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Microsoft Opens up Its Azure Quantum Platform for Public Preview
Announced at Ignite 2019, Azure Quantum is a full-stack, cloud ecosystem enabling access to diverse quantum hardware and software. Aimed at developers, researchers, and customers, Azure Quantum is now in public preview.
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Microsoft Announces Limited Access to Its Neural Text-to-Speech AI
Recently, Microsoft announced limited access to its neural text-to-speech AI called Custom Neural Voice. The service allows developers to create custom synthetic voices.
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Confluent Announces Strategic Alliance with Microsoft
Confluent, the company of the founders of Apache Kafka, recently announced a new strategic alliance between them and Microsoft to enable a more integrated experience between Confluent Cloud and the Azure platform.
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AI Models from Google and Microsoft Exceed Human Performance on Language Understanding Benchmark
Research teams from Google and Microsoft have recently developed natural language processing (NLP) AI models which have scored higher than the human baseline score on the SuperGLUE benchmark. SuperGLUE measures a model's score on several natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including question answering and reading comprehension.
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Microsoft Open-Sources Fluid Framework for Distributed, Scalable, Real-Time Collaborative Web Apps
Microsoft open-sources Fluid Framework, a low-level platform for distributed, real-time collaborative web applications that possibly scale to a large number of simultaneous collaborators. Microsoft leverages the Fluid Framework in Microsoft 365.
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Microsoft Edge Made Available on Linux
Microsoft recently announced the availability of the Microsoft Edge Dev Channel for Linux (initial preview release). The Edge browser is now available on all major operating systems, desktop and mobile. Enterprise developers, many of which use Linux, may now build and test web applications in their preferred platform. The move seeks to further position Edge as the browser for business.
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Microsoft Edge WebView2 Now Generally Available
After publishing last year a preview release of WebView2, a Chromium-based control to host web content within native Windows applications, Microsoft recently announced the general availability of WebView2 for production Win32 C/C++, .NET Framework, .NET Core, and .NET 5 applications. WebView2 provides two distribution models (evergreen/fixed) with a different update policy (automatic/manual).
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Microsoft .NET Conf 2020: .NET 5, C# 9.0, F# 5.0, and More
At the 2020 edition of .NET Conf, streamed online last week, Microsoft released the much-awaited .NET 5, along with new major .NET language versions (C# 9 and F# 5), ASP.NET 5, and EF Core 5.0. New versions of Visual Studio 2019 were also released, with support for .NET 5 and improved Git tooling. The event also featured sessions covering tools and frameworks such as Blazor and Project Tye.
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Microsoft Releases Playwright Cross-Browser End-to-End Test Runner
Microsoft released (in preview) a dedicated test runner for Playwright, its test automation tool. The Playwright test runner provides zero-config cross-browser end-to-end testing for web apps, Jest-like assertions, and built-in support for TypeScript. The new test runner leverages Folio, a customizable test framework to build higher-level test frameworks.
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Microsoft Introduces Azure Space to Further Push the Boundaries of Cloud Computing
Recently Microsoft launched its Azure Space initiative as a further push of cloud computing towards space. This initiative by the public cloud vendor consists of several products and partnerships to position Azure as a critical player in the space- and satellite-related connectivity and compute part of the cloud market.
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Test-Automation Playwright Tool Now Records and Replays Interaction Scripts, Captures Test Videos
Newly released Playwright 1.4 brings key improvements to the cross-browser test-automation tool. Using the now public Playwright command line interface, developers and testers will be able to record user interactions and replay them with automatically generated Playwright scripts, generate page screenshots, inspect Playwright selectors, and record videos of test scripts.
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Microsoft Innovates Its Azure Multi-Cloud, Multi-Edge Hybrid Capabilities
During the recent Ignite virtual conference, Microsoft announced several updates for their Azure multi-cloud and edge hybrid offerings. These updates span from security innovations to new edge capabilities.
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Microsoft Obtains Exclusive License for GPT-3 AI Model
Microsoft announced an agreement with OpenAI to license OpenAI's GPT-3 deep-learning model for natural-language processing (NLP). Although Microsoft's announcement says it has "exclusively" licensed the model, OpenAI will continue to offer access to the model via its own API.
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Microsoft Introduces Its Quantum Intermediate Representation
Based on LLVM, IBM Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) extends LLVM IR to better suit the representation of quantum constructs.
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Microsoft to Contribute to Java on Windows and Mac ARM
Microsoft is working to help port Java to Windows and Mac ARM on the AARCH64 chipset. The improvement should help enable Java applications to run on upcoming commercial ARM hardware.