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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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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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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News|Aug 31, 2015

Make Seamless Office App Interfaces with Office UI Fabric

Whether you want to build apps that run in the Office ecosystem or just look like they do, Microsoft has released a new framework to help called Office UI Fabric.  This framework consists of JavaScript and CSS that allows you to style your applications using the same styles used by Microsoft for Outlook.com, OneDrive, and Delve.  …
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news|Aug 25, 2015

Microsoft Outlines Windows 10 Privacy Policies

Microsoft has been dealing with a bit of a backlash regarding its new policies under the “Windows as a Service” concept in Windows 10 including some significant concern coming from Torrent trackers regarding Microsoft’s ability to block pirated software from executing, although labeling blocking stolen software a “privacy concern” seems a bit of a stretch.…
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web-development|Aug 20, 2015

Azure DocumentDB Adds JavaScript Language Integrated Queries

Microsoft is continuing to build on it’s cloud based document database designed for web applications and today is announcing support for JavaScript Language Integrated Queries. Azure DocumentDB’s database engine is purposefully designed from the ground up to provide first class support for JSON and JavaScript. Our vision is for JavaScript developers to build applications without having…
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News|Aug 19, 2015

Windows Server 2016 Preview with Containers Support Released

Microsoft has released its latest Technical Preview for Windows Server 2016 which includes support for Docker Containers baked in as well as new features and functionality in its Nano Server edition. Today we are excited to release the first preview of Windows Server Containers as part of our Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 release.…
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News|Aug 18, 2015

Windows Phone Developers Can Get Xamarin for Free

The folks at Xamarin are showing some love for Windows Phone developers with an offer for a free Xamarin licenses.  The offer is targeted at individual independent Windows Phone developers who have currently have an App in the Windows Phone app store. This free community edition includes Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android as well as Visual Studio…
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visual-studio-alm-tfs-and-scrum|Aug 13, 2015

Visual Studio Code Updated

Microsoft has released an update to their multi-platform code editor Visual Studio Code.  This release brings improvements in documentation, PHP snippets, and support for Roslyn based quick fixes. Documentation improvements include better organization and additional information about how to extend VS Code. Since VS Code was released there have been a large number of questions…
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News|Aug 11, 2015

Windows 10 IoT Core Released

Microsoft has released another Windows 10 version this week with support for the Rasberry Pi2 and MinnowBoard MAX devices.  Dubbed IoT Core, it’s designed for embedded devices which may or may not include a screen.  This version doesn’t include the usual user shell experience and so you have to write a Universal Windows App as…
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News|Aug 6, 2015

Team Foundation Server 2015 Released

Microsoft announced the release of the final version of Team Foundation Server 2015 today which includes numerous improvements in Agile Project Management, a brand new build system, Git support enhancements, and extensibility.  While there are literally dozens of major and minor enhancements, here’s a quick highlight of some of the best. Agile Project Management: The…
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