) GO
…
-- Connect to the federation member and deploy schema to the federation member
USE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id=0) … GO
-- Create federated tables: customers and orders
CREATE TABLE customers (customer_id BIGINT PRIMARY KEY, …) FEDERATED ON (c_id = customer_id) GO
CREATE TABLE orders (…, customer_id BIGINT NOT NULL) FEDERATED ON (c_id = customer_id) GO
-- To scale out customer’s orders, SPLIT the federation data into two federation members
USE FEDERATION ROOT … GO
ALTER FEDERATION orders_federation SPLIT AT(c_id=100) GO
-- Connect to the federation member that contains the value ‘55’
USE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id=55) … GO
-- Query the federation member that contains the value ‘55’
UPDATE orders SET last_order_date=getutcdate()… GO
I am confident that you will find the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification very useful as you consider scaling-out the data-tier of your applications. We welcome your feedback on the SQL Database Federations specification.
Today, the Internet Explorer blog posted an interesting update of an HTML5Labs prototype of the W3C Media Capture API.
A usable and standardized API for media capture means Web sites and apps will be able to access these features in a common way across all browsers in the future.
You can read the full post on the IE blog.
Microsoft's SQL Server team yesterday announced the availability of a preview release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, which allows native developers to access Microsoft SQL Server from Linux operating systems.
For customers with native applications on multi-platform, the existing, reliable and enterprise-class ODBC for Windows driver (a.k.a. SQL Server Native Client, or SNAC) has been ported to the Linux platform.
You can download the driver here.
"In this release, the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux will be a 64-bit driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. We will support SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 with this release of the driver. Notable driver features (in addition to what you would expect in an ODBC driver) include support for the Kerberos authentication protocol, SSL and client-side UTF-8 encoding. This release also brings proven and effective tools and the BCP and SQLCMD utilities to the Linux world,"said Shekhar Joshi, a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver For Linux team.
This is another example of Microsoft and the SQL team's commitment to interoperability. You can read Shekhar's full blog post here, while additional information on the first release of Microsoft ODBC Driver for Linux can be found here.
As the HTML5 platform becomes more fully featured, web applications become richer, and scenarios that require server side interaction for trivial tasks become more tedious. This makes deficits in the capabilities of JavaScript as a runtime come into focus.
Microsoft is committed to advancing the JavaScript standard. Through active participation in the Ecma TC39 working group, we have endorsed and pushed for the completion of proposed standards which provide extensions to the intrinsic Math, Number, and String libraries and introduce support for Globalization. We shared the first version of prototypes for the libraries at the standards meeting on the Microsoft campus in July and are shared our Globalization implementation at the standards meeting last week at Apple’s Cupertino campus. In addition, we are also releasing these reference implementations so that the JavaScript community can provide feedback on applying their use in practice.
What’s in this drop
This drop includes extensions to the Math, Number, and String built-in libraries:
Math
String
Number
cosh, sinh, tanh
startsWith, endsWith
isFinite
acosh, asinh, atanh
contains
isNaN
log1p, log2, log10
Repeat
isInteger
sign
toArray
toInteger
trunc
reverse
To illustrate, a simple code sample using some of these functions is included below:
var aStr = "24-"; var aStrR = aStr.reverse(); var num = aStrR * 1; if (Number.isInteger(num)) { console.log("The sign of " + num + " is " + Math.sign(num)); };
This drop also includes an implementation of the evolving Globalization specification. Globalization is the software discipline that makes sure that applications can deal correctly with changes in number and date formats, for example. It’s a part of the localization of an application to run in a local language. With this library, you can show date and numbers in the specified locale and specify collation properties for the purposes of sorting and searching in other languages. You can also set standard date and number formats to use alternate calendars like the Islamic calendar or formats to show currency as a Chinese Yuan. Again, a code sample illustrates below:
var nf = new Globalization.NumberFormat(localeList, { style : "currency", currency : "CNY", currencyDisplay: "symbol", maxmimumFractionDigit: 1 }) nf.format(100); // "¥100.00" var dtf = new Globalization.DateTimeFormat( new Globalization.LocaleList(["ar-SA-u-ca-islamic-nu-latin"]), { weekday : "long", }) dtf.format() // today's date dtf.format(new Date("11/15/2011")); // "الثلاثاء, ١٢ ١٩ ٣٢"
How to get the bits
The prototypes should install automatically if you view the Intrinsics Extensions demo and the Globalization demo. Or to install the prototype, run the MSIs found here.
Note that as with all previous releases of HTML5 labs, this is an unsupported component with an indefinite lifetime. This should be used for evaluation purposes only and should not be used for production level applications.
Providing Feedback
We’ve created a couple of sample applications so you can see what this functionality enables. Once you’ve installed the bits, view the Intrinsics Extensions demo and the Globalization demo to see the APIs in action.
As usual, we encourage you to play with the sample apps, download the prototype, and develop your own app to see how it feels. Once you’ve tried it out, let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions. We look forward to improving JavaScript and making it ever easier to build great web applications using standard APIs.
Thanks for your interest!
Claudio Caldato, Adalberto Foresti – Interoperability Strategy Team
Hello web and mobile developers!
As you probably noticed, jQuery Mobile version 1.0 was announced this week. We are pleased to use this exciting occasion to reinforce our commitment to supporting popular open source mobile frameworks.
Of the most recent activities, I want to highlight the work done to supporting PhoneGap by adding support for Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), and now we are moving up the stack to improve support of jQuery Mobile on Windows Phone 7.5.
As you probably know, jQuery Mobile framework is a Javascript HTML5-based user interface system for mobile device platforms, built on the jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.
While today’s version 1 and the recent RC releases contain many features, we wanted to take a minute and highlight the collaboration we started with the jQuery Mobile team. In the last few weeks we have focused our attention on supporting Kin Blas and others in the community to improving the performance on Windows Phone 7.5.
In particular, as the RC3 blog published earlier this week outlines, Windows Phone performance has improved quite dramatically as shown by the two showcase apps:
The jQuery team has additional performance optimization tips for Windows Phone in the change log that saves additional perf time in certain scenarios.
We are pretty encouraged with this progress, and will continue working with community to bring higher levels of performance and support for jQuery features to Windows Phone... stay tuned, and congratulations again to the jQuery Mobile Team!