Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7.

A new February 2011 update is now available on Codeplex.

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Sign-up now to get free access to  Windows Azure platform resources.

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The Community Technology Preview (CTP) Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java , enables Java developers to simply configure, package and deploy their web applications to Windows Azure. Developers can choose to upload the Java environment of their choice and run it on on Windows Azure.The goal for this CTP is to get feedback from Java developers, and to make sure that configuring, packaging and deploying to Windows Azure integrates well with common practices. The primary benefits are: This Starter Kit...

Save $200 on your Tech·Ed conference fee. Register by February 28.

The 19th annual Microsoft Tech·Ed North America conference provides developers and IT professionals the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft's current and soon-to-be-released suite of products, solutions and services.

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Allan Naim is an Architect Evangelist focused on the Windows Azure platform in Silicon Valley. Here’s a great overview video that he created. The Data Market is a service that provides a single consistent marketplace and delivery channel for high quality information as a cloud service.Content partners who collect data can publish it on Data Market to increase its discoverability and achieve global reach with high availability. Data from databases, image files, reports and real-time feeds is provided...

David Pallmann has posted a sample code that is useful for anyone who wants to store data in Windows Azure. The samples show REST implementation and a .NET StorageClient implementation with identical functionality. And he shows every single operation you can perform in the Windows Azure Storage API against blob, queue, and table storage.

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The Accumulus Subscription and Usage Billing System enables businesses to find more success with subscriptions and recurring payments. The system includes a suite of integrated tools designed to help a business grow its customer base by improving customer acquisition, fully automating the customer life-cycle and maximizing customer retention. The system handles promotion tracking, usage tracking, fee calculation, credit card processing, provisioning, billing statement emailing and customer support...

Earlier this week the W3C announced that it had extended the charter of the HTML Working Group , including clear milestones for HTML5. HTML 5 is the next version of the platform-neutral HyperText Markup Language standard used worldwide for rendering Web pages, and the cornerstone of W3C's Open Web Platform for application development. Peter Galli reports on what this means to developers in his posting HTML5 Moves Forward . Next Steps with HTML 5 Peter reports: (1) Under the milestone timetable announced...

Microsoft announced SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 at TDWI World Conference in Las Vegas. Fast Track Data Warehouse is a set of Reference Architectures that help you reduce time to solution and cost.

Fast Track also provides significantly increased performance and scale through pre-tested and pre-tuned configurations.

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Yesterday was a big day in the world of Dynamics CRM 2011. We have released all the pieces necessary if you want to deploy a Dynamics CRM 2011 instance either onsite or even in a a partner hosted model. Once again with a single code model we can support multiple types of deployments and  not force you the customer into one type of deployment. The power of choice is a wonderful thing and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 delivers this and more thanks to the hard work of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011...

  If you are developing an application, you might be interested in the following resources to help you get compatible and to make the most of the Windows Azure platform. For more information please visit Microsoft Platform Ready and MSDEV. If you have any questions please contact the team at: 1-888-346-3129  via email HelpNow@microsoft.com . or Online Chat Free Testing Tool Available Application testing is now simpler and faster. Now you can test your Windows Azure application against common...

Windows Phone 7 Connector is a simple, easy-to-use application designed to sync your favorite media files from your Mac, with your Windows Phone 7 or Zune HD. You can also sync photos and videos you captured on your phone with your Mac, and when needed, update your Windows Phone 7 software. With Windows Phone 7 Connector, you can: Sync music, movies, TV Shows and podcasts, from your existing iTunes library, to your devices Sync photos and videos, from your existing iPhoto library, to your devices...

In just a few days after public availability the IE9 Release Candidate has been downloaded two million times. The IE9 RC includes a number of important improvements consistent with the vision of delivering an all-around fast browser, strengthens our commitment to privacy and security, and delivers on the the commitment to developers to enable them to use the same markup and site-ready HTML5. For example, the IE RC includes: Significant performance improvements in browser speed which, according to...

    In this video Jay Mishra, VP Product Development for Astera will demonstrate how organizations can quickly and easily move their data from Salesforce.com to Dynamics CRM 2011, online and on premise, and showcase the power of Centerprise Data Integrator from Astera Enjoy the show! John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel   Technorati Tags: Dynamics...

WCF Data Services Toolkit has recently been released to make it easier to expose arbitrary data sources as OData services. Whether you want to wrap OData around an existing API (SOAP/REST/etc.), mash-up SQL Azure and Windows Azure Table storage, re-structure the shape of a legacy database, or expose any other data store you can come up with, the WCF Data Services Toolkit will help you out.

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The new Site Pinning feature in Internet Explorer 9 lets users add a shortcut to a site from any page of their own to sit on their Windows 7 task bar. In addition your site can add interactivity, like putting site-specific notifications, navigation in the Windows 7 jump list, and information in contextual menus that sit behind the icon.

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Today we published the third unit in the SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence Training Course (a.k.a. SQLInsights ) on MSDN designed to help developers learn how to develop an ETL process (extract, transform, load) with SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services. Developers use SSIS packages to populate data models that are optimized for easy, high performance reporting and analytics experiences. Download the SQLInsights on the MSDN Training Certification Resources Watch the videos and review...

A new video in MSDEV shows how you can build support for Windows 7 Touch and Multitouch in your applications.

The video, How Do I: Use Multitouch in a Windows 7 Application?, demonstrates how you can create a Multitouch application for Windows 7. The sample demonstrates a simple WPF photo viewing application where you can drag, zoom, and rotate an object, and drag several objects at a time.

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A new MSDEV video series shows you how to add jump lists, thumbnails, progress bar icon, and overlay icons in a series of short videos.

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The roadmap for Windows Phone 7 was shown today at Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain today including several new features, a booming app marketplace, and the integration of even more Microsoft products with the phone.

Microsoft announced several new Windows Phone 7 features coming in 2011, including a “dramatically enhanced” browser experience based on Internet Explorer 9; additional multitasking capabilities; support for Microsoft Office documents in the cloud; and the addition of Twitter to the People Hub.

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Developers can take advantage of the new features offered in Internet Explorer 9. MSDEV has created a 15-minute video that show you can light up your Website in Windows 7 with just a few lines of metadata that is compatible with other browsers.

You can pin your site, create jump lists, and add items to the Windows 7. You can give your Website have the same look and feel in Windows 7 as other applications.

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vorApps for SharePoint Online delivers an email enabled information management solution leveraging the power of Microsoft SharePoint Online.

Diane Gallagher of Vorsite Corp talks to Greg Oliver, ISV Architect Evangelist, about how vorApps was built on Windows Azure and how Office 365 customers can use it with Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

Video Link: Azure Email-Enables Lists, Low-Cost Storage for SharePoint 

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The Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February release is now available here . This release includes these enhancements: New Silverlight-based LABS portal , bringing consistency with the production Windows Azure portal. Ability to select either a 128MB or 256MB cache size. Ability to dynamically upgrade or downgrade your cache size. Improved diagnostics with client side tracing and client request tracking capabilities. Overall performance improvements . To learn more about this release please visit these...

Nokia and Microsoft today announced plans to form a broad strategic partnership that would use their complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem.

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The release candidate for Internet Explorer was available for download today from the Web.

Internet Explorer 9 has a streamlined design, fewer dialog boxes to click through, more intuitive navigation, and many new features that speed up your web browsing experience. Features like Pinned Sites let you pin your favorite website directly to the taskbar for one-click access. Other features, like hardware acceleration, deliver an all-around faster browsing experience.

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