InfoQ Homepage Microsoft Content on InfoQ
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Microsoft Introduces the Azure Well-Architected Framework
In a recent blog post, Microsoft introduced the Azure Well-Architected Framework, which provides customers with a set of Azure architecture best practices to help them build and deliver well-designed solutions.
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Accessible Adaptive Design Systems with Microsoft's New FAST Framework
Rob Eisenberg recently introduced the FAST Framework. FAST allows developers to create their own design system and web component libraries by customizing styles and properties. FAST uses an adaptive color system that meets accessibility contrast requirements, supports color theming, and provides a perceptually uniform UI across different background colors – with little input from developers.
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OpenJDK Comes to Windows 10 on ARM
Microsoft has made its first big contribution to OpenJDK: Porting OpenJDK to Windows 10 ARM (AArch64).
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Microsoft's ZeRO-2 Speeds up AI Training 10x
Microsoft open-sourced Zero Redundancy Optimizer version 2 (ZeRO-2), a distributed deep-learning optimization algorithm that scales super-linearly with cluster size. Using ZeRO-2, Microsoft trained a 100-billion-parameter natural-language processing (NLP) model 10x faster than with previous distributed learning techniques.
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Pylance Is a New Python Language Server for Visual Studio Code
Microsoft has announced Pylance, a new language server for Python aimed to help programmers write better Python code and improve IntelliSense and Visual Studio Code support for the language. Pylance will eventually replace Microsoft Python Language Server.
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After MS-DOS, Microsoft Now Open Sources GW-Basic
Microsoft released on GitHub the original 8088 assembly language sources for its interpreter for GW-BASIC 1.0, a dialect of the BASIC programming language released in 1983 and bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles. After re-open-sourcing MS-DOS, Microsoft proceeds with releasing GW-BASIC under an MIT license due to numerous requests.
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Windows Terminal 1.0 Released with Support for Profiles, Multiple Panes, and Unicode Characters
Microsoft has moved Windows Terminal out of preview and announced the release of version 1.0. Windows Terminal includes multiple tabs, panes, customizable shortcuts, support for Unicode and UTF-8 characters, and custom themes and styles. The terminal can support PowerShell, cmd, WSL, and other command-line tools.
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With Project Reunion Microsoft is Attempting to Unify Win32 and UWP APIs
At Build 2020, Microsoft announced Project Reunion with the aim of unifying app development across multiple Windows 10 versions and devices. The first three components of Project Reunion available to developers in preview are WinUI 3, WebView2 and MSIX (MSIX-Core).
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Redis Labs Partners with Microsoft to Deliver a New Redis Cache for Developers
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new partnership with Redis Labs to deliver Redis Enterprise as newly, fully integrated tiers of Azure Cache for Redis. The enhanced service offering, currently in private preview, will provide customers with two new Enterprise tiers.
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Rust/WinRT Brings Microsoft Closer to Adopting Rust Internally
Now available in preview, Rust/WinRT is a language projection for the Windows Runtime that enables calling Windows APIs in a natural and idiomatic way, similarly to other language projections such as C++/WinRT.
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Source Generators Will Enable Compile-Time Metaprogramming in C# 9
Source generators are a new feature of the C# compiler that enables inspecting user code using compiler-generated metadata and generating additional source files to be compiled along with the rest of the program.
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Microsoft and Google Release New Benchmarks for Cross-Language AI Tasks
Research teams at Microsoft Research and Google AI have announced new benchmarks for cross-language natural-language understanding (NLU) tasks for AI systems, including named-entity recognition and question answering. Google's XTREME covers 40 languages and includes nine tasks, while Microsoft's XGLUE covers 27 languages and eleven tasks.
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Microsoft Announces General Availability for UI Flows, Enabling Robotic Process Automation
In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of UI Flows on April 2nd, for customers worldwide. UI Flows is an addition to Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, that enables democratized access to automation and workflow. In this this latest release, Microsoft is enabling robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities in the Power Automate service.
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GitHub to Acquire Npm in an Effort to Provide Continuity and Improvement
GitHub's CEO Nat Friedman has announced an agreement to buy npm, the default package manager for the Node.js ecosystem. Npm will remain free to use and will get the required investments to keep it fast and reliable, says Friedman, as well as more secure.
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Q&A with Martijn Verburg and Bruno Borges of Microsoft Regarding Contributing to the OpenJDK
InfoQ caught up with Martijn Verburg, principal group SWE manager, Java and Bruno Borges, principal program manager, Java at Microsoft, about the specifics of the intended contribution from Microsoft to the OpenJDK.