Blog

I am pleased to announce the beta release of the Windows Phone Toolkit for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Built by Microsoft as an open source project, this toolkit provides developers with a speed dial that lets them quickly connect and integrate Windows Phone applications with AWS (S3, SimpleDB, and SQS Cloud Services) To create cloud-connected mobile applications, developers want to have choice and be able to reuse their assets and skills. [More ...]

We are excited to be attending and participating at Node Summit in San Francisco this week. Among those Microsoft staffers on site are Server & Tools Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie - who participated on a panel about Platform as a Service this morning and also gave a keynote address - and Gianugo Rabellino, the Senior Director for Open Source Communities, who was on a panel discussing the importance of cross-platform. You can read more about Scott's keynote on the Windows Azure blog here. As you may know, in December Microsoft announced that it was adding support for Node.js to the Windows Azure platform, which allows developers to easily take advantage of the powerful capabilities of Windows Azure with simple tools and a new open source SDK. As this work continues inside of Microsoft as well as with the Node.js community and our partner ecosystem, new and exciting capabilities are coming available allowing Node.js developers to have great experiences on the Windows platform. Today, during his keynote, Scott Guthrie demonstrated how easy it is to get up and running with Node.js on Windows and Windows Azure, while our partners at Cloud9 showcased new tooling experiences that provide even greater flexibility to Node.js for developers who want to build for Windows Azure. Microsoft has been closely partnering with Joyent for some time now to port Node.js to Windows. [More ...]

Good news for all you Java developers out there: I am happy to share with you the availability of Windows Azure libraries for Java that provide Java-based access to the functionality exposed via the REST API in Windows Azure Service Bus. You can download the Windows Azure libraries for Java from GitHub. This is an early step as we continue to make Windows Azure a great cloud platform for many languages, including .NET and Java.  If you’re using Windows Azure Service Bus from Java, please let us know your feedback on how these libraries are working for you and how we can improve them. [More ...]

As Microsoft continues to deliver on its commitment to Interoperability, I have good news on the Open Source Software front: today, the OData Library for Objective-C project was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery. This means that OData4ObjC, the OData client for iOS, is now a full, community-supported Open Source project. The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for communications between client devices and RESTful web services, simplifying the building of queries and interpreting the responses from the server. [More ...]

As Microsoft’s Senior Director of Open Source Communities, I couldn’t be happier to share with you today an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure. As we continue to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities. [More ...]

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Microsoft's SQL Server team yesterday announced the availability of a preview release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, which allows native developers to access Microsoft SQL Server from Linux operating systems. [More ...]

As the HTML5 platform becomes more fully featured, web applications become richer, and scenarios that require server side interaction for trivial tasks become more tedious.  This makes deficits in the capabilities of JavaScript as a runtime come into focus. [More ...]

Great news for all Node.js developers wanting to use Windows: today we reached an important milestone - v0.6.0 – which is the first official stable build that includes Windows support. This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. [More ...]

Today, David Green at Tasktop posted a blog about the latest Eclipse platform improvements for Windows. As part of Tasktop’s ongoing partnership with Microsoft, they’ve been working hard to bring two more Eclipse platform improvements for Windows this year: Desktop Search and Glass. You can read more about both of these improvements here. We look forward to continuing to work with both Tasktop and the Eclipse community going forward, and would love to hear from you about new features you would like to see in the future. [More ...]

Are you a Web developer, designer or just interested in the space? Well, if you are, you really don’t want to miss W3Conf. W3Conf is the W3C's first ever 2-day conference for developers and designers, and is uniquely focused on cutting edge technologies that work today across browsers. It is being held in Redmond, Washington November 15-16 2011 and it’s packed with top-notch presentations by leading experts in the Web industry on HTML5, CSS3, graphics, accessibility, multimedia, APIs and more. I’m participating in the “Browsers and Standards: Where the Rubber Hits the Road” panel discussion, along with Tantek Çelik from Mozilla, Google’s Chris Wilson and Divya Manian from Opera. Microsoft is proud to be the host sponsor of the event, joined by AT&T, Adobe, and Nokia. There are several ways to experience this conference: you can register to attend in person; videos of the presentations (with English captioning) will be streamed live over the Web; and recordings will be archived and made freely available for future reference. [More ...]

I am happy to report that today the announced the availability of the AMQP 1.0 specification. I am in New York attending the fourth annual and launch event for this important milestone, and Microsoft is thrilled to have been able to participate in the work to get the specification to this point. As an open, interoperable, high-performance messaging protocol, AMQP opens up new possibilities in communications that span the client to the cloud, and will provide customers with increased choice. AMQP has been developed over the years through the collective work of the 24 companies - and the many diverse communities they represent - that constitute the AMQP Working Group, including JP Morgan, VMware, Red Hat, Deutsche Borse Group, Microsoft, INETCO Systems, Goldman Sachs, and WS02. These WG members are all committed to working together on open standards and represent a diverse range of communities, many of them Open Source.  Microsoft has been a member of the AMQP WG since 2008 and we have actively contributed to the development and testing of the protocol. We are also supportive of, and excited about, the transition of the AMQP work to , a consortium whose goal is to advance open standards, and the subsequent standardization of AMQP 1.0, which is an important first step towards wider adoption of the specification. Microsoft supports thousands of standards in its products and we actively participate in more than 150 standards organizations and over 350 working groups worldwide. [More ...]

More good news on Microsoft's commitment to Interoperability in the cloud: last week Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, that Windows Server Hyper-V is now an officially supported hypervisor for OpenNebula. This open source project is working on a prototype for release next month and it will soon be possible for customers to build and manage OpenNebula clouds on a Hyper-V based virtualization platform. "Windows Server Hyper-V is an enterprise class virtualization platform that is getting rapidly and widely deployed in the industry. [More ...]

It’s my great pleasure to announce today a comprehensive package to leverage your development skills while learning to build applications for Windows Phone. The Microsoft & Nokia agreement has been described at length over the past few months and, like Matt Bencke highlighted, one of our goals has been to make it easy for Nokia Symbian developers to learn Windows Phone. So, folks from Microsoft and Nokia worked together to build a great package to help you get started. [More ...]

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