March 2009 - Posts
-
http://mstechevents.sg/ViewEvent.aspx?eventId=203
Microsoft Singapore, DPE Team, gave Singapore Developers heads up on Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0. Presented by our popular MVP, Maung Maung Phyo. If you have missed the event, sorry to have missed you. You could have been part of the fun we had.
Anyways, we hope to see you next month in Apr 2009. Details to follow soon.
Session: Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0
Double Click on Video to view in full screen
Part 1: (50mins 41 Secs)
Direct Link to Video: Click Here
Part 2: (39mins 36secs)
Direct Link to Video: Click Here
Download Slides here:
/Dennis
|
-
-
-
Topics for this month: - Cloud Computing
- IE8 is here!
- Interesting Industry/Technology Discussions & Updates
- Architecture Resources
- Industry Architecture Sites
- Architect Community Sites
- Post mortem of Architect Council Event on 27 Feb 2009
- Upcoming Events
Here are some of the key highlights: Cloud Computing Today there is a shift emerging that we believe will eventually affect virtually every type of organization from small start-ups to large enterprises. This shift is the use of cloud computing and cloud services. We are starting to see organizations extend compute, storage, and other workloads to the cloud – where these workloads will be operated and managed by a software vendor. Some organizations are using the cloud for temporary compute power, as is the case with the New York Times, who needed compute resources to convert their archived library of articles to PDFs – some are more permanent such as data archival. So what makes the cloud attractive to organizations?
Problems today: - Many of the challenges with building applications today have very little to do with development tools, programming languages, or frameworks.
- Rather, many of the challenges that organizations face are related to the infrastructure required to deploy, run, and manage applications.
- Startups - For example, imagine you were a startup building the next social networking site or online game
- You have to worry about numerous issues that are unrelated to the functionality of the application.
- [Capacity]
- You have to think about the capacity requirements for the application.
- Will it be used by a few thousand users or hundreds of thousands or millions?
- How do users translate to bandwidth, storage, and server requirements?
- Will the usage be consistent during all times of the year?
- Will it be consistent over the lifetime of the application?
- Can you handle spikes in demand if there were sudden demands for the app? (Digg Effect)
- Ultimately, most organizations end up paying for more capacity then they need.
- [Deployment, operations, and versioning]
- Then you have to worry about deploying and operating your application
- How do you deploy your application over multiple servers?
- How do you roll out updates to the app without taking it offline?
- How do you manage patches?
- Enterprise - For established organizations, some of these decisions and problems may have already been addressed through a shared data center or an established staff and processes.
- However, in enterprise organizations we often find that apps are silos of their own servers.
- Established organizations also still have to spend a significant amount of capital and operations funding.
- IT resources are applied to maintaining applications rather than delivering new value and functionality.
- ISV - Finally, if you’re an ISV who builds applications for use by other businesses you have to worry about a number of additional problems.
- You have to think about your customer’s capacity, which gets factored into the cost of ownership.
- Often, your sales opportunities are limited by your customer’s ability to deploy new applications.
- Your customers often have existing assets such as order fulfillment systems, ERP systems, multi-terabyte databases, etc. that are running on-premise. You must be able to easily integrate with these assets.
- So many things get in the way for building new apps
- Infrastructure - Operations, Patching, OS Management
- Building and maintaining costly infrastructure
So why are organizations considering or moving to the Cloud? When we talk with partners and customers, there are 4 general reasons why they’re starting to find the cloud attractive. - First, they view it as a way to reduce their capital and operations costs. Cloud Services provide a utility-like model to compute and storage resources – where organizations can only pay for what they use. This is often referred to as a “Pay as you go” model.
- Second, the cloud can potentially simplify the deployment and management of applications. By relieving organizations from worrying about infrastructure and capacity.
- Cloud Services can improve time to market for new applications. Instead of spending weeks or months deploying servers and infrastructure to support new applications – organizations can quickly deploy applications to the cloud or use storage in the cloud where vendors provide pre-provisioned data centers.
- Finally, Cloud Services can make it much easier to scale up or down as needed. Instead of building out capacity for peak usage or not having enough capacity to deal with usage spikes, with the cloud the platform vendor manages the capacity and you only use (and pay for) what you need.
Think of this as “Pay as you grow”
Some interesting readings on cloud computing…. IE8 is here! Microsoft has officially announced the release of IE8 on 19 Mar 2009. Find out about the new great features. Download now and try it! Some useful information below…. - Web Slice: Go to Web Slice for more details. If you want more fancy Web Slices, such as customize refresh frequencies, go to Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice Style Guide and Subscribing to Content with Web Slices.
- Accelerator: Read more at Accelerators and OpenService Accelerators Developer Guide
- Visual Search: Search Provider Extensibility in Internet Explorer
Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities—for companies that know how to use them. FEBRUARY 2009 • Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, now attract more than 100 million visitors a month. As the popularity of Web 2.0 has grown, companies have noted the intense consumer engagement and creativity surrounding these technologies. Many organizations, keen to harness Web 2.0 internally, are experimenting with the tools or deploying them on a trial basis. Read full article at my blog or at The McKinsey Quarterly. For full article of Microsoft Singapore Architecture Newsletter: The Microsoft Singapore Architecture Newsletter is brought to you by: Linda Chong Architect Evangelist Developer & Platform Evangelism Microsoft Operations Pte Ltd Connect with me through t : (65) 6888 8021 | f : (65) 6888 8287 | m : (65) 9655 0493 e : lchong@microsoft.com | b : http://blogs.msdn.com/lchong | im (Live) : chonghcl@hotmail.com
|
-
| I think there is a real opportunity to innovate on top of IE8 and provide your innovations packaged up to your customers next year when IE8 is launched. Please now sit back and join me for the next 45 minutes while I go end-to-end on customising IE8! Check my blog for code samples - http://tr.im/ie8custom | /Dennis
|
-
| IE8 introduces Web Slices; a feature dreamt up by Jane Kim, Program Manager on the IE Team. WebSlices enable users to subscribe to specially marked content on a Web page. When the content changes, the user receives a notification on the Favorites Bar.You've met Jane before on Channel 9(watch that video to get a better idea of who she is and what the thinking was behind Web Slices). What's the state of Web Slices at Release Candidate quality? Anything new since Beta 1? Tune in. | /Dennis
|
-
| Jon Seitel, Program Manager on the IE team, sits down with us to discuss IE8's Accelerators feature. How do they work? How do you work them (from both a developer's and end user's perspective)? What problems do they solve? Learn about IE8's Accelerators from somebody who owns the feature. | /Dennis
|
-
| Thirty-four years ago, a nineteen year old kid and his twenty-two year old business partner sold their first program to a little computer company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The program was called BASIC, and it was the start of this company we call Microsoft.
Today, we’re beginning a brand new series called The History of Microsoft. Travel with us back in time as we discover the roots of one of the world's most important technology companies. Using rare video and photos we bring you the heart of Microsoft's struggles and successes. Year by Year. Every Thursday we will air a brand new episode beginning with 1975 where "The History of Microsoft" all began.
We hope you enjoy this historical journey.
1975 History of Microsoft Timeline: January 1, 1975 The MITS Altair 8800 appears on the cover of Popular Electronics. The article inspires Paul Allen and Bill Gates to develop a BASIC language for the Altair. February 1, 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen complete Altair BASIC and sell it to Microsoft’s first customer, MITS of Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is the first computer language program for a personal computer. March 1, 1975 Paul Allen joins MITS as director of software. April 7, 1975 “Altair BASIC – Up and Running,” declares the headline of the first edition of MITS Computer Notes. July 1, 1975 Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's BASIC officially ships as version 2.0 in both 4K and 8K editions. July 22, 1975 Paul Allen and Bill Gates sign a licensing agreement with MITS regarding the Basic Interpreter. The name Microsoft has not yet been chosen, and Microsoft is not yet an official partnership. July 29, 1975 In a letter to Paul Allen, Bill Gates uses the name "Micro-soft" to refer to their partnership. This is the earliest known written reference. December 31, 1975 The 1975 year-end sales total equals 16,005 dollars, as detailed on Form 1065 U.S. Partnership Return of Income. | /Dennis
|
-
| In this interview, Vijay Tewari explains what Microsoft has done and planned for the future to support Redhat Linux on Hyper-V. He also shows Redhat in action on server 2008 R2, a glimpse of what is coming next  | /Dennis
|
-
 | Final build (RTW) of IE 8 is released! Why as an IT Pro should you upgrade now from IE 6 or 7 or switch from a competing browser? Here are the top 5 reasons why you should upgrade to IE 8 now: -
More Productivity – Get things done and browse faster and easier. Microsoft gathered a huge amount of data to understand how people use the browser and the tasks they accomplish. IE 8 is designed out-of-the-box to help get tasks accomplished quicker along with an overall increase in browser performance and reliability. Webslices and Accelerators are innovations you’ll want which no other browser have. -
Performance – Overall page load times are faster than IE 6/7. Also, IE performs faster than Chrome or Firefox loading the entire page on half of the top 25 websites. -
Reliability – If a tab crashes, only the tab will crash – not the entire browser. Easily recover all of your tabs/sessions in the unlikely event of the entire browser crashing. Chrome does tab isolation, Firefox does session recovery, IE 8 is the only one to do both. -
Search – Automatically get more than just text visual search suggestions while you type along with a history of your previous searches for your favorite search plug-in such as Live search, Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia. Additionally, get a history of your previously visited websites and favorite sites as you type in the address bar. -
Accelerators – Highlight text on a webpage and in one click do things like get a map of an address, define a word, send an email, do a search, share on a social networking site, or translate text into another language. Your company might develop a custom accelerator or find one of the existing ~100 which help your users. -
Webslices – Get a small “slice” visual update for frequently updating content such as stock quotes, traffic, ebay auctions, and weather - dropped down from the browser favorites bar. Your company might also develop a custom webslice or find one of the existing ~30 which might help your users. -
Better Security – Don’t let leave your company at a higher risk by using a competing browser or an older version of IE. IE is the best browser at protection from malware and were the 1st to innovate with far more security and privacy enhancements than I can list below. - Smart Screen Filter – protects you against evolving threats. Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is the most common class of software vulnerability and IE 8 protects you against type 1 “reflective” XSS attacks. Phishing and malware protection is enhanced to be more effective over IE 7. IE 8 is currently the only browser on the market to protect you against click-jacking vulnerabilities.
-
In-Private Filtering – gives an added level of control and choice about the information 3rd- party websites can potentially use to track browsing activity. -
Per-Site and Per-User Active X controls – allows the lockdown of individual Active-X controls to a specific site or user(s), therefore significantly reducing the attack surface for Active-X controls, minimizing your risk. -
Domain Highlighting – automatically highlights the owning domain of whatever site you’re currently viewing. This helps users identify the real site they’re on when a website attempts to deceive them. -
Granular Management – IE is the only browser which gives you the complete control to lockdown and fine tune features via group policy. There have been over 100 group policy settings added, bringing the total to ~1,400 policies (xlsx file) which allow you to easily control how you'd like to run IE in your environment. -
Easy to Deploy – IE is the only browser on the market which allows the customization of the initial install package and gives you the support to deploy with so many options. IE 8 can be easily deployed using Windows Update, WSUS, SMS, SCCM, group policy, a network folder or even quickly slipstreamed into your existing Vista images. Furthermore, the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 allows customization of the installation package and builds upon the functionality and feedback received from IEAK 7. -
Easy to Migrate – With the capability to emulate IE7 on the browser and websites having the capability to force IE 8 into IE 7 mode with a simple piece of HTML code, there should be little reason to not move from IE 7 to IE 8 while maintaining compatability with your existing sites. IE 8 is embracing open standards for browsing and will continue to do so; in the long run making it easier for developers and IT Pros to do fewer testing with their web applications and upgrades, such as future generations of IE. Additionally, there are some great resources to help with your migration: Download IE 8 RTM Additional resources for IT Pros to learn more:
Attend locally or virtually the 1-day IE 8 Firestarter event March 26th
Productivity: IE gallery for add-ons, Channel 10 video, IE 8 Mixified site
Deployment: IE 8 Deployment Guide Developer? check out Channel 9 IE 8 content or go to the MSDN IE homepage | /Dennis
|
-
![ASPNET4[1]](http://geeksengaged.com/blogs/geeksengaged/ASPNET41_4735E41F.png "ASPNET4[1]") | Stephen Walther is preparing two great talks for MIX09 which illustrate some of the new features of ASP.NET 4.0. We were able to spend a little time with him and discussed a couple of the things that he thinks will help developers be more productive in this release. His MIX09 Sessions are: Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0 : What’s Next?
Come learn all about ASP.NET 4.0 and the new Microsoft Visual Studio improvements that will make you more productive. Hear how to build a simple video gallery website that takes advantage of new features to control the rendering of client ids and view state, and see how ASP.NET AJAX client-side templates and jQuery animations can be used to create a richly interactive web application. Microsoft ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level
Hear how ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 makes building pure client-side AJAX Web applications even easier, and watch us build an entire data-driven ASP.NET AJAX application from start to finish by taking advantage of only JavaScript, HTML pages, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. Also learn about new ASP.NET AJAX features including the DataView control, declarative templates, live client-side data binding, WCF, and REST integration. | /Dennis
|
-
| IE8 RC1 launched a few weeks back! Jane Maliouta, program manager in charge of deployment and setup of IE, tells us what’s new in setup with RC1 for IE8 and gives us the inside scoop on deployment with IE8. Here’s how it breaks down: - [2:21] Windows 7 upgrades to IE8
- [3:21] Why we decide to not wrap in next version of IE with service packs
- [4:46] IE6 to IE8 upgrade story
- [6:14] Whiteboard session:
- Nuts & bolts of how the IE8 setup works with the standalone exe and other deployment options (includes component based services - CBS)
- Why they created the IE8 Blocker toolkit and when you might need to use it
- [14:43] How slipstreaming works, why there is no IE8 slipstream install for Windows XP and what versions of windows will support the slipstream.
- [15:55] Why IE8 needs a reboot and other browsers do not
- [17:20] Tips and tricks for rolling out IE8
IE8 blog
IE8 deployment guide
Download IE8 RC1
If you decide to tune into “Over the Edge” at [19:14], you’ll find a patent award, a cheetah, a duck, and learn about her perceived correlation with the IE team and Tuques. | /Dennis
|
-
| Jatinder Mann gives us insight behind the new Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 (IEAK 8) and then shows a screencast/demo explaining the new features. Jatinder is the program manager in charge of all of the great features IT Pros get with IE. IE offers IT Pros controls which no other browsers on the market can match, such as customizing the deployment with IEAK and locking down features and settings with over 1300 group policies. Jatinder gives some context as to when you might use IEAK vs IEM and group policy, why an IT Pro should care about IEAK, and explains the new configuration options for IEAK 8. Download IEAK 8 | /Dennis
|
-
| Apurva, Web Developer Evangelist of Microsoft Singapore tells us of a sample "widget" application showcasing how a concept of a widget can be taken to allow end-users to get upto speed on creating/using reusable elements and hence cutting down development time. Widget is a whole unit that contains the user interface and the business logic that makes the widget work. The developer creates the widget in a way that will allow his/her end-user to simply set bunch of properties and get the widget to do what it is supposed to do. Software developers could also look at creating and selling such widgets allowing them additional revenue stream. The idea is similar to creating custom controls but is probably a newer way to look at how resuable components could be created. You can download the proof-of-concept sample code and make changes to it/enhance it as you see fit. Even better still would be to create you own widgets and share them with the Silverlight community. Some other ideas for widgets (e-Learning) like: Drag-Drop, Multiple Answers, Crossword puzzles, ….. | /Dennis
|
-
More Posts Next page »
|
