Microsoft in 2015: The Good, the Bad and the Works in Progress

‘Tis the season for year-in-review stories, and the techie blogosphere is sounding off on Microsoft’s performance in 2015. It was a banner year for Redmond, most observers agree, despite a few stumbles. Microsoft made bold forays into newer areas like virtual reality and hardware, while leveraging its strong enterprise customer base to build its cloud…

What is Windows-as-a-Service, and Why Should You Care?

On December 8th, owners of the Lumia 950 received and Over-The-Air update to the Windows 10 running on their phones.  While updates like this may seem common place, this one was special because the software came directly from Microsoft with no intervention by the mobile service carriers.  While iOS users are able to update their phone…

Java Security Updates May Not Actually Be Secure

With Java SE reportedly installed on 850 million PCs, the “Java Update Available” popup has become a well known nuisance.  But keeping software up-to-date is supposed to help protect us.  According to the FTC, Java updates might be an exception to that rule. The key issue is that Java updates have not always removed older…

Microsoft Drops IoT Gauntlet, What Will You Build?

Microsoft, Hackster.io, and Arduino have launched a new contest they are calling “The World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge” with prizes for the best combination of Arduino, Windows 10, and Windows Azure.  With more than 1,000 winners receiving a new Arduino MKR1000 board there seems to be plenty of prizes to go around.  The top 3…

Are Microsoft’s Windows 10 Universal Aspirations Becoming Reality

Microsoft’s bold attempts to create a “universal” platform that runs on mobile, tablet, and PC seems to be picking up some steam lately as major app publishers have released or announced new Windows 10 universal apps.  Is this the beginning of a trend? Recently NetFlix released their new Windows 10 Universal app targeted for PCs…

AngularJS 2 Beta Announced

Santa’s elves aren’t the only ones working hard this December, as the AngularJS team has announced the release of Angular 2 Beta.  This release marks point at which further changes should be minimal and significant applications for production can be built. Through developer preview and alpha we’ve worked closely with several large projects here at…

Jumping Off the Deep End of Node.js with Kevin Griffin

In this webinar, Kevin Griffin provides an overview of everything you need to know to get started with Node.js from it’s history, to how to serve web pages and how to extend Node.js using NPM. After a brief discussion of the origins of Node.js in the Google V8 platform, Kevin discusses Node.js performance and the pros…

Apple Design 2015

After a series of inexplicable design choices, Apple goes “All-in” with the charger design for their new electric car! Photo courtesy of Jonathan Atkinson (@twsjonathan).

Join the Azure Service Fabric Party with Free Party Clusters

Want to learn more about Azure’s Service Fabric?  Now you can host your apps for free on Microsoft’s new “Party” clusters.  These free public clusters are short lived instances that offer developers a chance to try out their apps on Azure before being blown away every 2 hours. Each party cluster is the same and…

Microsoft Open Sources the Chakra JavaScript Engine

One of the best new features of Microsoft’s Edge browser is its fast execution of JavaScript.  This feature is build on a newly designed execution engine that Microsoft calls Chakra.  This weekend at JSConf Microsoft announced that they are releasing the Chakra Engine to Open Source on GitHub. Unlike other open source announcements, the code…