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Silverlight 5 Timeline And Lots of Questions
Yesterday Microsoft announced the timeline for Silverlight 5 in 2011 at the Silverlight FireStarter event. Silverlight 5 will be in beta the first half of 2011 and ship early in the second half of 2011. Developers quickly began posting impressions and many questions.
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NCBI BLAST for Windows Azure
Microsoft is now offering NCBI BLAST for the Windows Azure platform. NCBI BLAST was created by a group of researchers working for the National Institutes of Health, a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. NCBI describes BLAST as a tool that “finds regions of local similarity between sequences” of protein and DNA chains.
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HTML5 Labs Launched and WebSocket Update
Last week Microsoft launched HTML5 Labs where they intend to post early prototypes of applications running on unstable web standard specifications for .NET developers. Yet earlier this month, preliminary WebSocket implementations in FireFox 4 and Opera where disabled due to security concerns.
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Announcement: Windows Phone 7 Opens to Visual Basic
On November 29th, the Visual Basic team announced the Release To Web version of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This is exciting news for the large number of Visual Basic developers to achieve almost parity with the C# developer community in regards to Windows Phone 7 development of applications.
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Prism 4 Final Released
Karl Shifflett released the final release of Prism 4 to MSDN on November 12. Simultaneously, Karl also published the first installment of a series of multimedia training that is consumed within Visual Studio 2010 called, In the Box.
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OS Release: Pyxis 2 Beta 2
Last Wednesday, Thomas Holtq announced the release Pyxis 2 beta 2 of the Pyxis 2.0 operating system for .NET Micro Framework devices.
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Microsoft’s WebMatrix Now Shipping with PHP 5.3 and PEAR
The third beta of Microsoft’s WebMatrix IDE was released this month with significantly improved support for PHP. This round brings the option to choose between PHP 5.2 and 5.3 as well as support for PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository.
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LINQ to Z3, The World’s Fasted Theorem Prover
Microsoft Research claims that Z3 is the world’s fastest theorem prover. Z3 is designed to be a low-level tool for other applications, it is not meant to stand-alone. With its host of theorem provers, it is used by numerous projects including Spec#/Boogie, Pex, Yogi, Vigilante, SLAM, F7, SAGE, VS3, FORMULA, and HAVOC. With Bart De Smet’s LINQ to Z3, using this tool becomes embarrassingly easy.
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SQL Azure Achitecture - Competitive Differentiation
Two weeks back Kalen Delaney published a whitepaper on SQL Azure internals focused on how SQL Azure achieves scalability and high availability. A foundation feature which differentiates SQL Azure from its competitors is the multi-tenant architecture upon which it has been built.
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IronPython/IronRuby have Decided on Github and CodePlex
Since Microsoft announced that it was giving up control of its Iron languages, there has been a quiet debate on where to host the project. The negotiations have finally been settled and the winner is Github for source control and CodePlex for issue tracking.
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Named Resource Streams for WCF Data Services
Under the current version of WCF Data Services, developers can associate only one streaming resource with a given entity. With the October 2010 CTP, developers can now add additional named streams to an entity. For example, for images you may have streams named “Thumbnail”, “Small”, and “Full”.
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Moonlight Leaps Ahead of Silverlight with Hardware Accelerated Pixel Shaders
Recently David Reveman added significant amounts of hardware rendering to Novel’s Moonlight. This puts it in the lead over Silverlight, offers only a limited amount of hardware rendering support.
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Microsoft's Cloud Economics
Two weeks ago Rolf Harms and Michael Yamartino of Microsoft published a whitepaper entitled The Economics of the Cloud. In the whitepaper, they predict a seismic shift within the IT world away from client/server to public clouds, ala Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. The document clearly outlines their technical and business plan for a Brave New Microsoft.
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New Version of Bing AJAX Map is targeted for Mobile Devices
The new version of the Bing AJAX Map Control version 7 is one third the size of the previous version, a huge win for web sites that cater to mobile device users. Controls have been reduced in size and given HTML 5 support. There have also been performance improvements for multiple-point rendering.
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Pizzigati Prize For Software in the Public Interest Open for Nominations
InfoQ doesn't normally report on contests and calls for registration . But for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, this time we decided to make an exception. The Pizzigati Prize is a $10,000 prize awarded to "a software developer who adds significant value to the nonprofit sector and movements for social change". Nominations are open until December 15.