Interoperability @ Microsoft

MongoDB Experts video series

Doug Mahugh — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:55:11 GMT

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!

OData submitted to OASIS for standardization

Doug Mahugh — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:31:00 GMT

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:

The OData feed from Microsoft Research can be used to query against publications, projects, events, and other entities.
The Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket offers OData feeds for Business, Government, Health Science, Retail, and many other categories.

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:

Microsoft Visual Studio offers comprehensive OData support through WCF Data Services.
OData support is provided by OSS SDKs for iPhone, Android, and other frameworks.
Telerik has developed a variety of developer tools and services for creating OData consumers and producers.
ComponentOne offers OData support in their BarChart and LineChart controls.
Validation is a critical step in creating robust OData services, and the Outercurve Foundation provides an OData Service Validation Tool that can be used to test implementations against the OData spec.
The OData4j project is an open-source toolkit to help Java developers add OData support to their applications and services.

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 Mahugh
Senior Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

News from MS Open Tech: Initial HTTP Speed+Mobility Open Source Prototype Now Available for Download

Adalberto Foresti [MS OPEN TECH] — Fri, 11 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT

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

Here’s to the first release from MS Open Tech: Redis on Windows

Claudio Caldato — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:01:00 GMT

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.

More news from MS Open Tech: announcing the open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile

Abu Obeida — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:00:00 GMT

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:

A few months ago, we sponsored the development of full Windows Phone support for PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova), the open source framework that lets applications be built for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other mobile platforms using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.
At the same time significant improvements were brought to jQuery Mobile (read more about this in our previous blog post): feedback from the community has been great and was partly responsible for our decision to expand our engagement with jQuery Mobile and sponsor this work.

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

Announcing one more way Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities

Jean Paoli — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:00:00 GMT

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 to help developers write cross-browser code

Olivier Bloch — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:38:00 GMT

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!

Speed and Mobility: An Approach for HTTP 2.0 to Make Mobile Apps and the Web Faster

Jean Paoli — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:00:00 GMT

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

New Interoperability Solutions for SQL Server 2012

Peter Galli — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:30:00 GMT

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.

SAG Awards Drupal Website Moves to Windows Azure

Peter Galli — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:56:00 GMT

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.

Open Source OData Tools for MySQL and PHP Developers

Doug Mahugh — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:01:51 GMT

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:

The OData Producer Library for PHP, an open source server library that helps PHP developers expose data sources for querying via OData. (This is essentially a PHP port of certain aspects of the OData functionality found in System.Data.Services.)
The OData Connector for MySQL, an open source command-line tool that generates an implementation of the OData Producer Library for PHP from a specified MySQL database.

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:

The OData server receives the submitted request, which includes the URI to the target resource and may also include $filter, $orderby, $expand and $skiptoken clauses to be applied to the target resource.
The OData server parses and validates the headers associated with the request.
The OData server parses the URI to resource, parses the query options to check their syntax, and verifies that the current service configuration allows access to the specified resource.
Once all of the above steps are completed, the OData Producer for PHP library code is ready to process the request via your custom IDataServiceQueryProvider and return the results to the client.

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:

In C#/.NET, the System.Linq.Expressions namespace contains classes for building expression trees, and the OData Producer Library for PHP has its own classes for this purpose.
The IDSQP interface in the OData Producer Library for PHP differs slightly from .NET’s IDSQP interface (due to the lack of support for LINQ in PHP).
System.Data.Services uses WCF to host the OData provider service, whereas the OData Producer Library for PHP uses a web server (IIS or Apache) and urlrewrite to host the service.
The design of Writer (to serialize the returned query results) is the same for both .NET and PHP, allowing serialization of either .NET objects or PHP objects as Atom/JSON.

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?

Beta of Windows Phone Toolkit for Amazon Web Services released

Adalberto Foresti [MS OPEN TECH] — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:00:00 GMT

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!

Microsoft at Node Summit

Peter Galli — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:45:00 GMT

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.

Windows Azure Libraries for Java Available, including support for Service Bus

Ram Jeyaraman — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:03:00 GMT

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

Open Source OData Library for Objective-C Project Moves to Outercurve Foundation

Peter Galli — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

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.”

Full Support for PhoneGap on Windows Phone is Now Complete!

Abu Obeida — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:02:00 GMT

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 check
this 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 Studio
Express 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 few
weeks 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

Azure + Java = Cloud Interop: New Channel 9 Video with GigaSpaces Posted

M. Sawicki — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:10:00 GMT

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.

Openness Update for Windows Azure

Gianugo Rabellino — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:01:00 GMT

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:

We are releasing the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source, available immediately 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. Head to the Windows Azure Developer Center for documentation, tutorial, samples and how-to guides to get you started with Node.js on Windows Azure.
We will also be delivering the Node package manager for Windows (npm) code to allow use of npm on Windows for simpler and faster Node.js configuration and development. Windows developers can now use NPM to install Node modules and take advantage of its automated handling of module dependencies and other details.
To build on our recent announcement about Apache Hadoop, we are making available a limited preview of the Apache Hadoop based distribution service on Windows Azure. This enables Hadoop apps to be deployed in hours instead of days, and includes Hadoop Javascript libraries and powerful insights on data through the ODBC driver and Excel plugin for Hive. Read more about this on the Windows Azure team blog. If you are interested in trying this preview, please complete the form here with details of your Big Data scenario. Microsoft will issue an access code to select customers based on usage scenarios.
For all of you NoSQL fans, we have been working closely with 10Gen and the MongoDB community in the past few months, and if you were at at MongoSV last week you have already seen MongoDB running on Windows Azure. Head out to the 10Gen website to find downloads, documentation and other document-oriented goodies. If you’re using the popular combination of Node.js and MongoDB, a simple straightforward install process will get you started on Windows Azure. Learn more here.
For Java developers, take a look at the updated Java support, including a new and revamped Eclipse plugin. The new features are too many to list for this post, but you can count on a much better experience thanks to new and exciting functionality such as support for sticky sessions and configuration of remote Java debugging. Head over to the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more.
Does your application need advanced search capabilities? If so, the chances are you either use or are evaluating Solr, and so the good news for you is that we just released a set of code tools and configuration guidelines to get the most out of Solr running on Windows Azure. We invite developers to try out the tools, configuration and sample code for Solr tuned for searching commercial and publisher sites. The published guidance showcases how to configure and host Solr/Lucene in Windows Azure using multi-instance replication for index-serving and single-instance for index generation with a persistent index mounted in Windows Azure storage.
Another great example of OSS on Windows Azure is the use of Memcached server, the popular open-source caching technology, to improve the performance of dynamic web applications. Maarten Balliauw recently blogged about his MemcacheScaffolder, which simplifies management of Memcached servers on the Windows Azure platform. That blog post is only focused on PHP, but the same approach can be used by other languages supported by Memcached as well.
Scaling data in the Cloud is very important. Today, the SQL Azure team made SQL Azure Federation available. This new feature provides built-in support for data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) to elastically scale-out data in the cloud. I am thrilled to announce that concurrent with the release of this new feature, we have released 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, under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. With those additional SQL capabilities, the database tier can provide built-in support for data sharding to elastically scale-out data in the cloud, as covered in Ram Jeyaraman’s post on this blog.

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!

SQL Database Federations: Enhancing SQL to enable Data Sharding for Scalability in the Cloud

Ram Jeyaraman — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:17:00 GMT

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.

Thanks,

Ram Jeyaraman

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft’s Interoperability Group

HTML5 Labs Prototype Update for W3C Media Capture API

Peter Galli — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:40:00 GMT

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.

Preview Release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux Hits the Streets

Peter Galli — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:24:00 GMT

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.

Prototypes of JavaScript Globalization & Math, String, and Number extensions

Claudio Caldato — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:21:00 GMT

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

jQuery Mobile Open Source Framework Support for Windows Phone

Abu Obeida — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:16:00 GMT

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:

226% improvement in rendering the form gallery, bringing it down from 5 to 2.2 seconds
20x improvement in rendering the complex 400 item listview, from 60 seconds to 3 seconds

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!

Abu Obeida Bakhach

Interoperability Strategy Program Manager

First Stable Build of Node.js on Windows Released

Claudio Caldato — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Great news for all Node.js developers wanting to use Windows: today we reached an important milestone - v0.6.0 – which is the first official stable build that includes Windows support.

This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. Since then we’ve been heads down writing code.

Those developers who have been following our progress on GitHub know that there have been Node.js builds with Windows support for a while, but today we reached the all-important v0.6.0 milestone.

This accomplishment is the result of a great collaboration with Joyent and its team of developers. With the dedicated team of Igor Zinkovsky, Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis under the leadership of Ryan Dahl, we were able to implement all the features that let Node.js run natively on Windows.

And, while we were busy making the core Node.js runtime run on Windows, the Azure team was working on iisnode to enable Node.js to be hosted in IIS. Among other significant benefits, Windows native support gave Node.js significant performane improvements, as reported by Ryan on the Node.js.org blog.

Node.js developers on Windows will also be able to rely on NPM to install the modules they need for their application. Isaac Shlueter from the Joyent team is also currently working on porting NPM on Windows, and an early experimental version is already available on GitHub. The good news is that soon we’ll have a stable build integrated in the Node.js installer for Windows.

So stay tuned for more news on this front.

Claudio Caldato,

Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team

Windows Gets Eclipse Platform Improvements

M. Sawicki — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Today, David Green at Tasktop posted a blog about the latest Eclipse platform improvements for Windows. As part of Tasktop’s ongoing partnership with Microsoft, they’ve been working hard to bring two more Eclipse platform improvements for Windows this year: Desktop Search and Glass.

You can read more about both of these improvements here.

We look forward to continuing to work with both Tasktop and the Eclipse community going forward, and would love to hear from you about new features you would like to see in the future. Feel free to let David know about these at david.green@tasktop.com.

Thanks!

Martin Sawicki

Principal Program Manager: Interoperability