The Windows Start button has been an iconic and (eventually) highly intuitive UI feature in Windows since good old Windows 95 confused and confounded Windows 3.1 users back in the day. That was nearly 20 years ago…Yikes!
Its disappearance was just one of the criticisms levelled at Microsoft when the Windows 8 betas emerged, and everyone got in a bit of a flap about the Metro Modern interface.
According to The Verge, Microsoft have listened to the online *ahem* discussions…and is reportedly bringing back the Start button in the next major update for Windows 8. There is …
The Windows Start button has been an iconic and (eventually) highly intuitive UI feature in Windows since good old Windows 95 confused and confounded Windows 3.1 users back in the day. That was nearly 20 years ago…Yikes!
Its disappearance was just one of the criticisms levelled at Microsoft when the Windows 8 betas emerged, and everyone got in a bit of a flap about the Metro Modern interface.
According to The Verge, Microsoft have listened to the online *ahem* discussions…and is reportedly bringing back the Start button in the next major update for Windows 8. There is also talk of having a “Boot to deskptop” option too.
The actual functionality of the resuscitated button is also still a little moot, but either way, this is good news and should go a long way to appeasing the nay-sayers.
It’s taken a bit of getting used to, but here at Framework Towers, we likes us a bit of Windows 8, it’s a solid OS.
New Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012
Microsoft has just released a tool suite that bolts on to Visual Studio 2012. The new Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 allow deeper control, integration, and app development and deployment options for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, and cloud-based Office 365.
Following the new Modern design paradigm that is running through the latest generation of Microsoft products and platforms, the underlying technologies are assembled with ease of deployment to the Web and Cloud firmly in mind. HTML5, …
Microsoft has just released a tool suite that bolts on to Visual Studio 2012. The new Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 allow deeper control, integration, and app development and deployment options for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, and cloud-based Office 365.
Following the new Modern design paradigm that is running through the latest generation of Microsoft products and platforms, the underlying technologies are assembled with ease of deployment to the Web and Cloud firmly in mind. HTML5, CSS, JavaScript are promoted for develop rich user interfaces, while OData provides solid and platform-agnostic networked data connectivity (the same OData API used with Windows Azure).
It’s great news for internal development teams that create and maintain Office solutions within their organisations, but also paves the way for small, medium and large commercial software houses to develop and publish apps to the Microsoft Office Store.
Want to know more? Check out “Project Napa”, where you can create apps for SharePoint and Office 2013 / 365 directly in your browser, with the option to drop them into Visual Studio 2012 later on, and keep on coding.
Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 – final build completed
Development work on Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 has been completed – now been shipped to manufacturing prior to release in September.
Some exciting news broke yesterday when S. Somasegar (VP Developer Division, Microsoft) posted an announcement on his blog stating that Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 are completed and the products have been passed to manufacturing.
There will be a launch event on September 12th and MSDN subscribers will be able to download the software on August 15th.
We’ve already delivered training in to clients Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 development topics using the pre-release versions – we’re looking forward to playing with the final cut when it arrives.
Windows 8 Surface Tablet Surfaces
Two new tablets released by Microsoft – one running on ARM, the other on Intel Ivy Bridge.
Windows 8 on Microsoft Surface – is beauty skin-deep?
By choosing to step back into hardware we can assume Microsoft are hoping these products will follow in the footsteps of the hugely-successful Xbox consoles…
Their latest foray into the hardware market was announced this week trumpeting the arrival of two tablet lines running Windows 8 RT and Windows 8 Pro respectively. The level of technical detail is hardly of a forensic level, but there’s enough there to tweak our interest.
Both of these tablet product lines are constructed around an all-magnesium case, have 10.6 Gorilla glass displays and a magnetically attached cover that doubles as a full multi-touch keyboard and trackpad.
The Windows 8 RT tablet has an ARM-based architecture, connectivity comes via Wireless Networking, micro HDMI, microSD and USB 2.0 and a choice of 32 or 64GB of solid-state storage. This kit is packed into a case 9.3mm thick and weighs in at 600g – almost identical to the third gen iPad (9.4mm and 652g).
The Windows 8 tablet is Intel-based with an Ivy Bridge Core I5 with either 64 or 128 GB of storage, USB 3.0, Mini Display Port, pen input support and a higher resolution display (1080p). It’s a little more chunky that its stable mate – 13.5mm thick and 900g
The release dates are tied to the Windows 8 launch, so we expect sometime around mid-autumn 2012 for the RT and the end of the year for the Pro.
If you are considering developing for these devices we provide scheduled and on-site courses in Windows 8 Development and Windows 8 Metro style App Development
Scribbled by Ian
Learning to live with Big Data
To many people, “Big Data” is just a buzzword. To others, it’s a source of considerable concern and stress. For those with the right tools, capabilities and mind-set, Big Data is a huge and ever-expanding opportunity.
To many people, “Big Data” is just a buzzword. To others, it’s a source of considerable concern and stress. For those with the right tools, capabilities and mind-set, Big Data is a huge and ever-expanding opportunity.
Big Data arises when you collect so much input from your [web traffic / sales / scientific research / financial / geographic / demographic] systems, that you can’t see the wood for the trees. But you still need to be able to aggregate, analyse, and report on that data.
When your relational database is maxing out your massive RAID array and is really starting to groan under the strain, it’s probably time to consider spreading the load. Don’t worry – there are tools that can help.
While the likes of Oracle and Teradata offer some pretty heavyweight Big Data and analytics solutions, there is an open-source framework called Hadoop, released through the Apache Foundation, which has an impressive user base.
Although it only hit v 1.0 in December last year, for years Hadoop has been underpinning the huge flow of data for outfits such as Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Last.fm, Linkedin, Rackspace, and Spotify. Even Microsoft recognises the power and reach of Hadoop, and is making the platform available through its Azure cloud services.
Hadoop is designed to run on massively distributed nodes / clusters. Much of its existence is owed to technologies originating from Google, but Yahoo! has subsequently contributed a lot of the code and just happens to be running Hadoop across more than 100,000 CPUs.
You don’t have to be a search engine, massive media streaming outlet, or government-funded research lab to benefit from Hadoop, and thanks to Cloud services like Amazon and Azure offering scalable solutions, you don’t need your own underground bunker full of servers to start realising the information locked away in your huge databases.
If you are looking to gain a broader view of Big Data solutions, for instance in order to help get buy-in with project stakeholders who aren’t so deeply involved in the technical minutiae of database management or business intelligence (e.g. Board of Directors, Project Managers, Business Analysts), we would be more than happy to deliver an objective overview of Big Data at your offices, aimed at laying bare the pros and cons of investing time and resources into processing large data sets, with real-world case studies and ample discussion.
Otherwise, if you’d like to know more about Hadoop, you might be interested in our 1-day Overview of Apache Hadoop which is aimed at people directly involved in data collection, warehousing, analytics, and reporting. We cover topics such as Hadoop Architecture & Common Utilities, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), MapReduce, and more.
Please drop us a line or give us a call on 020 3137 3920 if you’d like to have a chat about what you need to get out of Big Data.
Scribbled by Tom
Windows 8 Editions revealed
Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc has lifted the lid on the official naming scheme for the Windows 8 versions which should be hitting the streets in the near future. And they shall be known as Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, and Windows RT.
Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc has lifted the lid on the official naming scheme for the Windows 8 versions which should be hitting the streets in the near future.
Compared to the somewhat overwhelming options available for Vista and Windows 7, good ol’ x86 architecture boxes (desktops, tablets etc) will get a refreshingly simple choice of Windows 8, and Windows 8 Pro.
Regular Windows 8 should suffice for most home users, although if you want features like Hyper-V, booting from VHD, and Remote Desktop cooked in, you’ll need to go Pro.
ARMed to the teeth
Evidently aimed at going toe-to-toe with Android (and perhaps to a lesser extent iOS), Microsoft will also be releasing Windows RT, which is essentially the Windows 8 runtime for ARM based chipsets (or WOA as it is referred to internally). ARM have a pretty strong hold on mobile computing as it currently stands, and their licensed small-footprint chip technology to pretty much all the major tablet and smartphone manufacturers.
In his blog post, Brandon says it will only be supplied pre-installed on new systems, presumably to ensure proper hardware support and compatibility, and perhaps as a more controlled approach than the olden days of the proliferation of Windows CE / Windows Mobile 6.X.
It will be interesting to see if Windows Phone and Windows RT converge at some point in the future, as at least from a superficial point of view, they both seem to be aimed at performing pretty similar roles.
Edit: Just noticed a small footnote on Brandon’s blog mentioning Windows 8 Enterprise edition as well, which will essentially be Windows 8 Pro with Group Policy and other remote administration tools . So it’s all just a tiny bit less simple than originally meets the eye.
Scribbled by Tom
ASP.NET MVC & Razor go Open Source
The inimitable ScottGu has blogged today that Microsoft has released the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor) under an Apache 2.0 open source license via CodePlex.
The inimitable ScottGu has blogged today that Microsoft has released the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor) under an Apache 2.0 open source license via CodePlex.
Microsoft have also integrated jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, jQuery Validation, Modernizr.js, NuGet, Knockout.js and JSON.NET, which gives developers a great deal of tools for rapid web app development and deployment, ‘out of the box’.
If you head over to http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com you can browse the source code through your browser, or use git to clone the source repository. You can compile your own builds and try out updates out as soon as they are checked-in, as well as submit your own code and bug reports for review by the ASP.NET dev team.
Scribbled by Tom
Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 (WPF) Training Course
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is Microsoft’s API for creating Windows Applications with highly functional and good-looking user interface. This course provides comprehensive coverage of WPF with XAML in .NET 4.5, and also highlights differences from traditional Windows Forms development.
ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview & Roadmap spotted in the wild
Microsoft has unveiled plans for world domination. Well, Rich Web App domination at least.
It’s still early days for ASP.NET MVC 4, but the Roadmap is available, with some features that promise to give other MVC frameworks like Spring and Django a run for their money.
If you’re feeling adventurous you can already get your hands on the MVC 4 Developer Preview – it should happily co-exist alongside your MVC 3 install.
Microsoft have boldly proposed that they aim to make ASP.NET MVC “the best web platform …
Microsoft has unveiled plans for world domination. Well, Rich Web App domination at least.
It’s still early days for ASP.NET MVC 4, but the Roadmap is available, with some features that promise to give other MVC frameworks like Spring and Django a run for their money.
If you’re feeling adventurous you can already get your hands on the MVC 4 Developer Preview – it should happily co-exist alongside your MVC 3 install.
Microsoft have boldly proposed that they aim to make ASP.NET MVC “the best web platform for building modern rich web apps“….and looking at the interest we’ve had in our MVC 3 courses, we can well believe that there is faith among developers that the chaps at Redmond can back this sort of claim up.
Some of the proposed MVC 4 new features include:
- Improved development workflow
- Easier deployment, better performance, scalability & security – especially in relation to the Cloud / Windows Azure
- MVC 4 Recipes – extensible tools to help automate code creation for otherwise lengthy tasks such as authentication and writing AJAX grids.
- Excellent Mobile / Tablet support
- new and improved templates for a much nicer experience across various platforms and screen sizes (for users and developers alike!)
- jQuery Mobile integration
- Support for overriding Views for specific devices
- built-in “Device Switcher” so users have control over whether or not to view the mobile or desktop version of your web app’s UI for instance
- Better support for AsyncController Classes – less code needed for asynchronous action methods
- Other mooted improvements and additions in areas like AJAX, HTML5, WCF Web API, AppFabric, & mobile web project templates…
As stated, MVC 4 is very much in its infancy, so any or all of these features could change drastically or be struck off entirely, but we’ll be keeping a ear to the ground as the roadmap firms up, and we’ll no doubt be including a hands-on overview of the MVC 4 beta in our MVC 3 training course as soon as it’s available.
Scribbled by Tom
Windows 8 Developer Preview out now
A Developer preview of Windows 8 is available for download from today in both 32 and 64 bit versions….
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/
We’ve not had much chance to play with it yet – we’ll post our thoughts when we’ve given it a thorough seeing-too…
Scribbled by Ian
A Developer preview of Windows 8 is available for download from today in both 32 and 64 bit versions….
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/
We’ve not had much chance to play with it yet – we’ll post our thoughts when we’ve given it a thorough seeing-too…
Scribbled by Ian
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