the “Will Code for Green” Developer Contest
http://willcodeforgreen.gnomedex.com/
Bing and Gnomedex are sponsoring a “Will Code for Green” developer contest. Make the world a little better, win US$10,000 and be featured at Gnomedex. Create a green app using the Live Search API (search results, phonebook, video, images etc.) with any tech platform or language.
Microsoft Contributes Open Source Linux Drivers for Hyper-V
Microsoft has contributed 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel community. The code contribution, a Linux device driver, will be published on CodePlex, and will be immediately available to the Linux Community and customers, enabling any distribution of the Linux operating system to be virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. For more, check out the Channel 9 video.
MSN Soapbox is shutting down
MSN Soapbox is shutting down. Another good move from MS. MSN will no longer offer Soapbox. It was really an overhead and confusing offering.
Why Projects fail
An eye opener from my friend Sajad.
Microsoft India launches Online Services
Cloud based services have been in focus for a few years now. From FREE online email services (e.g. hotmail, gmail) to paid online services (e.g. Google Apps, Office Online, Yahoo Premium emails), the adoption of these services has been steadily rising. The safety of these applications have been questioned (as exposed by recent Twitter docs leak)..
While Microsoft had launched its service in US way back, it has now launched these services in India. These services follow the initial launch of Hosted Exchange and Hosted Dynamics. These pay as you go/ subscription based services are meant for companies who want to avoid internally maintaining these basic IT services.
The service is being launched as Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. This suite includes Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communications Online.
Exchange Online provides email, calendaring and contact management. Sharepoint Online is a collaboration suite for managing content and workflows. Office Live Meeting is a online conference solution to host real-time meetings, training session and events. Office Communications Online provides Instant messaging and presence awareness to facilitate rapid connections between people.
Currently, the Productivity Online Standard Suite (that includes all the above) is priced at USD 180/ per user per month. Individual applications can also be bought individually. The service is providing FREE trails right now. The commercial launch will be in Oct 09.
Google the other player in this space provides the service at USD 50/ per user per year. However, this doesn’t include any conferencing facilities.
The service details can be accessed at: http://www.microsoft.com/india/onlineservices
Free course on Microsoft Virtualization
Microsoft Virtualization eLearning Collection – 10 hrs of courses for FREE! ($159 value)
Get access to five 2-hr courses to brush up on your Virtualization skills. For a limited time, access this eLearning collection for FREE! ($159 value). These eLearnings will prepare you for Windows Server Virtualization Certification. Use promo code 9350-Y2W6-3676 and register now! HURRY: Offer expires June 30th, 2009
www.MyRampUp.com- free online learning program for developers
Ramp Up (www.MyRampUp.com) is a free online learning program for developers. Just launched three ASP.NET tracks: “Web Development with ASP.NET”, “Move from ASP to ASP.NET”, and “Move from PHP to ASP.NET”. These tracks, along with the other currently offered ones (e.g., Windows Mobile 6, SharePoint for Developers, Visual Studio 2008), teaches the important skills in a guided path, making the learning process easier and more efficient. The easy-to-access content (provided by subject-matter gurus) is specifically tailored for the Ramp Up program, and offered in a variety of forms (article, v-lab, codecast and slidecast). Check them out now at www.MyRampUp.com, and see how Ramp Up can help you become more employable by learning important and marketable skills.
Windows Azure – Updates
New Apps and Demos
- PHP SDK for Windows Azure
As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, this open source project is an effort bridge PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues - Windows Azure Management Tool (MMC)
The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure. Developed as a managed MMC, the tool allows you to create and manage both blobs and queues. Easily create and manage containers, blobs, and permissions. Add and remove queues, inspect or add messages or empty queues as well. - Bid Now Sample
Bid Now is an online auction site designed to demonstrate how you can build highly scalable consumer applications. This sample is built using Windows Azure and uses Windows Azure Storage. Auctions are processed using Windows Azure Queues and Worker Roles. Authentication is provided via Live ID.
New Features
- Geo-Location support. Starting in May, a new option was added to the portal to support geo-locating your code and data. Read more about this feature here and see a complete provisioning walk-through.
- Storage API updates. Three new features to Windows Azure’s storage capabilities
- The long awaited batch transaction capability for tables as well as a new blob copying capability were released. Additionally, the GetBlockList API was updated to return both committed and uncommitted blocks in blob storage.
- A new versioning mechanism has been added. New features will be versioned by a new header (“x-ms-version”). This versioning header must be present to opt-in to new features. This mechanism is in place to prevent breaking changes from impacting existing clients in the future. It is recommended that you start including this header in all authenticated API calls.
- Changes to how property names are stored in table storage as well as the size for Partition and Row keys. Unicode chars and up to 1K key sizes are now supported, respectively. Finally, the timeout values for various storage operations were updated as well.
- New capabilities for Visual Studio 2010 beta testers
- Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (templates, local dev fabric, etc.)
- Updated support for Visual Studio 2008 – you can now configure settings through the UI instead of munging XML files.
- Improved reliability of the local dev fabric for debugging
- Enhanced robustness and stability (aka bug fixes)
Relevant Blog Postings
- http://blog.smarx.com/posts/sample-code-for-new-windows-azure-blob-features
- http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/05/28/may-ctp-of-the-windows-azure-tools-and-sdk-now-supports-visual-studio-2010-beta-1.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/04/30/windows-azure-geo-location-is-live.aspx
- http://dunnry.com/blog/CreateAndDeployYourWindowsAzureServiceIn5Steps.aspx
Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 Beta with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Beta
Another pain killer from Microsoft:
http://edge.technet.com/Media/User-State-Migration-with-Windows-7/
The same repeated story – Be ready for Vista to get to Windows 7
http://edge.technet.com/Media/Be-ready-for-Windows-7-Application-Compatibility/
SharePoint Designer is now a free download
Subject says it all. Microsoft starting today has made SharePoint Designer a free download. If a client had purchased SharePoint Designer under SA they will get Expression Web (for what its worth).
