Interoperability @ Microsoft : interoperability

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.

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!

MS Open Tech develops the open source Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services

Olivier Bloch — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:45:00 GMT

Furthering the goal of bridging Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. developed the Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services that is being announced today by Scott Guthrie on his blog.

Windows Azure Mobile Services was created to make it easier for developers to build engaging and dynamic mobile apps that scale. By using Mobile Services, developers are not only able to connect their applications to a scalable and secure backend hosted in Windows Azure, but also store data in the cloud, authenticate users and send push notifications.

The Android SDK lets you connect your favorite Android phone or tablet (Android 2.2+) to a cloud backend and deliver push notifications via Google Cloud Messaging. It also allows you to authenticate your users via their Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Microsoft credentials. To enable this, the MS Open Tech engineering team delivered the following key features:

Data API: this API simplifies the communication between Android apps and the tables exposed through Windows Azure Mobile Services using a fluent API for queries and automatic JSON serialization/deserialization.
Identity API: this API allows leveraging Microsoft Account, Facebook, Twitter or Google authentication in an Android app.
Service Filters: these components allow the developer to intercept and customize the requests between the Mobile client and Windows Azure Mobile Services, providing a filter pipeline to handle the generated requests and responses.

The SDK is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license and community contributions are very welcome.

You can learn more about the new SDK reading Scott’s blog, and the getting started tutorial and come back soon as we are working on more samples/demos/tutorials.

//build/ today with open source frameworks on Windows Phone 8

Olivier Bloch — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:30:00 GMT

Added support for Windows Phone 8 in Apache Cordova, Sencha Touch, Cocos2D, Ogre3D and other open source frameworks.

The cool news for developers keeps on rolling at //build/ 2012. We’re thrilled to relay the announcements from a broad range of open source communities that their support for Windows Phone 8 goes live on “Day 1” of the SDK availability, along with other partners. There are several open source frameworks to choose from today.

Apache Cordova (known as PhoneGap) now supports Windows Phone 8
The next release of Sencha Touch 2 arrives with added support for Windows Phone 8
A new jQuery Mobile theme for Windows Phone 8 is available
SQLite can be used to build Windows Phone 8 applications. You can find the bits here.
Here is a preview version of Cocos2D supporting Windows Phone 8
Ogre3D on Windows Phone 8
Trigger.io has been updated to support Windows Phone 8
SharpDX (an open-source C#/Managed DirectX API for.NET) is now available for Windows Phone 8
Popular open source MVVM Light Toolkit gets a fresh new version supporting Windows Phone 8. Read the details on Laurent Bugnion’s blog

The Windows Phone team and Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. engaged early in the process with open source communities to enable Windows Phone 8 in these popular open source and cross platform frameworks. We provided technical support and information, gave early access to the tools and MS Open Tech contributed code to the Cocos 2D and Ogre3D projects.

The market opportunity just got bigger and easier for all developers with this news. We believe it is important that developers have choices and can reuse their skills and code to build Windows Phone 8 applications.

This added support for Windows Phone 8 in diverse open source and cross platform frameworks was made possible thanks to new features in Windows Phone 8: native C++ programming and Internet Explorer 10 expanded HTML5 support.

Developers who have applications based on these frameworks can publish them to the Windows Phone Store in record time. And this applies to various domains, like gaming with C++ or C# frameworks such as Cocos 2D, Ogre 3D and SharpDX, or cross platform development with HTML5 and JavaScript leveraging Apache Cordova, Trigger.io, Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile. Developers using popular open source tools and frameworks such as SQLite or GalaSoft MVVM toolkit will also be able to reuse their code and skills.

“Nearly 50% of Sencha customers have expressed interest in building apps for Windows Phone 8 in the next 6-12 months. Supporting Windows Phone 8 is a natural choice for Sencha to enable our customers to build universal apps for mobile devices.” - Abraham Elias, CTO Sencha Inc.

Jay Garcia, CTO at Modus Create, and his team are developing a mobile companion application for the game Diablo III:
“Using Blizzard’s Diablo III web APIs in combination with PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, we were able to hugely increase the game’s fan base because we could build and publish our application to both iOS and Android with the same HTML5 and JavaScript code base. It literally took us a few days to get the same code to run on Windows Phone 8 thanks to this newly added support.”

You can read more about Modus Create work to migrate their application to Windows Phone 8 on their blog post.

Craig Walker, CTO at Xero commented on the new support for Windows Phone 8 in Sencha Touch:
“Using web standards-based technologies such as Sencha Touch and Apache Cordova for our mobile accounting software application Xero Touch helped us target a wide range of platforms so our customers could focus on their business, not the underlying technology. Support for these technologies in Windows Phone 8 tools made it an easy Xero Touch build for our dev team, and a smart addition for our customers who need flexibility managing their business on the go.”

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., supported the jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch communities to deliver themes that will allow developers to integrate their applications into the Windows Phone 8 user experience.

As Craig Walker from Xero stresses, it is crucial for developers to be able to deliver a seamless consumer experience integrated into the platform. You can see below a video demonstrating the Sencha Touch theme for Windows Phone 8.

Brett Nagy, Technical Director at Microgroove, and his team got a chance to try the Windows Phone 8 tools and the early Sencha Touch support for Windows Phone 8:
“Our apps have been making companies more productive for well over a decade. Sencha Touch support for Windows Phone 8 has made our engineer team more productive by allowing us to easily re-use code from one mobile platform to another.
Within a couple of hours, we had the basic Windows Phone 8 themed version of an existing app without requiring any changes to its JavaScript codebase. Now that producing builds that run on Windows Phone 8 is part of our regular workflow, the next step is to build out functionality that really takes advantage of that platform. Knowing that we can do that in HTML + JS allows us to extend our reach beyond iOS and Android with minimal change to our projects timelines.”

For developers using jQuery Mobile, Sergey Grebnov from Akvelon, who previously published a jQuery Mobile theme for Windows Phone 7.5 is releasing a new jQuery Mobile theme for Windows phone 8. You can see below a short demo of how to apply the theme to a Windows Phone 8 application.

This is the first time so many open source and cross platform frameworks are on board with Windows Phone on the first day of a new SDK version release. It is great to see how much communities are eager to work with Windows Phone.

And today is just the beginning. We want to continue this effort to help open source developers enable their frameworks on Windows Phone 8. It’s important for developers to reuse their skills, expand the market opportunity to make money on our devices, and build the next generation of apps. Imagine the possibilities.

Go check out the various frameworks and let us know if you think of other ones you would love to be able to use to build Windows Phone 8 applications.

Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform: Technical Examples

Gianugo Rabellino — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 22:16:00 GMT

Two years ago we shared our view on Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform. Back then we talked to customers and developers and came out with an overview of an open and interoperable cloud, based on four distinct elements: Data Portability, Standards, Ease of Migration and Deployment, and Developer Choice. Since then, we have been laser focused on the quest for an interoperable and flexible cloud platform that would enable heterogeneous workloads.

Windows Azure is committed to openness across the entire application stack, with service APIs and service management APIs exposed as RESTful endpoints that can be used from any language or runtime, key services such as Caching, Service Bus, and Identity that can be hosted either on-premises or in the cloud, and open source SDKs for popular languages that give developers a choice of tools for building cloud-based applications and services.

In this blog post I’ll recap some of the most important news of the last year in each of these areas. As I mentioned in a blog postearlier this year, when a journey reaches an important milestone it’s good to look back and think about the road so far. We’ve come even farther down that road now, and here are many technical examples of what has been accomplished.

Data Portability

When customers create data in an on-premises application, they have a high level of confidence that they have control over the data stored in the on-premise environment. Customers should have a comparable level of control over their data when they are using cloud platforms. Here are some examples of how Windows Azure supports Data Portability:

Standards

Cloud platforms should reuse existing and commonly used standards when it makes sense to do so. If existing standards are not sufficient, new standards may be created. Here are some of the ways we’re working to support standards for cloud computing:

Ease of Migration and Deployment

Cloud platforms should provide a secure migration path that preserves existing investments and enable co-existence between on-premise software and cloud services. Here are some examples of ease of migration and deployment on Windows Azure:

Developer Choice

Cloud platforms should enable developer choice in tools, languages and runtimes to facilitate the development of interoperable customer solutions. This approach will also broaden the community of developers that write for a given cloud platform and therefore enhance the quality of services that the platform will offer to customers. Here are some of the ways that Windows Azure is delivering on developer choice:

It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come, and we still have much to do as well. The Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform originally came out of discussions with customers, partners, and developers about what they need from an interoperable cloud, and we’re continuing those discussions going forward, and we will continue to deliver on these important elements!

Gianugo Rabellino
Senior Director, Open Source Communities
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

W3C’s Web Platform Docs – Your “Go To” for All Things Web Development

Jean Paoli — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:30:00 GMT

From:

Jean Paoli, President, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Michael Champion, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

We are thrilled to share the news that the W3C announced the alpha release of Web Platform Docs. Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia and Opera are among the stewards of the project. Together, we worked with the W3C on creating this wiki-styled site and contributed thousands of web documentation articles.

W3C’s Web Platform Docs is a community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for developers to help them build modern web applications that will work across browsers and devices, and share their own expertise, which will further the goal of web platform interoperability and same markup.

Currently, developers need to do a lot of research about what technologies work on which platforms when building websites and applications with HTML5, CSS and other open web standards. It’s costly and inefficient for them to spend precious hours consulting multiple resources to understand how to employ web technologies in a way that functions across browsers, operating systems and devices. W3C’s Web Platform Docs addresses these issues by offering a single “go-to” source for web developer documentation, and providing a site that the community can continually edit and improve.

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., represented by Michael Champion, and the Microsoft Internet Explorer team represented by Eliot Graff, have been involved from the very inception of the project as we strongly believe this community site is key in the journey to an interoperable web platform and same markup.

As an initial contribution, Microsoft donated more than 3,200 topics from MSDN and will continue to add content moving forward. This is an open community – web developers can get an account at webplatform.org to make their own contribution – fill in gaps, correct errors, and flesh out the documentation with sample code to explain how to use the web platform to its full potential.

So what does this mean for you, the developer?

You will save time and resources, knowing you can consult with confidence 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.

W3C’s Web Platform Docs is an open site where anyone can become a member and contribute. Microsoft and the other founding stewards helped boot up the wiki (and will continue to contribute new content), but YOU, the developer community, own the site. W3C convened the community and will administer webplatform.org in the future, but you don’t have to join W3C to participate in this effort.

All materials on W3C’s Web Platform Docs are freely available and licensed to foster sharing and reuse.

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!

Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java - August 2012 Preview

M. Sawicki — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Gearing up for back to school, the Microsoft Open Technologies Inc. team has been busy updating the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java.

This August 2012 Preview update includes some feedback-driven usability enhancements in existing features along with number additional bug fixes since the July 2012 Preview. The principal enhancements are the following:

Inside the Windows Azure Access Control Service Filter:

Option to embed the signing certificate into your application’s WAR file to simplify cloud deployment
Option to create a new self-signed certificate right from the ACS filter wizard UI

Inside the Windows Azure Deployment Project wizard (and the role’s Server Configuration property page):

Automatic discovery of the JDK location on your computer (which you can override if necessary)
Automatic detection of the server type whose installation directory you select

You can learn more about the plugin on the Windows Azure Dev Center.

To find out how to install, go here.

Martin Sawicki
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

Interoperability Goodness at TechEd 2012

Peter Galli — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:33:00 GMT

I know there was a flurry of news at the recent TechEd 2012 conference in Orlando, so I wanted to point you to a piece of Interoperability goodness that might have gone unnoticed in the mix: the release of the System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) OVF Export/Importtool.

I recently chatted with my colleague Monica Martin, who is involved in the DTMF work around OVF for MS Open Tech. She gave me a lot of insight into the tool, which uses the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)’s Open Virtualization Format (OVF 1.1) standard, enables Interoperability between System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and VMware vCenter and Citrix Xen Server.

The tool allows Microsoft’s System Center 2012 VMM users to import and export a virtual machine in an OVF 1.1 format from VMware’s vCenter and Citrix’s Xen Server.

The OVF Import/Export tool is a set of cmdlets for use with VMM. Use of OVF promotes portability and interoperability of a virtual machine across Microsoft, VMware and Citrix hypervisors. We’ve gained valuable implementation experience with Citrix and VMware using OVF and successfully tested with vCenter and Xen Server.

Adding OVF and the OVF Import/Export tool to the cache of advanced infrastructure, configuration and service management capabilities to SC 2012 is another milestone in Microsoft’s plans to deliver ongoing value to our customers and partners.

The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distribution of virtual appliances to run in virtual machines developed in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Inc. Microsoft and other industry partners are focused on the development of OVF. Microsoft has been involved in OVF development from the outset.

OVF 1.1 is an international standard important to customers and partners, who are looking for strategies to effectively enable and speed their on-ramp of virtualization technologies in an interoperable way.

This is another example of how Microsoft is committed to interoperability and openness in the products and services we provide, including our multi-hypervisor and standard-based storage management features in SC 2012.

We have now taken this even further with the release of the System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) OVF Export/Import tool, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center. More information can be found on TechNet.

For more information about this tool and other System Center products and solutions, please visit the System Center website.

Eclipse Plugin for Java Developers on Windows Azure

M. Sawicki — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:16:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce the availability of the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java (by Microsoft Open Technologies), June 2012 CTP.

This has been the most ambitious and technically complex update we’ve had, focusing on improving the ease of creating projects, deploying apps to the cloud, and simplifying developers’ programmatic access to various services provided by Windows Azure. This update also includes a set of other enhancements driven by user feedback.

These are the main additions:

- New Windows Azure Deployment Project wizard – enables you to select your JDK, Java server, and Java apps right in the improved wizard UI. The list of out-of-the-box server configurations to choose from now includes Tomcat 6, Tomcat 7, GlassFish OSE 3, Jetty 7, Jetty 8, JBoss 6, and JBoss 7 (stand-alone), and it is user-customizable. (This UI improvement is an alternative to dragging and dropping compressed files and copying over startup scripts, which was previously the main approach. That method still works fine but will likely be preferred only for more advanced scenarios now.)

- Server Configuration role property page – enables you to easily switch the servers and applications associated with your deployment after you create the project, as part of the Role Propertiesdialog box.

- “Publish to cloud” wizard – an easy way to deploy your project to the Windows Azure cloud directly from Eclipse, automating all the heavy lifting of fetching credentials, signing in, uploading, and so on. (This is a contribution from our Java partner GigaSpaces Technologies Ltd.)

- Widows Azure Toolbar – provides easy access to several commonly used actions: Run in emulator, Reset emulator, Create cloud package, New Windows Azure Project, Publish to Windows Azure cloud, Unpublish.

- Componentsproperty page makes it easier for advanced users to set up project dependencies between individual Windows Azure roles in the project and other external resources such as Java application projects, as well as to describe their deployment logic.

- Package for Windows Azure Libraries for Java (by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc) – consists of all the JAR files needed for programming the Windows Azure APIs, including the Windows Azure Libraries fo Java. It is installed by default when you install the main plugin. You add a reference to just this one Eclipse library from your Java project. You can now also easily embed the entire library in your WAR file at the same time with just a single check box (no need to configure the deployment assembly separately). This package is for users who do not use Maven and would rather not have to download all the JAR files on their own.

- Instance input endpoint configuration UI– helps enable remote debugging and JMX diagnostics for specific compute instances running in the cloud in scenarios with multi-instance deployments. Users can do this by configuring this new type of Windows Azure endpoint. (Previously, remote debugging could be made to work reliably only for single-instance deployments.)

- Windows Azure Access Control Services Filter (by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc) – enables your Java application to seamlessly take advantage of Windows Azure Active Directory Access Control (ACS) authentication using various identity providers (such as Google, Live.com, and Yahoo). You don’t have to write authentication logic yourself, just configure a few options and let the filter do the heavy lifting of enabling users to sign in using ACS. Then just write the code that gives users access to resources based on their identity, as returned to your app by the filter inside the Request object.

Martin Sawicki

Principal Program Manager

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

Gigaspaces Working with MS Open Tech on Java Tools for Windows Azure

M. Sawicki — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:15:00 GMT

We’re pleased to announce that GigaSpaces Technologies Ltd, an established leader in helping enterprises move their Java applications to the cloud, has joined Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. and Persistent Systems Ltd. in the the development work behind the latest version of the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java (by Microsoft Open Technologies) - June 2012 CTP.

GigaSpaces has contributed the “Publish to cloud”wizard to the plugin, enabling Java developers to easily deploy their projects to the Windows Azure cloud directly from within Eclipse, thus eliminating the need for manual uploads via the Windows Azure portal. GigaSpaces has also contributed other new capabilities for Java developers, including:

the ability to view the progress of the deployment in an Windows Azure Activity Log view in Eclipse
the ability to reconfigure remote desktop access as part of the deployment process
the ability to delete previously published deployments

You can read more about the latest plugin update here, and you can learn how to use the “Publish to cloud” feature here.

Known for its industry-leading scalable application platforms, GigaSpaces Technologies is the creator of Cloudify, an innovative Open PaaS stack solution that enables on-boarding of mission-critical and big-data applications to the cloud without any code or architectural changes. Cloudify's recipe-based approach provides the flexibility and control required to manage the deployment, scaling, management and high availability of all the tiers of your application. Hundreds of tier-1 organizations worldwide use GigaSpaces technology to enhance IT efficiency and performance, among which are Fortune Global 500 enterprises and ISVs, from many industries spanning financial services, e-commerce, Telco, healthcare, and more.

Thanks to the team at GigaSpaces for all they’ve done to help streamline and improve the Windows Azure development and deployment experience for Java developers! We look forward to continued collaboration with Gigaspaces in the future.

Martin Sawicki

Principal Program Manager

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation