December, 2012

This morning we released a number of enhancements to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Mobile Services (job scheduler support, Europe Region Support, Command Line Support) Web Sites (scale improvements, integrated source control) SQL Data Sync (support in the new HTML portal) ACS Management (support in the new HTML portal) Media Services (job and task management, blob storage support, reserved compute) Virtual Network enhancements Subscription Filtering Support Windows Azure Store...

In October, I introduced the finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, powered by TechStars . Over the past couple of months, these startups have been mentored by business and technology leaders, met with investors, learned from each other, and, most importantly, been building great products. You can learn more about the startups in the first class and how they’re using Windows Azure here . As the first class approaches Demo Day on January 17 th , I’m happy to announce that today...

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon here in Seattle, and the kids are keeping themselves busy running around the Christmas tree, so I’ve got a little time to put together a post that addresses some questions that have come up a few times in the forums as well as in our internal discussion aliases for our on-premises install of HDInisght. We currently use the Web Platform Installer to take care of dependency management of the installation.  It’s important to point out that there are actually two...

This week the ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer teams delivered the Release Candidate of the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update (formerly ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update BUILD Prerelease). This update extends the existing ASP.NET runtime and adds new web tooling to Visual Studio 2012. Whether you use Web Forms, MVC, Web API, or any other ASP.NET technology, there is something cool in this update for you. You can download and install the RC today: http://www.asp.net/vnext . Great ASP.NET Enhancements This...

The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2 nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet . Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available...

A few weeks ago I posted about a number of improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services. One of these was the addition of an Objective-C client SDK that allows iOS developers to easily use Mobile Services for data and authentication.  Today I'm excited to announce a number of improvement to our iOS SDK and, most significantly, our new support for Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services).  This makes it incredibly easy to fire push notifications to your iOS users...

Today we’ve shipped an update to the single node HDInsight Server Preview that is installable via Web Platform Installer .   What Are We Doing? Every two weeks, we’re going to take a snapshot of the work in progress and update the public installer with this (provided it passes a basic level of validation).  This gives us the opportunity to rapidly get new bits in front of customers, experiment with new features, and address bugs in a timely fashion.  We’ve also snapped versions...