Category: News

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

February has come and gone without the highly anticipated Windows 10 Mobile upgrade for legacy Lumia handsets. In an email to partners, seen by VentureBeat, Microsoft is now targeting a release this month, to occur after the regular monthly service updates for the two Windows 10-powered handsets already on the market, the Lumia 950 and 950 XL. Unlike the previous schedule this one separates the upgrade from the service update. In other words, whereas the February rollout would have seen the update bundled into the upgrade, in March they are…

In less than a week Microsoft will formally end support for versions 4.0, 4.5, and 4.5.1 of the .NET Framework. Users should upgrade to a later version such as the slightly incompatible .NET 4.5.2. Before we move on, it should be noted that this only affects the 4.x series. The much older .NET 3.5 SP 1 will continue to be supported. In this context, support means having access to technical support, security updates, and hotfixes. Compatibility When upgrading to .NET 4.5.2, ASP.NET developers may see a compatibility issue. Though considered…

Microsoft is ending support for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 next week on January 12th, releasing a final patch encouraging users to upgrade to one of the company’s more recent browsers. The end of support means that these older versions of Internet Explorer will no longer receive security updates or technical support, making anyone who uses them much more vulnerable to hackers. A recently-announced patch will deliver the last few bug fixes, as well as an "End of Life" notification telling users to upgrade to IE 11 or Microsoft…

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has explained in an interview with BuzzFeed why the company is not concerned about the market share of its mobile operating system, which is about 1.7% globally. He said the company would be doing a “disservice” to itself by measuring its success solely by market share. “If you think of this more like a graph,” he said of how people use products, “these [devices] are all nodes. Sometimes the user will use all of these devices … sometimes they’ll use only one or two of our…

Unfortunately, it requires an upgrade from Windows Phone 8.1 – again. Microsoft launched build 10572 of Windows 10 Mobile to its insiders, together with a few nifty improvements on the messaging fronts. But, as before, you’ll still need to first downgrade to Windows Phone 8.1 to take advantage. Microsoft did say, however, that this two-steps-back, one-step-ahead approach will soon stop, and users in the Windows Insider program will once again be able to upgrade from Windows 10 preview builds without having to downgrade first. But the new build offers several…

When Microsoft kicked off work on Windows 95 way back at the beginning of the 90s, the company wasn’t to know how much of an impact it would have on our lives two decades on. In one fell swoop the new version of Microsoft’s OS brought a swish graphical user interface (GUI) to desktops for the first time and the much vaunted Start menu began life inside the mid-1995 edition of the OS. You only need look at the disquiet that surrounded its removal from Windows 8 and subsequent return…

In a video posted earlier (see it below), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella once again accepted the challenge of former NFL player Steve Gleason, who suffers from ALS, and poured a bucket of ice cold water over his head along with Terry Myerson and members of the Windows 10 team. At the same time, Myerson, head of the Windows and Devices division, confirmed that six million have signed up to the Windows Insider program that sees users able to test preview releases of Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile, according to Windows…