Interoperability @ Microsoft : interoperability

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.

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.

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.”

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!

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

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

W3Conf: Get up to Speed on the Modern Open Web Platform

paulcotton — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:56:00 GMT

Are you a Web developer, designer or just interested in the space? Well, if you are, you really don’t want to miss W3Conf.

W3Conf is the W3C's first ever 2-day conference for developers and designers, and is uniquely focused on cutting edge technologies that work today across browsers.

It is being held in Redmond, Washington November 15-16 2011 and it’s packed with top-notch presentations by leading experts in the Web industry on HTML5, CSS3, graphics, accessibility, multimedia, APIs and more.

I’m participating in the “Browsers and Standards: Where the Rubber Hits the Road” panel discussion, along with Tantek Çelik from Mozilla, Google’s Chris Wilson and Divya Manian from Opera.

Microsoft is proud to be the host sponsor of the event, joined by AT&T, Adobe, and Nokia.

There are several ways to experience this conference: you can register to attend in person; videos of the presentations (with English captioning) will be streamed live over the Web; and recordings will be archived and made freely available for future reference. Note that the Early Bird registration conference and hotel discount expires on October 31.

You can find all the details on the schedule, speakers, and the technologies themselves on the conference web site, which demonstrates the features enabled in modern browsers and authoring tools to make attractive, interactive, and accessible websites using emerging standards from W3C and other bodies. In other words, the site itself “eats the open web dog food.”

Along with my colleagues on the Interoperability Team, I believe this will be a great event, and encourage you to attend virtually or in person.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Paul Cotton

Co-Chair: HTML Working Group

AMQP 1.0 Specification Now Available

Ram Jeyaraman — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:05:00 GMT

I am happy to report that today the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group announced the availability of the AMQP 1.0 specification.

I am in New York attending the fourth annual AMQP business messaging conference and launch event for this important milestone, and Microsoft is thrilled to have been able to participate in the work to get the specification to this point.

As an open, interoperable, high-performance messaging protocol, AMQP opens up new possibilities in communications that span the client to the cloud, and will provide customers with increased choice.

AMQP has been developed over the years through the collective work of the 24 companies - and the many diverse communities they represent - that constitute the AMQP Working Group, including JP Morgan, VMware, Red Hat, Deutsche Borse Group, Microsoft, INETCO Systems, Goldman Sachs, and WS02.

These WG members are all committed to working together on open standards and represent a diverse range of communities, many of them Open Source.

Microsoft has been a member of the AMQP WG since 2008 and we have actively contributed to the development and testing of the protocol.

We are also supportive of, and excited about, the transition of the AMQP work to OASIS, a consortium whose goal is to advance open standards, and the subsequent standardization of AMQP 1.0, which is an important first step towards wider adoption of the specification.

Microsoft supports thousands of standards in its products and we actively participate in more than 150 standards organizations and over 350 working groups worldwide. We will continue to participate actively in these standards bodies, contributing to the development of new open standards and the improvement of existing standards.

We recognize that no single company can address interoperability challenges on its own and that collaboration with customers, partners, open source communities and other vendors is of critical importance. This collaboration includes open communication on the interoperability challenges that customers are experiencing and the ways in which those challenges can be addressed.

Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers, and AMQP has the potential to improve interoperability between various vendor products, which is extremely important to our customers.

Thanks,

Ram Jeyaraman

Technical Diplomat: Microsoft's Interoperability Group

OpenNebula Clouds on Windows Server Hyper-V

Peter Galli — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:33:00 GMT

More good news on Microsoft's commitment to Interoperability in the cloud: last week Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, announced that Windows Server Hyper-V is now an officially supported hypervisor for OpenNebula.

This open source project is working on a prototype for release next month and it will soon be possible for customers to build and manage OpenNebula clouds on a Hyper-V based virtualization platform.

"Windows Server Hyper-V is an enterprise class virtualization platform that is getting rapidly and widely deployed in the industry. Given the highly heterogeneous environments in today’s data centers and clouds, we are seeing enablement of various Linux distributions including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, and CS2C on Windows Server Hyper-V, as well as emerging open source cloud projects like OpenStack -- and now OpenNebula," Gupta said in a blog post.

Nokia Developers: learn Windows Phone even faster

JC Cimetiere — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:01:00 GMT

It’s my great pleasure to announce today a comprehensive package to leverage your development skills while learning to build applications for Windows Phone. The Microsoft & Nokia agreement has been described at length over the past few months and, like Matt Bencke highlighted, one of our goals has been to make it easy for Nokia Symbian developers to learn Windows Phone.

So, folks from Microsoft and Nokia worked together to build a great package to help you get started. This helpful package contains the following tools and documentation to help you along the path to learning Windows Phone development:

The “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper,
The addition of Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool
The “Nokia Windows Phone Training” roadshow, a series of developer events starting today in Paris

These complement the similar iOS/Android guidance & mapping work we released a couple months ago.

The “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper is about 100 pages organized in 8 chapters.

Chapter 1: Introducing Windows Phone Platform
to Symbian^3 Qt Application Developers
Chapter 2: Windows Phone Application Design Guidelines
Chapter 3: Windows Phone Developer and Designer Tools
Chapter 4: C# programming
Chapter 5: Introducing Windows Phone Application Life Cycle
Chapter 6: Porting Applications to Windows Phone
Chapter 7: Windows Phone Example Applications
Chapter 8: Using the API Mapping Tool

The white paper is available in different formats (HTML, DOCX & PDF). Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, and/or corrections on the online version.

Chapter 6 introduces porting tutorials, in which you will find practical examples and tips on how to port your applications, like the RSS Reader applications or the “Diner” example, a catalog-type restaurant information application. From design consideration to data binding, the porting story addresses many aspects of the process that will be useful to you; the developer.

The full list of samples and source code is available to you.

The addition of Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool is another perk we wanted to deliver in order to speed up the learning curve to Windows Phone. For this first iteration of the mapping, we’ve focused on the core libraries for Qt 4.7 for Symbian (QtCore, QtGui, QtLocation, QtNetwork, QtSensors, QtSql, QtXml, QtWebKit, QML Elements, QML Components ). We invite you to offer up ideas about what additional mapping you feel would make sense and would like to see included in the tool.

Finally, keep an eye on the “Nokia Windows Phone Training” roadshow, starting today in Paris, France. During this one day training event, you’ll learn how to take your ideas and get them running on the Windows Phone platform. Upcoming dates and locations for the roadshow are as follows: Milan, Italy (Sept 26), Madrid, Spain (Sept 29), Berlin, Germany (Oct 4) , London, United Kingdom (Oct 10) and Silicon Valley, USA - date & details coming soon!
Similar events are also happening in Australia: Sydney (Sept 24-25[SOLD OUT], Oct 8-9), Melbourne (Oct 8-9[SOLD OUT, wait list]) and Brisbane (Oct 8-9).
We realize this is only a few dates and locations, so for all the developers who want to learn Windows Phone, I recommend that you follow at your own pace the EXCELLENT “Window Phone Mango Jump Start” online video training. And stay tuned, there’s more to come!

Start Today!

We’re all eager to see the Nokia hardware running Windows Phone. Windows Phone Mango is just out of the door, so don’t wait, go get your copy of the “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper and take advantage of its guidance!

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Sr. Technical Evangelist
@jccim - blogs.msdn.com/interoperability

[Cross-posted on the Windows Phone Developer blog]

Community Participation

Peter Galli — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:30:00 GMT

I'm heading off to Paris this weekend to participate in the annual Open Source Think Tank and Open World Forum events held in that wonderful city next week.

I'm really looking forward to chatting with all those folk interested in this space, from enthusiasts to developers and end users.

I will be joined at these events by my colleague and Technical Ambassador Craig Kitterman, as well as by our local market interoperability program lead Alfonso Castro.

We will present technical sessions and participate in a number of panel discussions, ranging from what Open Source, Open Standards and Open Systems mean today to Open Source as an agent of change.

Our participation in these Paris events complements our existing broad engagement with OSS communities, and we look forward to meeting our friends from the PhP, Node.js, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.communities as well as to making a lot of new ones.

You can read more about our participation in Paris here, and we look forward to meeting those of you lucky enough to be attending in person.

Site Ready WebSockets

Peter Galli — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:49:00 GMT

Today the Internet Explorer blog has a post on site ready Web Sockets, which talks about how WebSockets technology has made significant progress over the last nine months and how the Web gets richer and developers are more creative when sites and services can communicate and send notifications in real-time.

As Brian Raymor, Microsoft's Program Manager for WebSockets notes in the blog, the standards around WebSockets have converged substantially, to the point that developers and consumers can now take advantage of them across different implementations, including IE10 in Windows 8.

You can read the full post here.

The OData Producer Library for PHP is here

Claudio Caldato — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:41:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce that today we released the OData Producer Library for PHP. In case you missed it, we released last year a client library that allows PHP applications to consume an OData feed, and with this new library it now easy for PHP Applications to generate OData Feeds. PHP developers can now add OData support to their applications so it can be consumed by all clients and libraries that support OData.

The library is designed to be used with a wide range of data sources (from databases such as SQL Server and MySQL to data structures that are at the application level for applications such as CMS systems). The library is available for download under the open source BSD license: http://odataphpproducer.codeplex.com/
In order to make the library generic so it can be used on a wide range of scenarios we didn’t take any dependency to specific data structures or data sources. Instead the library is based on 3 main interfaces that, when implemented by the developers for the specific data source, allow the library to retrieve the appropriate data and serialize it for the client. The library takes care of handling metadata, query processing and serialization/deserialization of the data streams.

Two examples are included that show how a full OData service can be built using the library: the Northwind DB example uses an SQL Express DB as data source and the WordPress example that uses the WordPress’s MySQL DB Schema to expose a feed for Posts, Comments and Users.

Quick Introduction to OData

Open Data Protocol is an open protocol for sharing data. It is built upon AtomPub (RFC 5023) and JSON. OData is a REST (Representational State Transfer) protocol, therefore a simple web browser can view the data exposed through an OData service.

The basic idea behind OData is to use a well-known data format (Atom feed or JSON) to expose a list of entities.

The OData technology has two main parts:

The OData data model, which provides a generic way to organize and describe data. OData uses the Entity Data Model (EDM).The EDM models data as entities and associations among those entities. Thus OData work with pretty much any kind of data.
The OData protocol, which lets a client make requests to and get responses from an OData service. Data sent by an OData service can be represented on the wire today either in the XML-based format defined by Atom/AtomPub or in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

An OData client accesses data provided by an OData service using standard HTTP. The OData protocol largely follows the conventions defined by REST, which define how HTTP verbs are used. The most important of these verbs are:

GET : Reads data from one or more entities.
PUT : Updates an existing entity, replacing all of its properties.
MERGE : Updates an existing entity, but replaces only specified properties.
POST : Creates a new entity.
DELETE : Removes an entity.

Each HTTP request is sent to a specific URI, identifying some resource in the target OData service's data model.

The OData Producer Library for PHP

The OData Producer Library for PHP is a server library that allows to exposes data sources by using the OData Protocol.

The OData Producer supports all Read-Only operations specified in the Protocol version 2.0:

It provides two formats for representing resources, the XML-based Atom format and the JSON format.
Servers expose a metadata document that describes the structure of the service and its resources.
Clients can retrieve a feed, Entry or service document by issuing an HTTP GET request against its URI.
Servers support retrieval of individual properties within Entries.
It supports pagination, query validation and system query options like $format, $top, $linecount, $filter, $select, $expand, $orderby, $skip .
User can access the binary stream data (i.e. allows an OData server to give access to media content such as photos or documents in addition to all the structured data)

How to use the OData Producer Library for PHP

Data is mapped to the OData Producer through three interfaces into an application. From there the data is converted to the OData structure and sent to the client.

The 3 interfaces required are:

IDataServiceMetadataProvider: this is the interface used to map the data source structure to the Metadata format that is defined in the OData Protocol. Usually an OData service exposes a $metadata endpoint that can be used by the clients to figure out how the service exposes the data and what structures and data types they should expect.
IDataServiceQueryProvider: this is the interface used to map a client query to the data source. The library has the code to parse the incoming queries but in order to query the correct data from the data source the developer has to specify how the incoming OData queries are mapped to specific data in the data source.
IServiceProvider: this is the interface that deals with the service endpoint and allows defining features such as Page size for the OData Server paging feature, access rules to the service, OData protocol version(s) accepted and so on.
IDataServiceStreamProvider: This is an optional interface that can be used to enable streaming of content such as Images or other binary formats. The interface is called by the OData Service if the DataType defined in the metadata is EDM.Binary.

If you want to learn more about the OData Producer Library for PHP, the User Guide included with the code provides detailed information on how to install and configure the library, it also show how to implement the interfaces in order to build a fully functional OData service.

The library is built using only PHP and it runs on both Windows and Linux.

This is the first release of a Producer library, future versions may add Write support to be used for scenarios where the OData Service needs to provide the ability to update data. We will also keep it up to date with future versions of the OData Protocol.

Claudio Caldato, Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team

PhoneGap mobile HTML5 framework adding support for Windows Phone Mango

JC Cimetiere — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:10:07 GMT

[Cross posted from the Windows Phone Developer Blog]

We’re very excited to join Nitobi to announce availability of a PhoneGap beta supporting Windows Phone Mango. This new option to build applications targeting Windows Phone gives more choices to developers. In particular, Web developers will be able to easily leverage their HTML5 skills to target Windows Phone.

The beta version of the PhoneGap libraries can be downloaded from: https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-wp7

In case you’ve been so busy writing code for months and you’ve never heard about PhoneGap, it’s an open source mobile framework that enables developers to build applications targeting multiple platforms, by using standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). On Windows Phone Mango PhoneGap leverages the new HTML5 support provided by IE9.

We have been in touch with André Charland and Brian Leroux (Co-Founders of Nitobi the creator of PhoneGap), who are seeing a growing interest from the PhoneGap developer community to target Windows Phone. So we’ve started working with Nitobi, helping to speed up the development of Windows Phone Mango support in PhoneGap by providing engineering resources and technical support.

The current beta version includes most of the basic features, and includes JavaScript APIs to use Windows Phone Mango features like:

Access Device Information (UDDI and stuff)
Add and search Contacts
Connection status (network / wifi connection status)
Alerts/Notification (alert and confirm)
Media Capture (Image and Audio)
Camera
Accelerometer
Geolocation

Here’s a screen shot of the PhoneGap Unit Test application running on the Windows Phone emulator:

I encourage you to read Nitobi’s blog post to get more details on how the whole process works.

This is the first step toward having full PhoneGap support for Windows Phone Mango. Stay tuned, we will provide updates and more extensive demos as progress is made. With Windows Phone Mango Released to Manufacturing and developer tools hitting “Release Candidate”, it’s the perfect time to start testing, give feedback and join the PhoneGap open source project.

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Sr. Technical Evangelist – Interoperability
@jccim - blogs.msdn.com/interoperability

W3C Announces Process Innovations Making it More Authoritative And More Agile

MCChampion — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:26:00 GMT

The JTC1 and W3C jointly announced this week that the international vote of 8 web services specifications was successful, and that these Recommendations are now ISO/IEC JTC1 International Standards.

Last year, the W3C applied to ISO/IEC JTC1 to become a “Publicly Available Specification (PAS) Submitter”, which would allow selected W3C Recommendations to be voted on to become international standards.

After ISO/IEC JTC1’s approval, W3C submitted the package of 8 web services specifications that was recently approved. With this approval, the W3C is now using successfully another process innovation, the second this month.

So why is this announcement important? The best answer comes from the W3C press release, which says: "To many national bodies, the ISO and IEC brands will be more familiar than the W3C brand. In some cases, such as procurement, a country may be required to use ISO/IEC standards. For these reasons and others, W3C believes that formal approval by JTC 1 of W3C standards as International Standards will increase deployment, reduce fragmentation, and provide all users with greater interoperability."

Microsoft already implements these ISO/IEC standards in several ways, especially in .NET Framework which uses all their major features. Thus, products which layer on top of the .NET Framework can also use these standards. Microsoft General Manager Bob Dimpsey notes this in his testimonial, while also pointing to the fact that this announcement validates W3C’s ability to build authoritative standards.

“Web Services specifications are an important part of the interoperability surface for Microsoft’s enterprise and cloud products. For example, while Web Services specifications are used to enable a Single-Sign-On experience using Access Control Services (ACS), they are also one key way for connectivity with Windows Azure applications through Windows Communication Foundation. We are very pleased that national bodies around the world have agreed to advance these specifications to become ISO/IEC Standards. Microsoft strongly endorses this vote of confidence in W3C’s ability to build consensus across diverse communities and produce stable, interoperable, and useful standards,” he says.

This is the second important announcement from W3C in recent weeks about process innovations. As you may remember, on August 16 Community Groups launched to provide an open forum where developers can work with other stakeholders to develop, analyze, test, and promote specifications using a lightweight process with sound legal underpinnings. This announcement was well received, with 15 groups (as of this writing) already up and running, while 9 more have been proposed and are looking for supporters.

Press reaction has also been very favorable. I particularly like Webmonkey’s summary: "Well, now is your chance to do something more than whine about the slow pace of standards on your blog. The W3C’s new community groups are designed so that anyone can contribute to the development of HTML. Just head over to the site and join a group that interests you. … With the new community groups you don’t need to be a Google or Apple employee to catch the attention of the W3C’s members, you just need to sign up and post your ideas for everyone to read."

Together, the Community Group and PAS Submission announcements add up to a compelling story: The W3C Recommendation process now has an “on ramp” allowing open and agile development of community specifications that can feed specifications into traditional Working Groups, and it has an “off ramp” that allows provably useful and interoperable Recommendations to become ISO/IEC JTC1 international standards.

Not all specs will travel the full route from informal brainstorming in a Community Group to formal standardization by ISO/IEC JTC1, but it’s good to have that full development path available. Not only can individuals get together and jumpstart potential new web standards but there is a full path to ISO/IEC JTC1 standardization.

Michael Champion, Sr. Program Manager

Member of W3C Advisory Committee and Advisory Board