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Microsoft announced that the rollout for updates to the “Mango” release of Windows Phone has begun. The Windows Phone team shared that we started rolling out the update to customer handsets and shared lots of developer goodness and started rolling out RTM updates to dev devices.
And now the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RTW release is now available on the Microsoft Download Center for immediate download and update.
View the BUILD Windows Conference keynotes. Links to the streamed keynotes will be posted to http://www.buildwindows.com/ shortly before the event.
The future of computing is here and On September 13th at //build/ in Anaheim, CA we will be taking a look at what the future holds as we discuss the details of Windows 8.
Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, Server & Tools Business, has begun a series of blog posts that describe new features coming to ASP.NET.
Posts describe new functionality and improvements – for both Web Forms and MVC - making building applications easier, faster and better.
A new version of Sync Framework Toolkit lets you synchronize data between your Silverlight apps, Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded Handheld, Windows computers, iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, Blackberries, and browsers supporting HTML5.
Wade Wegner has written a post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog that explains how you can Build Windows Phone Applications Using Windows Azure. The post explains how to get started building cloud apps using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone, how to get the toolkit, how to start your application in Visual Studio, and how to manage user authentication.
Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit has been updated. The toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7.
David Rousset describes how you can write JavaScript to take advantage of the new dual- or quad-core processors in your HTML5 applications. You’ll be interested in this for several kinds of scenarios, such as:
The Virtual Machine Manager team has released the release candidate for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (VMM).
VMM helps enable centralized management of physical and virtual IT infrastructure, increased server utilization, and dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization platforms. It includes end-to-end capabilities such as planning, deploying, managing, and optimizing the virtual infrastructure.
jpa4azure is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) that binds Java objects to Azure Tables, making it very easy for java developers to leverage Windows Azure Storage from on-premise or cloud applications.
Any intermediate Java developer can take an object model and with some simple annotations be on their way to using Azure as a persistence mechanism in minutes.
So many modern applications need to be able to make calls asynchronously. Whenever you have a method call that could take longer than 50 milliseconds, you want to be able to return control to the user so your users does not need to wait for some “long” activity. Those long activities might be retrieving data from a database or a Web service. Or it could be something that takes long calculation.
And wouldn’t it be awesome to have a way to do that in your code using the same techniques you have today?
The developer experience has been revampeded for the Windows Live developer platform to make it easier for websites to integrate Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger into your sites in ways that are meaningful and beneficial.
The release candidate for Silverlight 5 is now available to developers on the Silverlight developer site. You can get the release itself and additional details on Silverlight Downloads.
In my day to day discussions with ISVs who are moving their applications to Windows Azure, they often express the need to install drivers or services. Many think that they need a VM Role. But it turns out that most all of the configurations, drivers, and services can be installed using elevated privileges.
My colleague Greg Oliver has put together a blog post that describes the steps you can take to install drivers, start up services, or configure Windows. See Installing Windows Features in a Windows Azure Role Instance.
Events are available around the United States for developers to learn about Windows Phone. MSDN Events is offering one-day and two-day sessions around the US.
Register at MSDN Events.
Steve Marx, Microsoft Technical Strategist for Windows Azure, has put together a set of source code and example that shows how you can add support the new storage analytics API.
The Windows Azure Platform Pricing Calculator is designed to help application developers get a rough initial estimate of their Windows Azure usage costs. But where to start? What sort of numbers do you plug in?
A series of white papers from MSDEV helps give you a starting point for figuring it all out. Start with Getting a Start on Windows Azure Pricing and pick a scenario that is similar to your app. Then, use simple sliders in the pricing calculator to plug information about your application —like how many compute instances your application will use, the size of your database, the amount of data transferred to and from the application, and how much storage the application will need. Set the sliders and the calculator kicks out the estimated monthly cost to run the application on a pay-as-you-go model or through special offers.
Many times, ISVs ask me about how Microsoft is using Windows Azure. A recent blog post shares best practices and cost saving scenarios is to help customers make decisions about how best to plan for, deploy, and manage Microsoft solutions in their own environment.
The post, New Microsoft IT Showcase Articles Detail How Windows Azure Powers the Microsoft’s Own Global Enterprise, describes some of the key projects in the Microsoft IT Showcase.
An article in the September issue of MSDN magazine tells how you can take advantage of the features offered by modern browsers. Brandon Satrom’s article, No Browser Left Behind: An HTML5 Adoption Strategy, gives you practical strategies for how you can adopt HTML5 technologies today without ending up with the kind of graceless degradation.
When users pin your site, they visit more often, spend more time and go deeper. That means you get more site impact, like ad revenue, purchases, paid subscriptions or whatever you want your users to do more of. Start with the best parts of your site and then use pinning capabilities to grab attention and pull your users in.
Build My Pinned Site provides you with a step by step guide on how to make your site sticky with your users.
Seats at SharePoint Conference 2011 are going fast. The conference is October 3 – 6 in Anaheim, CA.
With less than three weeks until SharePoint Conference 2011, you still have time to register for one of the last seats at the biggest and most comprehensive SharePoint 2010 event in the world. Register now before the conference is sold out.
Steven Sinofsky, President of Windows and Windows Live Division, has been writing about features coming to Windows 8 in his Building Windows 8 blog.
Microsoft now provides geo-replication of all Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two data centers.
Geo-replication replicates your Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two locations that are hundreds of miles apart and within the same region.
Microsoft and Nokia have announced guidance, training, and technical mapping for Nokia Symbian developers to learn Windows Phone and have built a great package to help developers get started.
Project Silk provides guidance for building maintainable cross-browser web applications that are characterized by an intentional design, rich interactivity, and a responsive user interface (UI), resulting in an immersive and engaging user experience (UX). Such applications take advantage of the latest web standards, including HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript version 5, and modern web technologies such as jQuery and ASP.NET MVC3.