news|Oct 15, 2015

Microsoft Releases Azure Active Directory Domain Services

Microsoft has released a public preview for their new Azure Active Directory Domain Services feature in Azure Active Directory.  This feature allows you to establish virtual network domains in Azure. Azure AD Domain Services is an entirely new concept. It’s a cloud based service which gives you a fully Windows Server Active Directory compatible set…
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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 8, 2015

Amazon Releases New Cloud Services at re:Invent Conference

This is a big week for Amazon developers as Amazon’s annual web service developer conference kicks off in Las Vegas and the Day 1 keynote brought with it a slew of new product announcements.  Among them are a new Business Intelligence service, an interesting new device for transporting petabytes of data between data centers, and…
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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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machine-learning|Sep 30, 2015

Azure Machine Learning Studio Overview

Microsoft has created a new diagram to help provide an overview of the capabilities and features available in Machine Learning Studio.  For more information, check out this article on MSDN.
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sql-server|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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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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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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Blogs|Sep 9, 2015

Implementing Sharing in Xamarin Forms

One thing you may want to do within your Xamarin application is to allow users to share items that your application may capture, such as photos. While this isn’t quite trivial in Xamarin Forms as it’s different for both iOS and Android, this isn’t too hard to implement with the power of renderers. We’re going…
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