Microsoft is making a concerted effort to convince developers to use its Windows Azure service to build mobile apps that tie together with various back-end services. A number of sessions at last week's Visual Studio Live! Chicago conference described how developers can use Microsoft's new Windows Azure Mobile Services to remove the headache of writing code designed to link to server-side processes.
Windows Azure Mobile Services fits into a category known as mobile backend and a service (mBaaS). A report released last month by Gartner said 40 percent of mobile app development projects will tie to cloud-based back-end services in the next three years. Like platform as a service (PaaS) mBaaS provides application middleware to various back-end services but the latter is aimed specifically at letting developers add services to mobile apps such as push notifications, storage and integration with back-end systems and social networks. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/21/20130 comments
Craig Kitterman, product manager for the Windows Azure Team at Microsoft, gave the Day 2 keynote address at Visual Studio Live! Chicago last Wednesday. He guided attendees through the improved features and interface of the Windows Azure cloud platform, showing how dev organizations can quickly set up free Azure accounts for things like hosting cloud-enabled ASP.NET applications and creating virtual machines for dev/test operations.
In his talk (video replay available here), Kitterman stressed that there were five things devs need to keep in mind when transitioning to cloud app models. First, design to scale, making sure to properly manage session states across distributed caching environments. Second, he said, dev orgs must design for failure. More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/21/20130 comments
A revamped version of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service released a month ago today now gives developers the long-awaited capability of deploying their own servers and virtual machines. Eric Boyd, founder and CEO of the Chicago-based consulting and integration firm ResponsiveX, explained how developers can spin up VMs in the revamped Windows Azure Wednesday at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Chicago.
Until last month's release of the new Windows Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Microsoft's three-year old cloud offering was only a platform as a service (PaaS). At last spring's Visual Studio Live! conference in Brooklyn, N.Y., Boyd, a Windows Azure MVP, suggested that VMs were a key ingredient that would flesh out the Windows Azure service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/16/20130 comments
There are a number of techniques and challenges developers face when building Windows 8 live tiles. Ben Dewey, senior software consultant at Tallan, Inc. explored how to effectively build live tiles during a presentation Tuesday at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Chicago. Titled "Make Your App Alive with Tiles and Notifications."
In the session, Dewey showed how developers can communicate with users via Windows 8 tiles and notifications and covered the implementation of live tiles, secondary tiles, toasts, badges and notifications. More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/16/20130 comments
There are scores of so-called NoSQL databases that allow organizations to create scalable ways of parsing and querying non-relational data. Two that are attracting a growing number of .NET developers are the open source MongoDB and Cassandra databases.
In back to back sessions Tuesday at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Chicago, Ted Neward, principal with Neward & Associates, outlined the nuances of both NoSQL databases. In each session, Neward expressed his disdain for the NoSQL nomenclature, which effectively stands for a database that is "not-SQL." By that measure, Neward said, "NoSQL also applies equally to cars, rainbows and unicorns. None of them are a SQL database either."
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/15/20130 comments
Jay Schmelzer, director of program management for Visual Studio at Microsoft, gave the opening day keynote address at the Visual Studio Live! Chicago conference Tuesday morning. I caught up with Schmelzer after his presentation (watch the video here) to ask him about Visual Studio LightSwitch, the move away from Silverlight and the new Apps for Office programming model.
Michael Desmond: If you had one message that you'd like attendees to take away from keynote address today, what would it be?
Jay Schmelzer: For application developers, it would be the realization that it's a multi-device world. As much as we would want and love for everyone to be carrying Windows devices, we know it's the consumer's choice, and developers need an experience for supporting that.
I would say the other aspect of this is wanting everybody to realize that hey, the investments we've made in managed languages, VB, C#, .NET--those assets will continue to evolve and will help them to continue to modernize their apps and adapt them to the devices they need and the services they need to build. Those are investments people should feel confident in and continue to invest in.
MD
:
Platform confidence is of course such an important thing and has been a core strength for Microsoft in its relationship with developers. But didn't the retirement of Silverlight shaken that confidence a bit?
JS: I step back and look at it and say, 'it was really more that the entire RIA plug-in model. In hindsight had a lifespan." Whether it's Silverlight, whether it's Flash, they all are facing the same challenges, where they are dependent on devices supporting them. We could have at Microsoft decided to keep supporting [Silverlight] on our devices, but then a big chunk of its reason for existence is gone. It's not going to do what you need it to do, because I can't make Apple support it forever. More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/15/20130 comments
Microsoft might change the terms that give developers 750 hours of free Windows Azure usage, according to Craig Kitterman, a senior technical product manager for Windows Azure at the company.
Kitterman dropped the hint during his keynote address today at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Chicago. Kitterman didn't say whether significant changes are in the works or if Microsoft is merely looking at slight adjustments, but he suggested they will be for the better. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/15/20130 comments
Lenni Lobel, chief technology officer of Sleek Technologies and author of Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (Microsoft Press), offered a walk through the SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) built into Visual Studio 2012 and available for free download for users of Visual Studio 2010.
The session, held Wednesday morning at the Visual Studio Live! Chicago conference, showed how database developers can use SSDT to manage both on-premise and cloud-based database development projects. SSDT works with SQL Server 2012 and SQL Azure databases. More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/15/20130 comments
Developers need to support a diverse array of devices and understand the vital role of services in enabling rich application experiences. That was the message from Jay Schmelzer, Microsoft's director of program management for Visual Studio, during his opening keynote address at the Visual Studio Live! Chicago 2013 conference this morning, as he explored the two trends and how they directly play off each other.
"It turns out hardware devices really aren't that interesting without great software on them," Schmelzer told the audience. "It also turns out that great software is a lot easier to build when you have compelling hardware to target and capabilities in that hardware that you can target and leverage as part of your application." More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/14/20130 comments
Microsoft's forthcoming cloud-based big data service is "feature-complete" and in many regards is more advanced than rival offerings, but developers shouldn't anticipate a seamless experience. That was the assessment of Andrew Brust, CEO of Blue Badge Insights, in a session at Visual Studio Live! Chicago.
After an extended private test period that began last year, Microsoft in March released the beta of its Windows Azure HDInisght service, though testers have to pay a discounted fee, Brust told attendees at the conference Tuesday morning. HDInsight processes huge volumes of structured and unstructured data using Microsoft's SQL Server and the Hortonworks distribution of the Hadoop file system (HDFS). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/14/20130 comments
The Visual Studio Live! Chicago 2013 conference is set to open Monday, May 13, providing hands-on guidance and training for developers engaged with the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio development environment.
The event will kick off Monday with a trio of all-day workshops, before the formal event begins Tuesday morning with a keynote address by Jay Schmelzer, director of program management for Microsoft's Visual Studio Team. More than 60 sessions and a number of networking events are planned during the conference, which runs through Thursday May 16. More
Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/10/20130 comments