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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.
IE10 Platform Preview 2, the same HTML5 engine seen in the recent public “Windows 8” demos, is now available for download. With this update, IE10 continues to deliver support for site-ready HTML5 technologies as well as improving performance.
To coincide with the launch activities of Office 365 earlier this week, an updated Office 365 Training Course has been released for developers building solutions for the cloud for Office 365. The kit includes 8 sessions, over 12 hours of video and 19 labs as both an offline training kit and an online training course on MSDN.
Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) provides the latest updates for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and is now available.
SP1 contains all Cumulative Updates and Public Updates for 2010 that have already shipped. SP1 also contains new fixes for areas of each product. And there are some new features.
Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Microsoft Office 365, the company’s newest cloud service. Office 365 is now available in 40 markets, and it brings together Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription.
Microsoft Office applications are at the heart of Office 365. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook and other Office applications connect to Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync to deliver a world-class solution for communication and collaboration.
Office 365 is available in a wide range of service plans designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, ranging from the largest to the smallest.
The worldwide Microsoft ecosystem generated local revenues of $580 billion in 2010, up from $537 billion in 2009 and $475 billion in 2007. The IDC study estimates that for every dollar of revenue made by Microsoft Corp. in 2009, local members of the Microsoft ecosystem generated revenues for themselves of $8.70.
According to the IDC study, implementation of cloud computing is forecast to add more than $800 billion in net new business revenues to worldwide economies over the next three years, helping explain why Microsoft has made cloud computing one of its top business priorities.
Private Cloud test will apply to the Silver ISV Competency in the coming months and a Windows Azure MPR test will apply to the Gold ISV Competency in October. The announcements were made on the Microsoft Partner Network site.
The Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals will be held July 8-13 in New York City. This year, more than 400 international students, made up of 124 student teams from 73 countries, will gather to compete for top honors. Everyone can get involved in the excitement by voting for the Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide People’s Choice.
A Windows Azure AppFabric Application is any n-tier .NET application that spans the web, middle, and data tiers, composes with external services, and is inherently written to the cloud architecture for scale and availability.
Build AppFabric Applications using AppFabric Developer Tools, run them in the AppFabric Container service, and manage them using the AppFabric Application Manager.
Microsoft Corp. announced the winners and finalists of the 2011 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards. The annual awards honor Microsoft partners for delivering innovative solutions during the past year that directly address customer challenges. Award winners and finalists, chosen from nominations from around the world, will be recognized at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, the company’s premier annual event for industry partners, July 10–14 in Los Angeles.
Mobile Test Drive site has launched. It provides Windows Phone developers with the functionality you can expect on the IE 9 experience you’ll find in the ‘Mango’ release.
The site laid out to be easily read similar to Internet Explorer Test Drive, but uses on the mobile form factor.
Windows Phone 7 exam which will be available starting July 14. Peter Kuhn of the Silverlight Show has posted a series about how you can get ready for the exam.
The official outline of the measured Phone 7 skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:
We are super excited to announce the availability of DataMarket Service Update 2. Service Update 2 introduces a number of exciting new features, including:
ASP.NET developers have been asking for HTML5 & CSS3 support all the time and today we are super excited to announce the public availability of Visual Studio Web Standards Update which brings a ton of HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
VS Web Standards Update is a free extension available for anyone who is using Visual Studio 2010 SP1 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1.
It updates the HTML5 Intellisense and validation to reflect the latest W3C specifications and fixes some bugs bugs in the current SP1 support for HTML5. Also JavaScript Intellisense it updated to reflect many of the new browser capabilities such as Geolocation and DOM storage. Finally, this update adds comprehensive CSS3 Intellisense and validation based on the latest specifications from W3C.
Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) from Microsoft Research has been released for noncommerical application development.
The Kinect for Windows SDK can be downloaded today at no cost for development of noncommercial applications at http://research.microsoft.com/kinectsdk.
S Somasegar, Developer Division Senior Vice President, announced C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) that helps you target graphics hardware from all the major hardware vendors. The idea is to provide a way you can build out your software on massively parallel to include both GPU and APUs.
Soma also announced Microsoft’s intent to make C++ AMP an open specification.
The MPR website has been updated to include Office 365 under the Develop Tab. Here are some of the resource available at the site:
Online Services
The SketchFlow Template for Windows Phone 7 adds a new SketchFlow template for Expression Blend* users that makes creating a prototype of a Windows Phone app quick and easy. You can download it from here (CodePlex)
With this new template you can quickly mockup a Windows Phone app using all the SketchFlow features you already know and love, sketchy controls, sample data, Behaviors and the Visual State Manager. The prototype you create runs in the SketchFlow player enabling you to easily test, get feedback and quickly iterate on your ideas even if your client and stakeholders are remote to your location. For the SketchFlow phone template we have added a number of unique phone features to speed up the prototyping process such as pivot and panorama, date and time pickers, map controls, the application bar as well full screen mockups of features such as the camera, Bing search, the app list and home screen.
Access Control provides an easy way to provide identity and access control to web applications and services, while integrating with standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directories such as Active Directory®, and web identities such as Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.
The service enables authorization decisions to be pulled out of the application and into a set of declarative rules that can transform incoming security claims into claims that applications understand. These rules are defined using a simple and familiar programming model, resulting in cleaner code. It can also be used to manage users’ permissions, saving the effort and complexity of developing these capabilities.
Here’s a brief description of potential usage scenarios, benefits and features. I’ve added eight links to a collection of short videos about ACS – each video is approximately two minutes. These are “demystifying” videos about ACS including supporting slides available for download. Thanks to fellow Microsoft employee, Alik Levin for providing these links
Debugger Canvas from DevLabs is a new user experience for stepping through code in the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It displays the code of each of the methods you step into on a canvas with call lines between them, helping you keep track of the bigger picture as well as the details.
Debugger Canvas pulls together all the code along a call path into a single display for browsing and even editing. Instead of having to keep all the code in your head while you look at one file tab at a time, now you can see the entire path on the canvas, enabling you to more easily track the flow of control and data through your application.
Cloud Computing and Security are very big issues whether one is considering public or private cloud solutions. Here are some great resources for Developers and Decision Makers.
MSDN Video: Case Study Interview with Quest Software
MSDN Video: Quest Software's Azure Services
MSDN Video: Security in Provisioning and Billing Solutions for Windows Azure Platform
Watch David Chou’s TechEd session about the widely discussed “hybrid” approach – solutions spanning from on-premise into the cloud. This session offers a discussion of how usage of multiple cloud solutions enables large enterprises to be successful in adopting cloud computing, as well as a review of challenges that go with it.
Please visit Microsoft Tech Ed Registration site and create a free account
Today Microsoft is releasing a comprehensive package for Android developers to easily learn Windows Phone and port their app to Microsoft’s phone platform.
The package consists of:
The Windows Phone API mapping tool is targeted at helping developers find their way around the Windows Phone platform. It’s not a magic wand, but it does provide a “pocket dictionary” type experience.
Economics is often called the inexact science, but it provides the driving force behind the transition to the cloud. It is similar to previous technology change such as the move from centralized to client/server to virtualization. Customers and have deployed virtualization within their environments to address key economic/budgetary issues of under-utilization and power consumption. My local power utility was providing tax rebates for virtualization projects in the past. Business units and developers have subscribed to SaaS and IaaS solutions to increase business agility and flexibility. IT departments are under pressure to deliver services similar to cloud providers – not just once, but to have repeatable processes.
The first official production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance by Fujitsu running in Fujitsu’s datacenter in Japan coming in August.
The Fujitsu Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. partnership allows Fujitsu to work alongside Microsoft providing services to enable, deliver and manage solutions built on Windows Azure.
With Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform service, FGCP/A5, customers will be able to quickly build elastically scalable applications using familiar Windows Azure platform technologies, streamline their information communications technology (ICT) operations management to accelerate business expansion, and enhance their competitive edge in the global market.