news|May 26, 2016

Microsoft: Windows Phone Not Dead, Still Evolving

The latest round of layoffs in Microsoft’s Windows Phone business—1,850 jobs will be cut, according to an announcement earlier this week—seems to signal the final death gasp of a segment of the company’s business that has long struggled. Windows phones currently make up less than one percent of smartphones sold worldwide. Microsoft, however, continues to insist…
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news|Mar 17, 2016

Windows 8.1 Mobile Customers Can Finally Upgrade to Windows 10

Think Windows Phone is dead? Not so fast. Though the customer base for the mobile OS remains paltry compared to competitors iPhone and Android, Microsoft still seems to see the phones as important to its overall plan for Universal Windows Apps. And on Thursday, the company began rolling out over-the-air updates to Windows 10 for…
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editorial|Feb 1, 2016

Microsoft’s Q2 Earnings Point to Success of Cloud-Focused Strategy

After Microsoft reported earnings last week for the quarter ending Dec. 31, its stock jumped by more than 8 percent. That’s despite the fact that both profit and revenue fell from the previous year. Why? Investors are excited about some of the same segments of Microsoft’s business that have drawn interest from developers: cloud services…
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docker|Dec 29, 2015

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…
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Survey|Sep 10, 2015

Will Windows 10 Continuum Lure Developers Back to Windows Phone?

Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 into every corner of the globe with more than 75 million devices running Windows 10 across 192 countries.  It’s next big push coming ostensibly as part of their October hardware announcement will be Windows 10 on phones, and with new hardware comes a feature called Continuum.  Continuum allows the latest…
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azure-and-cloud-computing|Apr 23, 2015

Which Mobile OS Do You Trust?

With recent revelations from the RSA Security Conference highlighting gaping security holes in iOS8 as well as pointing out that many Android apps don’t perform proper SSL validation, one has to wonder is their mobile data safe anywhere? Amit Yoran, President of the RSA kicked off their company’s annual conference with a scathing commentary on…
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Blogs|Mar 2, 2015

Responding to Orientation Changes in Xamarin Forms

Last week, I published the first in a series of articles on building cross-platform mobile apps with Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin Forms. In it, I presented an RPN calculator app that works on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. One subject I didn’t address in that article was how to respond to orientation changes in…
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editorial|Feb 3, 2015

Microsoft’s Most Popular Mobile Apps Aren’t Necessarily on Windows Phone

You may have heard that Microsoft has released mobile versions of their Office apps for Android and iOS, but that’s only scratching the surface of what they’ve published.  What’s more some of their apps are more popular on Android and iOS than Windows Phone. Microsoft’s recent move to open up the Office platform to Android…
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InfoGraphic|Dec 1, 2014

Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Roadmap

In a recent blog post, Microsoft’s Mohamed Yamama has released an updated infographic showing resources for learning, porting, designing, building, testing, publishing, and monetizing your Windows Phone 8.1 Apps.
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net|Nov 12, 2014

.NET Framework goes Open Source and Cross Platform

Microsoft is holding a virtual conference today called Connect() and it’s keynote is chock full of new announcements.  Chief among many is that Microsoft is going to make the entire .NET core stack open source with its next release as well as offering server side .NET implementations for Linux and OSX.  They are also furthering…
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survey|Nov 5, 2014

Is Microsoft Abandoning Windows Phone?

Last week Microsoft released a new wearable fitness device rather blandly named “The Microsoft Band“.  Surprisingly enough it’s getting good reviews as both a fitness device and a wearable smartphone extension.  But under the covers of the sudden success is a more troubling question for Windows mobile developers.  Following in the footsteps of the Office mobile…
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news|Oct 14, 2014

Try Out Apache Cordova in Visual Studio

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team makes learning more about Apache Cordova easier with a new fully loaded Azure VM Interested in building hybrid mobile apps without leaving the comfort of Visual Studio?  Not sure what a hybrid mobile app is?  Now you can experiment to your heart’s content without installing a single SDK.  Microsoft’s Visual Studio team…
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