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Testing Windows 7 Readiness MPR Test Tool Video
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Sign up today to mentor a student team for Imagine Cup 2011. Meet highly qualified student developers who use technology to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems.
Excellent article shows how you can use web services hosted in Windows Azure and have it communicate across various devices, such as Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android. And have that service scale to terabytes in size.
My colleagues Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos wrote the article for MSDN magazine Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure.
Kinect for Windows consists of the Kinect for Windows hardware and Kinect for Windows SDK, which supports applications built with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The newly release Kinect for Windows SDK version 1 offers improved skeletal tracking, enhanced speech recognition, modified API, and the ability to support up to four Kinect for Windows sensors plugged into one computer.
Version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime are now available for download, and distribution partners in our twelve launch countries are starting to ship Kinect for Windows hardware, enabling companies to start to deploy their solutions.
Students from Croatia, Ecuador, Jordan and the United States receive funding and other support in the first year of the Microsoft Imagine Cup Grants program.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting yesterday in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft Corp. announced the winners of the inaugural year of the Imagine Cup Grants program, a three-year, $3 million competitive grant program for student technology and social entrepreneurs.
The grant packages include $75,000 (U.S.) for each team, as well as software, cloud computing services, solution provider support, premium Microsoft BizSpark account benefits and access to local resources such as the Microsoft Innovation Centers. Microsoft will also connect grant recipients with its network of investors, nongovernmental organization partners and business partners.
One of the key patterns in building scalable applications is queues. Let’s say you have a Website or Web Service (in your Web Role) that responds quickly to a user request, but there’s another process that takes longer. It might be a long data base inquiry or video encoding or extensive calculation would be in a Worker Role. You may want to spin up more processors to work on those long term items too. The way the Web Role talks to your Worker Role is through queues.
You could choose Windows Azure Queues as a dedicated queue storage mechanism built on top of the Windows Azure storage services. You add an item on the queue, and the Worker Role checks the queue and performs the work.
Of you might choose to use a Service Bus Queue when you want to run process messages in a particular order (guaranteed first-in-first-out. Or maybe you need to hold the item in a queue and store it for a while. Or maybe you need automatic duplicate detection.
Compact Inspector detects if Internet Explorer platform changes affect your site, according to the IE Blog post IE10 Compat Inspector. Compat Inspector was developed during the course of IE9 to speed up the process of recognizing common issues across different sites and have now updated it for IE10.
Whether you're preparing for IE10 or still updating for IE9, run Compat Inspector on any page experiencing problems. Then watch for messages explaining potential issues and steps you can take to resolve them.
If you are an existing Visual Studio Professional, Premium or Ultimate with MSDN subscriber, you get free access to Windows Azure each month, and up to $3,700.00 in annual Windows Azure benefits at no charge.
This offer provides a base level of Compute, Storage, SQL Azure database, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching each month at no charge.
Tim O’Brien, General Manager, Developer & Platform Evangelism, has posted details about MIX. He writes, "We have decided to merge MIX, our spring web conference for developers and designers, into our next major developer conference, which we will host sometime in the coming year."
For details, see Thinking About Developer Events on the official Microsoft blog.
SQL Server 2012 launches March 7. Register now for the Virtual Launch Event. You will have access to over 30+ sessions to learn about the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 at your own pace, in your own schedule. This event brings together a who’s who of industry experts and executives to tell the SQL Server 2012 story in this unique online launch event. You will also “meet” with partners, experts, and peers in a virtual “Expo Hall” to discuss SQL Server 2012 one-on-one.
Learn more at SQL Server 2012 Launch Event.
A software engineer's glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece of code--and all the heroics it took to write it. With Visual Studio Achievements Beta, your talents are recognized as you perform various coding feats, unlock achievements and earn badges.
And have some fun!
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in Microsoft's Server and Tools Business division, explains in a new blog post how to sign-up and get started with Windows Azure. He explains the steps how you can get a no-obligation 3 month free trial. This free trial costs nothing and doesn’t obligate you to buy anything at the end of it. It provides an easy way to try out and get started with Windows Azure.
We’ll ask for a mobile phone number and credit card, only to verify that you are who you say you are. The credit card is not billed and during the free trial you’ll have a spending limit on Azure set to $0.
System Center 2012 Release Candidate (RC) joins Hyper-V and Windows Server as key building blocks for Microsoft's private cloud strategy.
ISVs are building out their cloud strategy by selling software for deployment to on premises or cloud customer sites, selling subscriptions through their own hosted solution, or by using Platform as a Service offering of Windows Azure, or even hybrid approaches where part of the application and its data is in the cloud, part on premises.
Brad Anderson published a blog post that describes how public and private clouds come together.
A new API lets you show up to three alternative routes on Bing Maps. The new routing engine is called Customizable Route Planning. Also the team announced a brand new algorithm for computing driving-direction queries, include reduced latency and higher performance.
Learn more at Bing Maps New Routing Engine.
New Windows Phones were announced jointly by Microsoft and partners at CES according to That’s a Wrap: Microsoft 2012 CES Keynote Recap by Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Corporate Communications.
Microsoft announced that new Kinect for Windows hardware and accompanying software will be available on February 1. The announcement was made at Starting February 1, 2012: Use the Power of Kinect for Windows to Change the World.
Kinect for Windows will be available in 12 countries (United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom), at a suggested retail price of US $249.
See Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer keynote at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show online. Steve Ballmer took the stage at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Ryan Seacrest.
Watch the address at Microsoft News Center about CES.
And stop by for more materials throughout the week.
Whitewater from Riverbed automates backup for enterprises into Windows Azure. Azure Architect Evangelist Allan Naim talks with Riverbed Marketing Director Bob Gilbert about Riverbed's decision to support Windows Azure for their Whitewater backup appliance.
ISV Video: Whitewater Backup to the Cloud on Windows Azure Storage
Internet Explorer 6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1% according to a blog post on Exploring IE, The US Says Goodbye to IE6.
Roger Capriotti, Director, Internet Explorer Marketing, writes, “IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away. In fact, we launched the IE6 Countdown site last March to help accelerate the process. Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6. In addition, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines are also entering the Champions’ Circle.”
The December release of Windows Azure has unveiled a new Windows Azure site and sign-up experience. In the past, one of the biggest concerns and roadblocks was that you could overspend on your free trial.
The new Windows Azure Trial accounts and MSDN Accounts are now completely risk-free given the institution of “spending limits”. By default all new trial accounts and newly provisioned MSDN benefits are created with a spending limit of $0. That means that if you exceed the monthly allotments of gratis services, your services will automatically be shut down and your storage placed in read-only mode until the next billing cycle. Then you can redeploy your services and take advantage of that month’s allotment (if any remains).
A holiday update Windows Azure SDK for Node.js can help get you started with server-side JavaScript on Windows Azure.
Node.js offers a server side JavaScript programming model ideal for building highly scalable and performant network applications whether on premise or in the cloud. One of its flagship qualities is that it leads you down a path of writing code that is using non-blocking IO thus achieving greater scale. Another is the fact that it is super small and lightweight. It has a very rich ecosystem of modules like express and socket.io which developers can pull in using the awesome node package manager otherwise known as npm. Thanks to the excellent partnership between Joyent and Microsoft we were able to port Node and NPM on Windows to enable a new class of applications.
Quark Brand Manager provides distributed sales and marketing teams the opportunity to easily create, customize and deliver brand-compliant marketing materials on-demand. Quark chose Windows Azure for this new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
Marketing manager for Brand Manager Nick Howard and engineering manager Amit Nayar talk with ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle about how they chose Windows Azure.
Video Link: Brand Manager Goes Global in the Cloud on Windows Azure
Whitewater automates enterprise backup to the cloud. The product from Riverbed is a gateway that combines data de-duplication, network optimization, data encryption, and integration with Windows Azure storage services through a single, virtual, or physical appliance.
No longer do enterprises need to use tape and move the files from disk to disk. Nor does an enterprise need to pay for a traditional disaster recovery site.
Whitewater cloud storage gateways and public cloud storage provides secure, off-site storage with restore anywhere capability for disaster recovery (DR). Data can be recovered by Whitewater from any location. Public cloud storage offers excellent DR capabilities without the high costs associated with remote DR sites or colocation service providers. With the public cloud and Whitewater cloud storage gateways – any size organization can significantly reduce its business risk from unplanned outages without the large capital investments and running costs required by competing solutions.
Frameworks are pre-built code libraries and well defined business processes that are designed to facilitate software development and implementation of business processes. Developers can use frameworks to speed up the development of solutions and products. iLink Systems provides solution frameworks that are nearly complete solutions of pre-built code that can be used to reduce time to market, support best practices, reduce delivery cost and improve ROI.
Once a potential need has been pinpointed, these frameworks can be leveraged individually, in parts or in combination with other frameworks. Frameworks are consumable by ASP.NET, Silverlight apps, or Web Services and tie in data from various formats, including Windows Azure data storage and SQL Azure. iLink’s Geographical Information System (GIS) Framework enables to add Geolocation to solutions and products by offering rich visualization of geography sensitive data.
All the features of in the new version of PhoneGap version 1.3 are supported on Windows Phone 7.5.
This release extends the cross-platform capabilities of PhoneGap, giving more choices to developers in need of a programming environment allowing them to easily deliver the same mobile experience to their users across the various existing and prominent mobile operating systems.