News|Oct 26, 2015

New Microsoft Project Oxford Features including Open Source SDKs

Microsoft has announced new features for their Language Understanding Intelligent Services (the natural language engine that powers Cortana) as it comes into public beta.  New features include Chinese language support, the ability to import and export langage-to-system data as JSON objects, and increased usage of internally built language models.  They have also open sourced the SDK code…
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Humor|Oct 23, 2015

Top 7 Tweets from @IAmDeveloper

If you haven’t seen the humor tweets from this parody Twitter account, here are seven of my favorites.   You can read all the posts at https://twitter.com/iamdevloper.
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How To|Oct 20, 2015

What Developers Need to Know About Docker

Docker is an application virtualization service based on features of the Linux operating system.  It provides a way to share a host OS, and using a virtualized filesystem, install and run Linux based apps in an isolated environment called a container.    The following diagram shows how Docker is different from Virtual Machines. Docker Architecture Docker…
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How To|Oct 14, 2015

A Microsoft Project Orleans Primer

If you’ve been wanting to learn more about Microsoft’s Project Orleans programming model, this primer will give you the basic concepts you need to understand to get started. Actor Based Programming Actor based programming is designed to allow for objects representing multiple instances of related real-world artifacts to interact as independent single threaded entities in…
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News|Oct 12, 2015

Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 CTP Released

Last week amid all the hardware releases, Microsoft also released a CTP of the next update for Visual Studio 2015.  This release includes support for Edit and Continue in C++ Windows Store projects, the C# Interactive debugging window, and a pull request hub in the Team Explorer window. Team Explorer now features a new Pull…
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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 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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Blogs|Sep 24, 2015

Automating Xamarin Builds with FAKE – Part 1: Introduction and Setup

Being a .NET developer, I’m sure one of your pain points throughout the development process in any project has been trying to setup automated building, testing, and even deploying. However, build tools have been evolving much like other development tools and have been getting much, much better. I’m sure most of you have heard of…
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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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