News|Oct 7, 2015

How Azure File Storage Works

Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich published a blog post that goes into detail about how the newly released Azure File Service takes advantage of existing Azure services to provide a hyper scale file share service.  The key is the implementation of SMB 3.0 support with directory and file metadata being stored in Azure Table Storage while the…
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news|Oct 5, 2015

Microsoft Windows 10 Hardware Event – Live Blog

Join us tomorrow morning as we offer our first Live Blog of a Microsoft event.  You’ll get all the updates as they happen right here.  The show starts at 10:00 AM EDT. See you there!   (function() { var lb24 = document.createElement(‘script’); lb24.type = ‘text/javascript’; lb24.id = ’24lbScript’; lb24.async = true; lb24.charset=”utf-8″; lb24.src = ‘//v.24liveblog.com/embed/24.js?id=1304887’;…
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News|Oct 1, 2015

More Azure Announcements from AzureCon

Microsoft held a virtual Azure conference this week and with it came several new announcements for features in Azure.  The virtual conference had sessions viewed by tens of thousands of people all over the world detailing the newest features of Azure.  Here is a quick summary of those announcements. New Azure Regions in India –…
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machine-learning|Sep 30, 2015

Azure Machine Learning Studio Overview

Microsoft has created a new diagram to help provide an overview of the capabilities and features available in Machine Learning Studio.  For more information, check out this article on MSDN.
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news|Sep 28, 2015

Microsoft Announces New Big Data Azure Services

Microsoft announced several new features targeting Big Data processing including support for HDInsights on Ubuntu Linux, as well as a set of new features in their Data Lake services. The first announcement was of the availability of HDInsights, Microsoft’s Hadoop services, on Ubuntu Linux virtual machines.  Features include the ability to create HDInsight clusters from the…
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How To|Sep 23, 2015

Quick Tip: Add Developer Command Prompt Here

While it’s certainly not a new trick, it’s often useful to be able to get to a development command prompt quickly from File Explorer.  You can add that feature easily using the INF files published by Daniel Cazzulino on GitHub. To install the Developer Command Prompt Here context menu, just download the package from GitHub,…
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xamarin-development|Sep 22, 2015

Xamarin Studio Adds Roslyn Support

Xamarin Studio now supports Microsoft’s Roslyn compiler-as-a-service features found in Visual Studio 2015.  They’ve also announced a new project model that integrates with Microsoft’s MSBuild system. In previous versions of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, they had their C# compiler, but they separately had to write and maintain all of the code that supplied Intellisense, refactoring, red-squiggles,…
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How To|Sep 18, 2015

Tasks are (still) not threads and async is not parallel

    I talk to a lot of developers who are either new to .NET or are moving from an older version to the newer platform and tools. As such I’m always trying to think of new ways to describe the nature of Tasks vs Threads and async vs parallel. Modern .NET development is steeped…
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how-to|Sep 14, 2015

A Hypermedia Overview

Hypermedia is a term that originated with the beginnings of the World Wide Web to explain how browsers could adapt their features to any type of media (text, XML, JSON, images, video, etc.) using MIME types.  The term has been expanded to be applied primarily to REST based APIs to describe a model for API…
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