News|Jan 6, 2016

AT&T Announces New Developer Tools, and Other CES 2016 News

The world’s biggest gadget-fest, CES, officially kicked off in Las Vegas today. The gaggle of products on display ranges from the weird (smart bras) to the derivative (a slew of Surface knockoffs) to the undeniably cool (a drone with built-in VR headset that lets you share its birds-eye view? Yes, please!). Amid all the hardware…
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news|Jan 4, 2016

Windows 10 Hits 200 Million Device Mark

Microsoft kicked off 2016 with a milestone: Windows 10 is now active on more than 200 million devices, Microsoft VP for Windows Yusuf Mehdi wrote in a blog post Jan. 4. That’s up from 110 million, the last figure Microsoft reported in October 2015, and the fastest growth in adoption rates of any Windows version…
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news|Dec 30, 2015

Google Abandons Oracle Java for OpenJDK

The legal battle between Google and Oracle over Java APIs just took a new turn—and it could be good news for developers. Google has opted to use OpenJDK, the open-source APIs for Java, in its new version of Android, VentureBeat reports. That’s a change from current versions, which are based on Oracle’s proprietary Java Development…
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security|Dec 23, 2015

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…
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machine-learning|Dec 22, 2015

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…
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News|Dec 16, 2015

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…
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News|Dec 9, 2015

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…
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News|Dec 7, 2015

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…
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news|Dec 3, 2015

Apple Makes Swift Open Source – But Not For The App Store

It’s not too often that we hear about open source projects from Apple, but today they have announced that they are open sourcing the Swift programming language.  The version released today will work on Linux Ubuntu as well as OSX.  Will this eventually mean Swift for Windows or Android? Apple will still be leading the…
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news|Dec 1, 2015

Click Your Way To A New App with Microsoft PowerApps

Microsoft is looking to make building Windows 10 Apps that leverage Azure services easier for business users with the release of PowerApps.  Using a tool that you download from the Windows Store, users can create apps from prebuilt templates, from an existing data source, or from scratch using step-by-step templates. Apps can be built from…
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News|Nov 30, 2015

Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 Released

Microsoft has dropped Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 less than two weeks after it was announced during the Connect() conference.  Included in this release are new features such as support for Android Marshmallow and iOS 9 in Apache Cordova apps, new Universal Windows apps tooling, ASP.NET RC1, and the latest .NET framework (4.6.1). This release features…
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news|Nov 25, 2015

Azure PowerShell 1.0 and Azure Portal Enhancements Released

Microsoft has released the 1.0 version of the Azure PowerShell cmdlets for automating processes with Azure including better support for Resource Manager, VM disk encryption with Azure Vault, and inclusion of Azure Data Lake and Notification Hub cmdlets.  Also released were new user experience improvements in the Azure Preview Portal such as notification enhancements and…
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