Join us at 8:00 AM PST on March 7 for a two-day online event celebrating the launch of our latest version as well as 20 years of Visual Studio. Watch the live stream featuring Julia Liuson, Brian Harry, Miguel de Icaza, and Scott Hanselman as they share the newest innovations in Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure, and more. After the keynote, Microsoft engineers will lead interactive technical demo sessions to help you get the most out of Visual Studio 2017 and the rest of our tools and platform. On March…
Category: Microsoft
News collection from Microsoft world. What’s new with .NET and Windows? New features on Azure? New projects around the world
Microsoft’s new adaptive shell will help Windows 10 scale across PC, Mobile, and Xbox
The Windows Shell is essentially the Windows environment we all know and love. In layman’s terms, it gives us access to system elements and objects necessary for running applications, and houses features such as the Taskbar, Start Menu, Desktop and more. Currently, the Windows Shell is different depending on the version of Windows 10 you’re using. For example, Mobile is using a different Windows Shell than desktop; but Microsoft is working to change and streamline that. Microsoft is building an "adaptive shell" into Windows 10 that’ll work across PCs and…
Microsoft is working on a new design language for Windows 10 codenamed Project NEON
Microsoft has made several adjustments to its design language over the last few years, starting with Windows 8 and evolving into what we now know as "Microsoft Design Language 2" or MDL2 in Windows 10. With MDL2 being the current design language used throughout Windows 10, Microsoft has plans to begin using a much more streamlined design language with Redstone 3, codenamed Project NEON. A Metro 2.0? Cassim Ketfi at Numerama.com confirms our information and has heard Project NEON called "basically Metro 2". That designation refers to the first Metro…
Satya Nadella: Microsoft building the ‘ultimate mobile device’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has again reaffirmed the company’s commitment to developing smartphones. Unfazed by its market share dropping beneath 1 percent, Nadella said Microsoft is planning a revolutionary “ultimate mobile device.” Nadella made the comments during an interview with the Australian Financial Review. He visited Sydney last week to address a local developers conference about Microsoft’s cognitive computing systems and Azure cloud services. Nadella outlined his plans for Microsoft’s future involvement with smartphones. He suggested the company has stopped trying to rival the established leaders in the field. Instead,…
Microsoft delivers test builds of Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio 2017 for Windows
Visual Studio for Mac is not a port of Visual Studio for Windows; it’s a rebranded version of Xamarin Studio integrated development environment (IDE) that will work on the Mac. (Microsoft bought mobile-tool vendor Xamarin in February 2016.) Visual Studio for Mac is available as of today as a preview for download. Visual Studio 2017 is the official name of the product Microsoft has been calling "Visual Studio Next" and/or codename "VS ’15’." As of today, a near-final Release Candidate version of that product is available to testers. The RC…
Windows switching to differential patching in the Creators Update
Major Windows 10 updates, including this summer’s Anniversary Update and next year’s Creators Update, are distributed as essentially full operating system installs. The downloads are around 4GB, and installing them performs a complete in-place upgrade to Windows. That is set to change as Microsoft rolls out what it calls its Unified Update Platform (UUP). Major upgrades will be shipped as differential updates, where only the differences between the currently installed version and the newly installed version need to be downloaded. The company estimates that this will result in major version…
Microsoft takes on Slack with its new Microsoft Teams app
Microsoft today announced a major new app at its Office event in New York City. The company’s new service, Microsoft Teams is its own take on the popular team communication tool, Slack. We reported about Microsoft Teams just 2 months ago, and Microsoft is officially launching it in a limited preview for Office 365 users today. Microsoft, however, is calling Teams a group chatting software which will be accessiblefrom the Web, Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. Firstly, let’s get the basics covered: Microsoft Teams lets you share…
AWS public cloud is twice as big as Microsoft, Google, IBM combined
Amazon Web Services is utterly dominating the competition, taking 45 percent of worldwide revenues for public cloud services, according to a new analysis. Microsoft and Google might be increasing public cloud revenues faster than AWS, but they’ve also got a long way to go to come close to catching up, a new analysis from Synergy Research Group shows. The combined revenues from Microsoft, Google, and IBM amount to less than 20 percent of worldwide infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS, revenues in Q3 2016, compared with AWS’s 45 percent, the research firm reports.
Microsoft is building a quantum computer that may never work
Microsoft is working on a quantum computer that uses what are called “non-abelian anyons,” a quasiparticle that physicists aren’t sure even exist. Quantum computers promise to perform calculations at unfathomably faster rathes than today’s computers. Although other companies are using more realistic, proven materials in their work to create the machine, Microsoft is hopeful that its unique approach will pay dividends as the resultant machine should be less susceptible to external interference. The company has nearly 40 people working on the project, as quantum computing is seen as well worth…
Nadella: ‘Windows is the most open platform there is’
When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he asked what the company’s place in the world is, and how it could make the biggest contribution. What he kept coming back to was that the company builds things that empower people to build their own things. When he looked at Microsoft, he saw software that could be a force to "democratize and empower people." Nadella articulated what that vision means for the future of Azure, Windows, Office, Cortana, Linkedin, and more during his keynote address – on a telepresence…
Microsoft research works on “touching” virtual reality objects
Microsoft Research has presented a new way to interact with virtual reality by touch. As haptic solutions for virtual reality, NormalTouch and TextureTouch 3D haptic shape controllers are able to explore the virtual space with just your finger. Currently, the controller only supports the index finger, but who knows what else could be developed with further innovations. The 3D objects are tracked in virtual reality with the Optitrack system and presented through the Oculus Rift headset. The NormalTouch renders the surface of virtual objects by using a flat platform that…
Microsoft warns iOS isn’t as secure as you think
Microsoft has warned customers that iOS is no more secure than Android, contradicting commonly held beliefs about the relative security of the two platforms. The company said that recent attacks targeting iOS prove it’s as vulnerable as Android. Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for enterprise and client mobility, set out his views in a company blog post last week. He used the Pegasus iOS spyware, revealed last month, as an example of severe vulnerabilities present in iOS. Pegasus is capable of monitoring everything a user does on their device,…
Microsoft to launch new Surface PC at October 26th event
Microsoft is holding a special Windows 10 and Surface event in New York City later this month. The software giant has started emailing out invites to an event on October 26th, and Microsoft is expected to make some Xbox-related announcements at the event, alongside new Surface hardware and some details on the company’s next Windows 10 software update. Microsoft’s event isn’t expected to be as large, or involve as much hardware. Surface-branded keyboards and a mouse have started leaking ahead of Microsoft’s event, and the company is widely expected to…
Google opens Chromebooks to Android store
Google’s Chromebook update will allow the inexpensive laptops to run apps from the Android store opening them up to apps from Microsoft Word to Quicken.
All Windows 10 PCs will get Windows Holographic access next year
Windows 10 users will be able to dive into mixed reality starting next year, with an update planned that can let any “mainstream” Windows 10 PC run the Windows Holographic shell the company first revealed in January 2015. The update will allow users to multi-task in mixed reality environments, which combine traditional 2D Windows 10 apps with immersive, 3D graphical environments. These will be enabled via a range of “6 degrees of freedom devices,” input devices that add positional tracking to other more traditional forms of input, like clicking and…
Microsoft REST API Design Guidelines
Microsoft is publishing its “REST API Design Guidelines” to the API community: https://www.GitHub.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/. These guidelines represent a multi-year, cross-company, collaborative process aggregating the collective experience of hundreds of engineers designing, operating, and running global scale cloud services from across Microsoft; and listening to feedback on our APIs from customers and partners. We have attempted to incorporate those learnings along with industry best practices in the API space to create guidelines that API teams across Microsoft use on a daily basis. Our hope in publishing these guidelines to the greater API…
Introducing the IIS Administration API
The IIS team has been working on a new RESTful API to manage your IIS configuration. While still under development, the team was eager to share a preview of the new API. The API allows configuration of IIS resources such as authorization rules, modules, and applications. The API has been built with Hypertext Application Language (HAL) to allows APIs to have built-in discoverability. Starting at the root of the API, you can browse the entire API surface. In addition to the API, the IIS team has also built an API…
Microsoft takes on IFTTT with Flow
IFTTT is one of the most useful online services. Today, Microsoft is taking on IFTTT with its new service called “Flow”. The company is launching the preview of Flow today, and it works almost like IFTTT. Unlike IFTTT, Flow isn’t mostly focused on consumers — instead, it’s mostly focused on enterprise integrations. Flow lets you automate your workflow, and be more productive. With Flow, you can setup GitHub to automatically send a Slack notification and add a card in Trello when a new issue is submitted. Additionally, you can also…
Under the hood of Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux
Bash on Windows 10 was one of the big reveals at Microsoft’s recent Build conference. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Microsoft did to make this possible. Microsoft is starting to provide more details via blog posts and a new Channel 9 video on what’s going on under the covers. Spoiler alert: There’s no secret Linux kernel hidden in Windows 10. Instead, it’s the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that was developed by the Windows Kernel team is what provides the foundation that enabled the Linux…
C# 7 Features Previewed
Over the last year we’ve shown you various features that were being considered for C# 7. With the preview of Visual Studio 15, Microsoft has decided to demonstrate the features to make it into the final release of C# 7. Tuple Value Types .NET has a tuple type, but in the context of C# there are a lot of problems. Being a reference type, you probably want to avoid using it in performance sensitive code as you have to pay for GC costs. And as they are immutable, while making…
Microsoft’s multipronged strategy for bringing speech to IoT devices
Microsoft has been stepping up its game around connecting its Azure cloud services to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. But few may realize the company also is simultaneously working to bring its various speech capabilities to IoT devices, too. Microsoft provides IoT developers with various tools for integrating speech with their devices. There are built-in Windows 10 speech application programming interfaces (APIs) for tasks like dictating a simple message and Web search. There are natural-language services — known as Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) — that are part of Microsoft…
Microsoft, others join forces to work on encrypted email protocols
In the world of the Internet, technology is constantly changing. The SMTP technology behind email, however, has not changed much since it was first released a very long time ago. Despite the invention of SMTP SMARTTM to solve this problem, most emails are still unencrypted, and thus open to a man in the middle hack. Luckily though, a team of engineers from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Comcast, and other leading companies have been working on a proposal which would cut out the middle man hacker The proposal which has been submitted…
Microsoft adds ‘non-security updates’ to security patches
MS16-023, billed as a “Security update for Internet Explorer” and issued on March 8, includes six “General distribution release (GDR) fixes”. Five are innocuous as they address glitches like “Empty textarea loses its closing tag in Internet Explorer 11 after conversion from XML to HTML.” But the last item on the list item 3146449, has the rather more interesting title “Updated Internet Explorer 11 capabilities to upgrade Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.” A great many users just accept all Windows updates, so will never see item 3146449. Even if you…
Microsoft has released a Debian Linux switch OS
Put down your coffee gently. Microsoft has today released a homegrown open-source operating system, based on Debian GNU/Linux, that runs on network switches. The software is dubbed SONiC, aka Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. It’s a toolkit of code and kernel patches to bend switch hardware to your will, so you can dictate how it works and what it can do, rather than relying on proprietary firmware from a traditional networking vendor. It also pits Redmond against white-box network operating systems from the likes of HP, Dell, and…
Announcing SQL Server on Linux
It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. This Thursday at our Data Driven event in New York, we will kick off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability later this year. This is the most significant release of SQL Server that we have ever done, and brings with it some fantastic new capabilities. SQL Server 2016 delivers: Groundbreaking security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion…