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Microsoft on Plug-ins vs HTML5
In an announcement signed Walid, Scott and Soma, Microsoft has clarified its position on the role of plug-ins vs. web standards such as HTML5. With a bit of humility, they are taking a fairly balanced stance by acknowledging the increasingly important cross-platform capabilities of HTML5 while still promoting the advanced capabilities of plug-in development.
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IronPython Fully Implements Python 2.7
IronPython 2.7 has been released with new features including improved tooling inside Visual Studio, better interoperability with LINQ and extension methods, better documentation, and full language parity with Python 2.7.
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Mono in Google’s Summer of Code
Mono has been selected as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code. Since 2005, Google has been sponsoring this annual event for students. In exchange for working on an open source project, each student accepted into the program is paid a stipend of 5,000 USD, 500 of which is given in advance.
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Windows Installer XML (WiX) 3.5 Makes Component Authoring Easier
Windows Installer XML (WiX) 3.5 focuses on an updated version of Votive, the tool which allows developers to create WiX installers via the Visual Studio IDE. In addition to several bug fixes, WiX 3.5 improves to both Component Authoring and Major Upgrade functionality.
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Microsoft releases Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7
On Mar 23, 2011, Microsoft announced the availability the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7. The toolkit, downloadable from CodePlex, installs as a Visual Studio 2010 extension, and is designed to make it easier for developers to build applications on Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices that interact with Windows Azure.
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MonoMac Offers .NET Style APIs for Cocoa Development
MonoMac, the newest attempt at creating a GUI toolkit for C# on OS X, has hit its 1.0 release. MonoMac is designed to be much more consistent with other .NET/Mono libraries. This is done by offering a thicker wrapper around the Cocoa APIs that obeys the .NET Framework Design Guidelines.
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Visual C++ gets GPU-accelerated graphics and animations, Intrinsics
The new Visual Studio 2010 SP1 improves Visual C++ with GPU-accelerated graphics and animations support and Compiler-Intrinsics, which allow for highly efficient computing.
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MongoDB 1.8 Improves Reliability with Journaling
MongoDB's new journaling feature improves reliability with write-ahead redo logs. Log entries are written before permanent storage is updated. When a server restarts after a crash outstanding journal files will be replayed before the server goes online. Other changes include sharding performance boosts, shell tab completion, and the addition of covering and sparse indexes.
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HTML 5 and CSS 3 Support for Expression Web
Microsoft has released an update to Expression Web 4 to support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development. This update, part of Service Pack 1, is only a partial solution; it offers IntelliSense and error-checking support but with only partial preview support. This update also includes expanded support for PHP IntelliSense.
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Windows 7 Taskbar Integration for Websites
Microsoft’s is offering some of the same Windows 7 taskbar features to website developers that they offer to native application developers. Websites can be “pinned” by dragging them into the taskbar. Once there the website shows its own icon, tooltip, and jump list as if it were an installed application.
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Moonlight Playbacks Video Directly on GPU
Moonlight has been enhanced to support GPU-accelerated video playback. Silverlight 5 will do the same, but with extra features.
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Unity 3.3 adds support for the Android
Unity technologies announced March 1st that their popular game development tool Unity now supports the Android. The pricing model is the same as for iOS, $400 for Unity Android and $1500 for Unity Android Pro.
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WPF on Mono? It is a matter of funding.
Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono project, says that support for Windows Presentation Foundation on Mono is possible, but would require funding for 15 to 20 developers over a period of two to three years. As an alternative he proposes using other toolkits, but they too need community support.
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FlexMonkey Reloaded Released Featuring a Revamped Console
The FlexMonkey open source tool for testing Flex and AIR applications, has released a new beta version (code-named "Reloaded"), which features a completely revamped console and full FlexUnit 4 integration.
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Entity Framework 4.1 gets DbContext API – but no Database Evolution, SPs or Cached queries
ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 is upon us – slated for a late April release, it will come with a whole set of new features, but not all of them are going to make it.