windows-10|Jan 27, 2016

Microsoft Accelerates Windows 10 Preview Schedule, Releases Build 14251

A new Windows 10 build goes out today to Insiders in Microsoft’s Fast track, and it includes previously announced changes to Cortana. The Fast track is living up to its name, with this new version, Build 14251, released just a week after Build 11102. (Don’t be confused by the leap in numbers; Microsoft is simply…
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News|Jan 26, 2016

Microsoft Will Release First Technical Preview of Azure Stack on Jan. 29

Microsoft will debut its hybrid-cloud platform, Azure Stack, this week, offering a technical preview that goes live Jan. 29. Aimed at enterprise customers who aren’t ready to put all their sensitive information in the public cloud, Azure Stack allows users to deliver Azure services from their own datacenters. The platform’s architecture mimics that of Azure.…
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News|Jan 14, 2016

Microsoft Offers R Server Free to Developers

Microsoft is releasing a free developer edition of its Microsoft R Server, an analytics platform for enterprises based on R, the most popular programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. The company has been working to integrate R into its big data products since acquiring Revolution Analytics, a provider of R software and services,…
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editorial|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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news|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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news|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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Blogs|Dec 8, 2015

A Quick Look at F# In Visual Studio Code

It’s F# Advent time again! This is a yearly event the F# community comes together for the month of December and each person releases an F# related post on a day of their choosing. Today is that day for me this year. With the recent announcement at Microsoft’s Connect() conference, Visual Studio Code now has…
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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|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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editorial|Nov 26, 2015

What We’re Thankful For!

Today is Thanksgiving in the USA, a time for reflection and gratitude for all of the joys in our lives.  And while our staff will be busy showing our family and friends how much we appreciate them, several of them took a few moments to say what in they are thankful for in technology. The…
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