Interoperability @ Microsoft

W3C Pointer Events Gains Momentum Within Web Communities

Mark Gayler — Tue, 14 May 2013 23:28:00 GMT

MS Open Tech Announces Intent to Implement in Blink While Continuing WebKit Implementation

From:

Asir Vedamuthu Selvasingh, Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Adalberto Foresti, Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

The W3C Pointer Events emerging standard continues to gain traction, advancing support for interoperable mouse, touch, and pen interactions across the web. Today, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) made the first step towards interoperable support for Pointer Events in Blink by submitting a formal Intent to Implement to enable our engineering team to actively collaborate and work toward a positive adoption of Pointer Events by the Blink developer community.

Earlier this year, MS Open Tech published a Pointer Events prototype for WebKit on HTML5 Labs and submitted the patch to the WebKit developer forum. To help even more developers adopt the Pointer Events technology, we plan to continue our collaboration with the WebKit community.

Pointer Events makes it easier to support many browsers and devices by saving Web developers from writing unique code for each input type. Today people interact with Web content on a range of devices – phones, tablets, PCs, even the living room TV. Pointer Events unifies how you code for point, click and touch across these devices. The input model is based on the APIs already available in IE10 on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and you can start building websites incorporating point, click, and touch today.

Pointer Events continues to receive positive feedback from the developer community -- many are already embracing it as a unified model for cross-browser multi-modal input:

The jQuery team has been watching the progress of Pointer Events and participating in the W3C standardization process as it moves to Candidate Recommendation. Congratulations to the W3C working group for their hard work in getting to the CR stage. We see Pointer Events as a great way to unify the haphazard models that exist today for mouse, touch, and other pointer devices. Our team looks forward to supporting web developer use of Pointer Events as implementations begin to arrive.

Dave Methvin, President jQuery Foundation

Pointer Events is a great way to add cross-browser support for multi-modal input from mouse, pointer, and touch. With Pointer Events reaching Candidate Recommendation stage, it is time all mobile html5 application developers paid attention. The best part; you can start using it today….

Jesse MacFadyen, Adobe Developer, Cordova Committer

Pointer Events Advances to W3C Candidate Recommendation (CR)

As announced last week by the W3C and shared by our colleagues in IE, the W3C has now published the Pointer Events specification as a Candidate Recommendation, an important step toward a standard. This progression from Last Call Working Draft to Candidate Recommendation is a mark of the effective collaboration among Microsoft Corp., Google, Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, jQuery, and others to help sites take advantage of new interactive devices for the Web.

‘Candidate Recommendation’ indicates that the W3C considers the specification widely reviewed and satisfying the Working Group’s technical requirements. It signals a call for additional implementation experience to inform the group.

MS Open Tech and the Microsoft Internet Explorer teams will continue to work with our colleagues across the industry, engaging developers to test and provide feedback on the specification to W3C.

Learn more about Pointer Events on Web Platform Docs

As you start building, migrating, or testing your apps using Pointer Events on various browser platforms, you should check out the resources available on the Pointer Events Wiki at Web Platform Docs:

You can Try out the cool multi-model input capabilities with Pointer Events Demos.
You can Learn about Pointer Events by reading the specification documentation or watching Jeff Burtoft explaining how to easily upgrade from mouse to Pointer Events. And, you can learn even more by checking out the Pointer Events Primer on WebPlatform.org.
You can check out code samples such as the hand.js polyfill and even validate your own code with Pointer Events Test cases.

So much progress -- Pointer Events enables you to build for the future of the Web, today. So when someone invents the next big input breakthrough (such as Tom Cruise’s crime lab from Minority Report or Tony Stark’s holographic CAD console from Iron Man), you’re already on your way to supporting new input features.

Jump in, have fun with the demos, join the discussion at #PointerEvents and update your site with the cool capabilities of Pointer Events. Point. Click. Touch.

Redis on Windows – new version and NuGet Packages

Claudio Caldato — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:12:08 GMT

Continuing our support for Redis on Windows, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. has just released the latest version (2.6.12). It has been tested and validated by our test team using the same process we used in the past to ensure stability and reliability.

We’ve also released Redis-32 and Redis-64 NuGet packages to make it easier to install for developers that don’t need access to the source code.

We are also working on adding support for the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) so stay tuned for more news soon!

Accelerating Start-ups with open source, and Windows Azure Accelerators

Ross Gardler — Tue, 07 May 2013 17:21:00 GMT

In early 2012 Microsoft chose Tel Aviv, as the location for its first start-up accelerator. When the team at Microsoft Research and Development, Israel asked if MS Open technologies, Inc. could speak about open source on Windows Azure at their Cloud Day event I immediately jumped at the chance since I’m fascinated by how open source can help accelerate innovation. It seemed to me that this event would attract the kinds of people who could show me a thing or two about innovation on the cloud.

The Cloud Day event was designed to provide an opportunity for members of the local start-up community to explore the latest & hottest trends in cloud computing and to gain insights on how to get the most value out of the cloud. Speakers included representatives of start-ups at varying stages of development, Venture Capitalists, Cloud Consultants and Microsoft Open Technologies.

My session focused on using open source software to get the most from the cloud. I discussed how Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. work with projects and communities in order to ensure Windows Azure is an ideal platform for open source solutions. This was illustrated with a number of examples and case studies, such as how Ascribe Ltd transformed healthcare using open source big data solutions thanks to Microsoft’s contributions to Apache Hadoop and how Teletica.com used Azure and open source to manage a massive surge in web traffic. I also demonstrated how, using VM Depot makes it possible for anyone to build a video sharing site during their coffee break (more on that in a later post).

For me though what I had to say was not the important part, it was what the attendees had to say that interested me. After my session I was able to talk to quite a few people who were both keen to tell me about their start-up and to learn how they can make the most of open source software. Almost everyone I spoke to demonstrated a hunger, energy and determination that was nothing short of impressive. It's no
wonder that the Microsoft Accelerator here has such a high success rate.

By the end of the day it was clear that open source is an important part of the start-up ecosystem in Israel and I, along with the rest of Microsoft Open Technologies, look forward to continuing to support the brilliant team at Microsoft Israel R&D a they continue to provide support for local innovation and business development.

A new way for iOS and Android users to access corporate resources: The Application Gateway

Claudio Caldato — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Every CIO today has mobile VPN access sitting very high on the priority list and knows how mobile connectivity to corporate resources is an important yet complicate matter. In a quest to solve the VPN issue in a simple way, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. created AppGateway, an application of VPN access for Android and iOS based on the preview of a Windows Azure Application Gateway service meant to help mobile users be more productive on the go. With this app, developed in collaboration with the Windows Azure Active Directory team, Android and iOS users can experience easy connectivity to web sites behind the corporate firewall, leveraging Windows Azure authentication services.

For obvious security reasons, connecting to resources that are behind a firewall usually requires a fairly complex infrastructure such as VPN (Virtual Private Network). The AppGateway demo app is designed to make the process simpler yet highly secured. The mobile app connects to a service on Windows Azure that acts as the proxy to an agent that is running inside the network behind the firewall. Using the Windows Azure Authentication service, the proxy can establish a trusted connection to the agent so that the application on the mobile device can browse web sites that would not be normally accessible outside the corporate network.

The demo app is available on the Apple App Store, GooglePlay and Amazon marketplaces at the following links:

For more information on the Windows Azure Application Gateway service preview, visit http://appgportal.cloudapp.net/.

In our best tradition, we also released the source code of the demo app. You can find the Android application code here.

For detailed instructions and a quick ‘get started; guide is available here.

We look forward for your feedback, comments and suggestions.

If you’re working with Java on Windows Azure, this update is for you!

M. Sawicki — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

From:
Martin Sawicki – Principal Program Manager – MS Open Tech
Brian Benz – Sr. Technical Evangelist – MS Open Tech

Incorporating developer feedback and keeping pace with Windows Azure’s ongoing evolution, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., has released a new update to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Eclipse. This latest version – the May 2013 Preview (or v2.0.0) – includes a number of new improvements we hope will further simplify your Java work in the Windows Azure cloud. This major update accompanies the release of the Windows Azure SDK v2.0.

Key Enhancements:

Automatic upload of the JDK and Server to Windows Azure storage (and deployment from there)

This new option automatically uploads the selected JDK and Web Application Server, when needed, to a selected Windows Azure storage account and deploys these components from that account. This commonly requested feature can greatly enhance the ease and efficiency of deploying the JDK and server components, as well as help with team development scenarios, by avoiding the need to embed these components in the deployment package, or the hassle of manual uploads. Our “Hello World” tutorial walks you through these steps in detail. Here is a screenshot from the updated project creation wizard showing this feature in action:

Centralized storage account tracking

You may be wondering how Windows Azure knows which storage accounts to display in the drop-down list. The answer is another new feature – centralized storage account tracking. In order to reference storage accounts more easily across the various features that rely on storage, like caching and, in this case, the JDK or the Web Application server component deployment, you can register existing storage accounts names and endpoints in your current Eclipse workspace under Preferences > Windows Azure > Storage Accounts:

As usual, you can import the information from your subscription’s publish settings file to provide the storage account discovery magic.

Here’s an example of the centralized storage account tracking for caching as well. The drop down shows you where you would specify which storage account to store credentials for the cache configuration in a Windows Azure role. This way you no longer have to enter the access key manually.

Simplified Remote Access setup

For this release we’ve also streamlined the previous two-step remote access setup into one step. In the “Publish to Cloud” wizard, type in a user name and password to enable remote access, or leave it blank to keep remote access disabled.

By default, Eclipse will use the sample certificate for encrypting your remote access credentials in the Windows Azure configuration file. If you’d rather use your own certificate, choose the Advanced… link.

The “all-in-one” Eclipse library for easier Windows Azure API access now updated with the latest (v0.4.2)

The latest SDK distribution of the Windows Azure Libraries for Java are packaged along with their open-source dependencies as an Eclipse library and referred to as the Package for Windows Azure Libraries for Java (by MS Open Tech). If your Java code needs to take advantage of the Windows Azure API, just add this library to the build path of your Java project (not the Windows Azure project) and all the needed libraries will be automatically referenced and included in your WAR file.

Additional Enhancements

We’ve also fixed sticky sessions on Windows Server 2012 (previously limited to Windows 2008). And we’ve made some package publish performance improvements that can make the upload portion of the deployment process up to twice as fast as in previous releases, especially helpful if you’re not using the “deploy from download” options, but still embedding large components in the deployment package itself. We’ve also made a number of bug fixes, including some reported issues related to deploying Tomcat and Jetty on Windows 2012 from a cloud download.

Getting the Plugin

Here are the complete instructions to download and install the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java, as well as updated documentation.

As always, let us know how the latest release works for you and how you like the new features! To send feedback or questions, just use MSDN Forums or Stack Overflow.

MS Open Tech, Linux and Open Source at LinuxFest 2013

Mark Gayler — Fri, 03 May 2013 23:11:00 GMT

I was fortunate to be invited to speak on behalf of MS Open Tech at last weekend’s LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, WA. This was a local event with a wide variety of developers and tech enthusiasts who gathered at Bellingham Technical College to participate in a broad spectrum of presentations, demonstrations, and labs.

My presentation Microsoft, Linux and the Open Source Community was part of the Developing a Community Track at LinuxFest so, given Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. had just celebrated our One Year Anniversary, I took this opportunity to demonstrate some of the MS Open Tech projects that are enabling the open source community to benefit from new interoperability technology initiatives:

Linux on Windows Azure – Just prior to LinuxFest, the Azure team announced general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Windows Azure Infrastructure Services enable you to deploy and run durable VMs in the cloud. As well as Windows Server options, the built-in image gallery of VM templates includes Linux images for Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE Linux distributions. During my presentation session, I used Windows Azure Web Sites to create a new cloud-based WordPress site including a MySQL instance.

VM Depot – Built on the capabilities of Linux on Windows Azure, VM Depot is a cloud-based catalog of more than 200 open source Linux virtual machine images for Windows Azure contributed by the community. Developed by MS Open Tech, on VM Depot the community can build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configurations and other freely downloadable images, create custom open source stacks, and work with others to build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Windows Azure platform.

OData – OData is an open data protocol jointly developed by Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Citrix, and other industry partners and currently undergoing standardization via OASIS. We have recently revamped the http://odata.org website and encourage community contributions to develop consumer and producer services using OData as highlighted in the Ecosystem subsection. My demonstration showed how OData can be used by the community to publish and access open government data using the DataLab open source code on GitHub.

Pointer Events - Pointer events is an emerging standard developed by the W3C to define a single device input model – mouse, pen and touch – across multiple browsers. Microsoft contributed the initial specification and is working to demonstrate cross browser interoperability for Pointer Events. MS Open Tech developed an open source Pointer Events prototype for WebKit on HTML5 Labs and submitted the patch to the WebKit community. We encourage the developer community to learn more about Pointer Events on Web Platform Docs and join the #PointerEvents discussion.

I would like to thank the LinuxFest organizers for the opportunity to participate. Events like LinuxFest are an ideal way for us to share the work we do at MS Open Tech with the open source community and seek feedback on our efforts. I look forward to the next opportunity.

Thanks for a great one year anniversary!

Robin Ginn — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:03:22 GMT

Thanks to all our friends who sent us anniversary greetings and also those who joined us in the Valley last week to celebrate. It was great to reflect on the many open source and open standards projects with community and industry leaders in the house.

The future looks bright as we look to collaborate on more openness projects with you!

An Update on Professional-Quality Video Captioning

Mark Gayler — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:13:00 GMT

I am really excited that Microsoft IE has taken another step forward enabling professional-quality closed captions for online video, to address evolving industry requirements for browsers and other software on Internet-connected devices. The IE team have just posted a blog that describes the latest milestone for Web-based accessibility -

“In February 2013, Microsoft joined industry stakeholders in the W3C Timed Text Working Group (TTWG) to deliver the TTML Simple Delivery Profile for Closed Captions (SDP-US) profile specification. SDP-US is based on Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) (a caption interchange specification that has been used in the professional video industry for years) and clearly defines key caption format features like layout, style, timing and content requirements. Internet Explorer was one of the first browsers to include early support for HTML5-based video captioning via the <track> element with TTML and WebVTT file formats.

Professional-quality online video is a forthcoming reality, enabled by emerging Web specifications and powerful content delivery infrastructure. Captioning is an important building block for enabling professional-quality video, and Microsoft is actively working with industry partners to enable rich captioning experiences. If you are working on Internet video, we invite you to review the new SDP-US profile, join the industry discussion, start considering how your caption content can adapt to SDP-US, and let us have your feedback.”

Now part of the MS Open Tech alumni, I have been proud to work with the IE team and industry experts in driving this important interoperability milestone.

Monica Martin
Senior Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Redis on Windows – stable and reliable

Claudio Caldato — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:58:26 GMT

The MS Open Tech team has been spending quite a bit of time testing the latest build of Redis for Windows (available for download from the MS Open Tech Github repo). As we approach completion of our test plan, we thought we’d share some very promising results.

In phase I of our stress testing, we put Redis on Windows through various tests with execution times ranging from 1 to 16 days, and configurations ranging from a simple single-master setup to more complex configurations such as the one shown below, with one master and four replicas. You can find an overview of the testing strategy and configurations that we used on the wiki page here.

The results are encouraging – we found only one bug, which we’ve already fixed.

These tests have been done with the port of the Redis 2.6.8 version from Linux to Windows, and this version includes all of the work we announced in January, including 64-bit support. Our goal is to ensure developers that they can trust using Redis on Windows on scenarios where reliability is an important requirement, and we plan to keep testing the code on more ‘demanding’ scenarios to assure that we haven’t missed anything.

If you have comments or recommendations on any scenario we should add to our test plan, or any other suggestions on how we can improve our testing strategy, please let us know. We’ll be happy to consider using any app or scenario that Redis developers feel would be a good test case for Redis.

Claudio Caldato
Principal Program Manager Lead
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Microsoft Donates JavaScript Materials to Web Platform Docs

Mark Gayler — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:39:00 GMT

We’d like to highlight a pleasant spring surprise from our Microsoft colleague Eliot Graff who this week has informed the tech community that Microsoft is proving additional content to the Webplatform.org project by donating over 400 pages of JavaScript reference materials.

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and the Microsoft Internet Explorer team represented by Eliot, have been involved from the very beginning of the W3C’s Web Platform Docs (WPD), a community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for developers to help build modern web applications that will work across browsers and devices. We strongly believe this community site is key in the journey to an interoperable web platform and same markup.

From Eliot’s Blog post:

“To date, JavaScript remains one of the areas in Web Platform Docs where we are still in need of robust reference documentation. I am pleased to announce that Microsoft is donating over 400 pages worth of additional content to Web Platform Docs, in order to boost our library in this regard.”

So what does this mean for you, the developer?

You will save time and resources, knowing you can consult confidently with a community-curated site to learn about standards, innovations and best practices including:

What technologies really interoperate across platforms and devices;
The standardization status of each technology specification;
The stability and implementation status of specific features in actual browsers.

Microsoft's involvement in the Web Platform Docs project dates back to its inception almost two years ago. Ten supporting steward organizations (the W3C, Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera) have pooled their resources in order to create a single, centralized, nonpartisan, accurate, complete, and comprehensive collection of educational and reference materials for web development.

We trust this additional contribution from Microsoft will strengthen the existing foundation to the JavaScript reference materials.

WPD is a community effort. Anyone can join or contribute. The infrastructure is set up using an instance of MediaWiki, the same as Wikipedia. You can visit the site at www.webplatform.org and watch an overview video. From there, check out the docs or the community content. You can also join the effort and start editing, writing, and contributing in other ways. You can add a little code sample, write a tutorial, or join in for some of the organized doc sprints or other activities.

Begin simplifying your web development and check out W3C’s Web Platform Docs today. Better still, sign up for an account, find a topic of interest, and contribute your expertise!