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Windows Phone Developer Tools for Windows Phone 7 Released to Web!

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:17 GMT

Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools and start creating apps and games for Windows Phone 7!

MS11-075 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Active Accessibility Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2623699) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-082 - Important : Vulnerabilities in Host Integration Server Could Allow Denial of Service (2607670) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-058 - Critical : Vulnerabilities in DNS Server Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2562485) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-039 - Critical : Vulnerability in .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2514842) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS10-077 - Critical : Vulnerability in .NET Framework Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2160841) - Version: 3.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS10-070 - Important : Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Information Disclosure (2418042) - Version: 4.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-066 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Chart Control Could Allow Information Disclosure (2567943) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-044 - Critical : Vulnerability in .NET Framework Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2538814) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-069 - Moderate : Vulnerability in .NET Framework Could Allow Information Disclosure (2567951) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-081 - Critical : Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (2586448) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-071 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Components Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2570947) - Version: 2.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-078 - Critical : Vulnerability in .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2604930) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-083 - Critical : Vulnerability in TCP/IP Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2588516) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-084 - Moderate : Vulnerability in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Denial of Service (2617657) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-090 - Critical : Cumulative Security Update of ActiveX Kill Bits (2618451) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-037 - Important : Vulnerability in MHTML Could Allow Information Disclosure (2544893) - Version: 2.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-085 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Mail and Windows Meeting Space Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2620704) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-087 - Critical : Vulnerability in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2639417) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-028 - Critical : Vulnerability in .NET Framework Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2484015) - Version: 2.4

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-091 - Important : Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Publisher Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2607702) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-086 - Important : Vulnerability in Active Directory Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2630837) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-089 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Office Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2590602) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-095 - Important : Vulnerability in Active Directory Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2640045) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-088 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Office IME (Chinese) Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2652016) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-093 - Important : Vulnerability in OLE Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2624667) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-097 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Client/Server Run-time Subsystem Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2620712) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-092 - Critical : Vulnerability in Windows Media Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2648048) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-096 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2640241) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-005 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2584146) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-002 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Object Packager Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2603381) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-094 - Important : Vulnerabilities in Microsoft PowerPoint Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2639142) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-099 - Important : Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (2618444) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-001 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Kernel Could Allow Security Feature Bypass (2644615) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-003 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Client/Server Run-time Subsystem Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2646524) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-025 - Important : Vulnerability in Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2500212) - Version: 4.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-006 - Important : Vulnerability in SSL/TLS Could Allow Information Disclosure (2643584) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-008 - Critical : Vulnerabilities in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2660465) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-100 - Critical : Vulnerabilities in .NET Framework Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2638420) - Version: 1.3

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-098 - Important : Vulnerability in Windows Kernel Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2633171) - Version: 1.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-004 - Critical : Vulnerabilities in Windows Media Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2636391) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-007 - Important : Vulnerability in AntiXSS Library Could Allow Information Disclosure (2607664) - Version: 2.1

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-012 - Important : Vulnerability in Color Control Panel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2643719) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-011 - Important : Vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2663841) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-014 - Important : Vulnerability in Indeo Codec Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2661637) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-010 - Critical : Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (2647516) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-013 - Critical : Vulnerability in C Run-Time Library Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2654428) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-009 - Important : Vulnerabilities in Ancillary Function Driver Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2645640) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-015 - Important : Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Visio Viewer 2010 Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2663510) - Version: 1.0

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS11-049 - Important : Vulnerability in the Microsoft XML Editor Could Allow Information Disclosure (2543893) - Version: 2.4

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

MS12-016 - Critical : Vulnerabilities in .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2651026) - Version: 1.2

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04:10 GMT

[SDP 3][16b46435-0d2e-4b34-b78c-f638c78c8959] Internet Explorer Data Collector

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:10:00 GMT

This article describes the information that may be collected from a computer when running Internet Explorer Diagnostics for Windows Client and Server.

MS11-081: Actualización de seguridad acumulativa para Internet Explorer: 11 de octubre, 2011

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:30:00 GMT

Resuelve varias vulnerabilidades en Internet Explorer que podrían permitir la ejecución remota de código si un usuario viera una página web creada especialmente para ello con dicho explorador.

[SDP 3][e09cf338-24ca-48d6-b446-7afc623d8ecb] Internet Explorer WPAD Diagnostic – All versions

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:11:00 GMT

The Internet Explorer WPAD Diagnostic was designed to reset and collect data related to Internet Explorer’s Automatically Detect Settings activity used to troubleshoot Internet Explorer connectivity issues related to Proxy Automatic Discovery.

Error message when you browse a web server that has Internet Explorer installed: "ASP 0177:8000ffff"

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Fixes a problem in which you receive a "ASP 0177:8000ffff" error message when you use Internet Explorer to browse certain websites. This behavior occurs after you install a cumulative security update that is greater than MS07-045.

Real World Windows Azure: Interview with Luke Spikes, CEO at Spikes Cavell

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:21:00 GMT

As part of the Real World Windows Azure series, I talked to Luke Spikes, Chief Executive Officer at Spikes Cavell, about how the company took a long-term strategic bet on Windows Azure to deliver a new product, spotlightonspend, that helps public sector entities share spending data with the general public. You can read the full customer success story here. Here’s what he had to say:

Himanshu Kumar Singh: What does Spikes Cavell do?

Luke Spikes: Spikes Cavell develops online solutions that help public sector entities increase the efficiency of their procurement practices to save money. Through our self-hosted Observatory offering, a modular suite of data-driven online tools, we enable government organizations to collect and store spend information from multiple systems in a single database. Financial decision makers can use search, analytics, and reporting tools in Observatory to identify opportunities for savings.

HKS: How did you come up with the idea for spotlightonspend?

LS: In August 2009, I read an article in the Sunday Times newspaper that sparked an idea for a new cloud-based product to empower public sector organizations to share spending data with the general public. The articled was about a manifesto proposal from David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader who was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain in May 2010, to compel public entities to disclose all external payments for goods and services. We recognized an opportunity to build on the spending analysis and reporting functionality we had already developed for Observatory to help government organizations comply with this proposed policy. The obvious challenge was how to scale our infrastructure to handle the potential use of such an application by thousands of people at the same time. To maximize sales opportunities, we wanted to deliver the application in the cloud shortly after the general election in May 2010. We started development in September 2009.

HKS: Did you evaluate other cloud providers besides Windows Azure?

LS: At first, we used Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) to host spotlightonspend, but we learned that we needed to continuously update and reconfigure servers, which inhibited developer productivity and the company’s responsiveness to new market opportunities. After several months, we decided to move spotlightonspend to Windows Azure.

HKS: Why did you decide to launch spotlightonspend on Windows Azure?

LS: The shift to Windows Azure was a long-term strategic bet on our part. As a growing company in an industry moved by rapidly changing political considerations, we needed the agility that only a fully managed cloud platform like Windows Azure can provide.

HKS: Did you meet your election deadline?

LS: Yes, we released spotlightonspend in May 2010, only days after the newly installed coalition government formally announced its transparency policy. By June 2011, we had delivered 40 customers in the United Kingdom. We are now offering the solution to U.S.-based public sector organizations.

HKS: Describe some of the other benefits of Windows Azure for Spikes Cavell and its customers.

LS: The migration to Windows Azure took only 10 weeks, a timeline that would not have been possible without the flexibility and ease-of-use of Microsoft technologies. The ability to access a complete set of tools in a single platform means we can keep our development costs low and continue providing new functionality to meet customer requirements. Because Windows Azure makes it easier for us to focus on our core strengths, we’re able to devote more time to supporting existing customers and nurturing business opportunities in new markets, which has played a crucial role in our success.

Read the full story. Learn how others are using Windows Azure.

Actualizaciones para el.NET Framework 2.0 mediante Windows Update puede provocar algunos.Bloqueo de las aplicaciones de NET Framework

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:10:00 GMT

Proporciona una solución a un problema en las actualizaciones para el.NET Framework 2.0 mediante Windows Update puede provocar algunos.NET Framework bloqueo de las aplicaciones.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #7)

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:31:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

Articles and Blog Posts

Developing a Hello World Java Application and Deploying it in Windows Azure – Part 1 by JananiK, DotNetSlackers.com (posted Feb. 17.)
Tutorial – Going Live with Your First Application on Windows Azure – Part 1 Cloud.Story.in (posted Feb. 17.)
Combining Multiple Windows Azure Worker Roles into a Windows Azure Web Role blog post by Dina Berry (posted Feb. 16.)
New Course: Building Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure by Jason Salmond, the pluralsight blog (posted Feb. 15.)
Think Big and Microsoft BizSpark Offer Startups $60,000 in Cloud Services on Windows Azure by Allison Way, Think Big blog (posted Feb. 15.)
Deploying a Windows Azure & SQL Azure Solution with Visual Studio Team Build blog post by Michael Collier (posted Feb. 14.)
(Windows) Azure Revolution blog post by Juha Harkonen (posted Feb. 14.)

Upcoming Events, User Group Meetings

Feb. 22: Umbraco 5 and Windows Azure Workshop – Ghent, Belgium
Feb. 23: NY Windows Azure Summit – New York City
March 6: UK Windows Azure User Group Meeting – London
March 8: Windows Azure: Focus on the Application, Not Your Infrastructure (live event)– Waltham, MA
March 24: Detroit Day of Windows Azure – Detroit, MI
Ongoing: Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts - Online

Recent Windows Azure Forums Discussion Threads

Creating a secure session key – 243 views, 6 replies
Reg Data-tier Applications Node in SQL Management Studio R2 – 205 views, 8 replies
Blob URL address case sensitive – 332 views, 4 replies
Store an array as an element in (Windows) Azure Table – 539 views, 5 replies
Websockets vis Node.js/socket.io – 701 views, 7 replies

Please feel free to send us any articles you come across that you think we should highlight, or content of your own that you’d like to share. And let us know about any local events, groups or activities that you think we should tell the rest of the Windows Azure community about. You can use the comments section below, or talk to us on Twitter @WindowsAzure.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu

MS11-099: Actualización de seguridad acumulativa para Internet Explorer: 13 de diciembre, 2011

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:30:00 GMT

Resuelve vulnerabilidades en Internet Explorer que podrían permitir la ejecución remota de código si un usuario viera una página web creada especialmente para ello con dicho explorador.

Microsoft Adds New Board Member

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

John W. Thompson, CEO of Virtual Instruments and former CEO of Symantec, to join board.

Release Notes for 2/17/2012

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:51:53 GMT

Here are the notes for today’s release:

Fixed a rare issue that would cause users to sometimes see error messages when browsing source code in Mercurial projects.
Fixed an issue where folder names would wrap poorly in the source code browser when they did not fit in the available width of the frame.
Deployed some infrastructure changes in preparation for a set of scale improvements to our Mercurial services.

Windows Azure Marketplace Adds Support for Six Languages and HTML5 Applications

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:30:00 GMT

For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with it, Windows Azure Marketplace is an online market for data providers and developers to buy and sell datasets and applications.

Available in 26 countries around the world, Windows Azure Marketplace is now available in six languages including Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Italian. This update enables developers in non-english markets to find and purchase products in their native language.

We’ve also enabled HTML5 applications to consume data sets from the Windows Azure Marketplace. This is made possible through OData support for JSON and JSONP. Now developers working in HTML5, getting ready for Windows 8, can pull data from the rich and varied data sets already available in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

These improvements follow Service Update 4 in September which included Microsoft Translator APIs and international availability.

Visit the Windows Azure Marketplace page for updated availability and language support details, and check out http://www.odata.org/ for details on JSON and JSONP support.

MS12-010: Actualización de seguridad acumulativa para Internet Explorer: 14 de febrero de 2012

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Resuelve vulnerabilidades en Internet Explorer que podrían permitir la ejecución remota de código si un usuario viera una página web creada especialmente para ello con dicho explorador.

Internet Explorer 9: Complementos de seguridad en Internet Banking

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:40:00 GMT

Lee aquí como usar los complementos de seguridad de Internet Explorer 9 para realizar transacciones en línea seguras o hacer compras en tiendas virtuales.

Internet Explorer 9: Preparar Internet Banking seguro

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:40:00 GMT

Lee aquí como usar los complementos de seguridad de Internet Explorer 9 para realizar transacciones en línea seguras o hacer compras en tiendas virtuales.

Updates: Coreinfo v3.04, DebugView v 4.78, LiveKd v 5.1, Process Explorer v15.13

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:59:51 GMT

Coreinfo v3.04: Coreinfo, a tool that dumps information about a system’s processor topology and capabilities, adds a fix for a bug that sometimes misreported the presence of hyperthreading

DebugView v4.78: This update to DebugView, a utility for capturing and logging user-mode and kernel-mode debug output messages, can now capture output generated by Metro applications on Windows 8.

LiveKd v5.1: LiveKd, a utility for leveraging kernel debuggers to analyze live physical systems or Hyper-V virtual machines, now supports newer Intel processors that implement the XSAVE instruction.

Process Explorer v15.13: This Process Explorer release adds Background priority to the process context menu, which sets the CPU, memory and I/O priorities of a process to low, and includes a bug fix for restoring user-entered process comments.

Real World Windows Azure: Interview with Randy Starr, VP of Technology, Blue Dot Solutions, and Sebastian Witzmann, CEO, Vela Entertainment Studios

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:39:00 GMT

As part of the Real World Windows Azure interview series, I spoke to Randy Starr, Vice President of Technology at Blue Dot Solutions, and Sebastian Witzmann, CEO at Vela Entertainment Studios, about how they used Windows Azure to lower sales barriers, control costs, scale applications to demand, and develop new revenue opportunities. Here’s what they had to say.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Can you please tell us about your companies - Blue Dot Solutions and Vela Entertainment Studios?

Randy Starr: Blue Dot Solutions delivers mobile workforce management extensions for enterprise management systems developed by other ISVs. For example, we developed a mobile extension for Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software that allows field workers to connect to their company’s Infor EAM system from mobile devices. Infor brands the Blue Dot mobile solution as an extension to Infor EAM, and pays royalties to us on the licenses.

Sebastian Witzmann: My partners and I founded Vela Entertainment Studios in 2010 to develop education and entertainment applications for mobile devices. We sell directly to consumers through mobile app markets, and license applications to telecommunications companies to include with a mobile device or service.

HKS: So what led you to cloud computing and Windows Azure to develop your applications?

RS: When Infor sold a Blue Dot mobile extension, we typically charged the end customer to configure, install, and support our mobile workforce management solution in the customer’s on-premises IT environment. It was a significant investment for them – which could create sales barriers – and supporting all of those unique infrastructures was a complex and time-consuming logistical challenge for us that ate into the profitability of each project.

SW: We needed the computing capacity and flexibility to scale up or down instantly. If we gain 10,000 new users but we don’t have the capacity, we lose those customers. It would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build an on-premises infrastructure that could support our business model, and while we are very good at developing mobile applications, we are not system administrators. We don’t want to provision or manage servers and databases

HKS: Tell us a bit about the solutions you developed with Windows Azure?

RS: We used Windows Azure to develop a multitenant cloud-based framework for mobile applications called Cyan, and used Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Windows Communication Foundation, and the Microsoft .NET Framework to build a Cyan-based Infor EAM extension called Advanced Mobile for Infor EAM that we can synchronize with hosted and on-premises Infor EAM environments supported by Java, Ruby, PHP, and other development standards.

SW: We have used Windows Azure to build and host more than 300 mobile applications that work with Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone 7 devices. For example, we used Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Windows Communication Foundation to power a Windows Phone 7 application called Sports Manager Football for Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile telecommunications companies.

HKS: What benefits have you generated for your company and your customers by using Windows Azure to build and deliver these applications?

RS: By supporting Cyan mobile applications with Windows Azure, we eliminated the customers’ need for new infrastructure and support, which helped lower barriers and accelerate sales cycles. We eased our own installation and support costs by close to 40 percent, and we eventually expect a 75 percent revenue increase as we transition customers from a capital-expenditure model to subscription-based pricing.

SW: With Windows Azure, we can work with a broad range of technologies and partners and scale our applications to meet customer demand. Sports Manager Football is a great example of what we can do with Windows Azure. After only six months, 100,000 users were playing the game, and without knowing beforehand how many users the game would attract, we could expand capacity as soon as we needed it. We avoided more than U.S.$360,000 in infrastructure investment, and with the predictable Windows Azure cost structure, we can easily set licensing and download fees that we know will be profitable.

Read the full Blue Dot and Vela success stories. Learn how others are using Windows Azure.

Internet Explorer may appear to hang when opening a new window

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Recibe un error de secuencia de comandos y no puede imprimir desde Internet Explorer 9

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Obtenga información acerca de qué hacer si recibe un error de secuencia de comandos y no puede imprimir desde agilizarán.

Solución de problemas que impiden instalar Internet Explorer 9

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:50:00 GMT

Explica cómo solucionar los problemas de instalación de Internet Explorer 9.

How to change the user interface of Internet Explorer 9 to your desired language

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:40:00 GMT

After you install Windows Internet Explorer 9 on a non-English version of Windows 7, you find that the version of Internet Explorer 9 you have installed is English. This article describes how to change the user interface of Internet Explorer 9 to your...

Most important Internet Explorer 9 keyboard shortcuts

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:40:00 GMT

Read here how to use Internet Explorer 9 faster through keyboard shortcuts (shortcuts) navigate and call Web page functionality.

How to use Compatibility View in Internet Explorer 9

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:40:00 GMT

This article describes how to use Compatibility View in Internet Explorer 9.

Managing Federations in SQL Azure with the SQL Server Management Studio of SQL Server 2012 RC0

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:30:00 GMT

In this blog post we will cover some new abilities in SQL Server Management Studio 2012 (SSMS) that enhance the ability to work with SQL Azure. Specifically, we will highlight support in SSMS for the new SQL Azure feature known as SQL Azure Federation, which was just introduced this past December. Federations in the SQL Azure database provide the ability to achieve greater scalability and performance from the database tier of the application through horizontal partitioning of data in multiple databases. One or more tables within a database are split by row, and are stored across multiple system-managed databases, called Federation members. This type of horizontal partitioning is often referred to as ‘sharding’. Detailed information about SQL Azure Federation is available on Cihan Biyikoglu’s blog, MSDN Online, and this video demonstration.

The SQL Azure Management Portal and the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) of the SQL Server 2012 RC0 release include rich tooling support for managing Federations. One can easily create new Federations, view the Federation meta-data & the Federation members, split Federation members, and work with the database objects in the Federation root and work with the Federation members. The features that were especially built for Federations in SSMS include the following:

Streamlined view in the Object Explorer: If one connects to the SQL Azure virtual server in the SSMS, only the user created databases are listed in the Object Explorer and the GUID-named Federation members are filtered out. This helps in reducing the clutter and makes it easier to work with the databases.

View, create, split and delete Federations: The Federation root database can have more than one Federation and all the Federations are listed under the node titled ‘Federations’ in the object explorer. The right-click context menu on the Federations node and the Federation members have the option to create new Federations, split and delete Federation members, view top 1000 Federation members and connect to a Federation member.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: The right-click context menu on a Federation has the options for viewing, splitting and deleting Federation members.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: Listing the Top 1000 Federation members in a Federation.

Scripting Federations: The right-click context menu on a Federation provides the option for scripting a Federation. The CREATE To scripting option for a Federation scripts out the layout of the Federation and includes all the splits in the Federation in form of ALTER FEDERATION…SPLIT AT. Running the script will recreate the Federation and all the Federation members in the Federation.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: Scripting a Federation.

Connecting to a Federation member: The ‘Connect to a Federation Member’ dialog is used for connecting to a Federation member by specifying a distribution value for the distribution key. The validator in the dialog lists the permissible range for the distribution value based on the data type of the key and also validates that the value is in the correct format and range.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: Connect to a Federation member dialog.

Viewing Federation member and the objects in it: After a successful connection to a Federation member, the member is displayed in the Object Explorer in a separate node. The Federation member is listed in a friendly name comprising of <Federation Root Database>::<Federation> (Federation Distribution Key = Range_Low..Range_High). The icon for the Federation member and the Federated table are different from the icons for other databases and tables to make it easy to distinguish Federation objects. The column in the Federated table that is linked to the Federation Distribution Key is labeled as ‘federated’ for easily identifying it. A federated table, when scripted out, is scripted with the ‘FEDERATED ON’ clause that can be used to recreate the table in other Federations.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: Viewing Federation member and the objects in it. The T-SQL Editor displays the CREATE To script for the Federated table Customers with the FEDERATED ON clause.

Reconnecting to a Federated member after it splits: A split operation can be in progress for a Federation member while there is a connection to it in the Object Explorer. After the split operation completes, the original Federation member database is deleted and the connection to the member in the Object Explorer becomes invalid. SSMS detects this and pops up a message that the split has completed and provides an option to invoke the ‘Connect to a Federation Member’ dialog to connect to the new Federation member database that now has the data from the original Federation member.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: Reconnecting to a Federation member after it splits using the ‘Connect to a Federation Member’ dialog.

Querying the Federation members in the T-SQL Editor: The T-SQL Editor displays the name of the Federation member that it is connected to in the same friendly syntax as used in the Object Explorer. The connection can be easily switched between the Federation root database and the Federation member using the Available Database dropdown control in the T-SQL Editor toolbar. If the USE FEDERATION query is issued to change the connection to another federation member or to the root, the T-SQL Editor detects that the connection has changed and updates the friendly name to the Federation member or the root that it is connected to.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: The Federation member is displayed in the same friendly syntax as used in the Object Explorer. The Available Databases dropdown control can be used to change connection to the Federation root.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: The friendly name is updated to the Federation member database that the T-SQL Editor is connected if the connection is changed using the T-SQL statement - USE FEDERATION CustomerFederation(cid=100) WITH RESET, FILTERING=OFF

Warning messages: Warning messages alert the users against taking action that can have far reaching impact. For example, if an attempt is made to delete the Federation root database, a warning message is displayed alerting the user that the database has Federations in it and deleting the database will also delete all the Federations in the database.

SQL Server Management Studio 2012 Screen Shot: Warning message when deleting a Federation root database.

With the native support for Federations in SSMS, administrators and developers can work with Federation through an intuitive interface that makes it easy to navigate and manage at scale. We would like to hear feedback on this experience. You can email your feedback to mailto:SAPESupport@microsoft.com.

Solucionar problemas de visualización o guardar el historial en Internet Explorer 9

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:50:00 GMT

Obtenga información acerca de qué hacer si tiene problemas para ver o guardar el historial en Internet Explorer 9.

Mensaje de error cuando utiliza Internet Explorer 9 para examinar una página Web que utiliza la propiedad dialogArguments para el método showModalDialog: "Permiso denegado"

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Corrige un problema en el que recibe un mensaje de error "Permiso denegado" cuando utiliza Internet Explorer 9 para examinar una página Web que utiliza la propiedad "dialogArguments" para el método de "showModalDialog".

Announcing Reduced Pricing on SQL Azure and New 100MB Database Option

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:03:00 GMT

To meet evolving customer needs across both ends of the database size spectrum, we are lowering the price of SQL Azure and introducing a 100MB database option.

Customers will realize 48% to 75% savings for databases larger than 1GB. The 100MB DB option enables customers to get started using SQL Azure at half of the previous price, while still providing the full range of features including: high availability, fault tolerance, self-management, elastic scale-out, on-premises connectivity, and full Service Level Agreement. Full details on our new pricing can be found here.

Today’s price reductions and new entry-level database option are the result of both customer feedback and evolving usage patterns. Specifically, two usage patterns have emerged in the last 18 months. First, many projects start small but need to quickly grow in size. To promote this pattern, we are passing along better economies of scale and options for larger deployments. As your database grows, the price per GB will decline significantly. Second, many cloud adopters and customers with smaller workloads want an inexpensive option for modest usage. Just as we made a 150GB option available for customers with large database needs, we are providing the same level of choice at the other end of the spectrum with the 100MB option for smaller database needs. Today’s announcement is another step in our ongoing journey to help customers with a variety of scenarios embrace Cloud Computing.

The chart below provides a side by side comparison of the cost savings as cloud deployments grow and database sizes increase. Be sure to check out our pricing calculator and pricing page for additional details.

GB	Previous Pricing	New Pricing	New Price/GB	Total % Decrease
5	$49.95	$25.99	$5.20	48%
10	$99.99	$45.99	$4.60	54%
25	$299.97	$75.99	$3.04	75%
50	$499.95*	$125.99	$2.52	75%
100	$499.95 *	$175.99	$1.76	65%
150	$499.95*	$225.99	$1.51	55%

*Previous prices 50GB and larger reflect price cap of $499.95 announced December 12, 2011.

Steven Martin, General Manager, Windows Azure Business Planning

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #6)

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:23:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

CloudCover Episode 70 – Windows Azure Demos with Steve Marx (posted Feb. 10.)]
MongoDB, Windows Azure (and Node.js) blog post by Neil Mackenzie (posted Feb. 5.)
Exporting XML from LightSwitch Part 2 – Azure blog post by Regan Ashworth (posted Feb. 3.)
Azure Service Bus: Connectivity at a Cloud Scale by Brendon Birdoes, SSWUG (posted Feb. 10.) (Thanks to @MichaelCollier for the tweet.)
New Article on MSDN: Real World: Considerations When Choosing a Web Role Instance Size: How small should I go? (Thanks to @seattlejoel for the tweet.)
What I Learned Building a Startup on Microsoft Cloud Services: Part 1 – Introduction blog post by Liam Cavanagh (posted Feb. 6.
Connection Pool Fragmentation: Use Federations and You Won’t Need to Learn About These Nasty Problems That Come with Sharding! blog post by Cihan Biyikoglu, SQL Azure program manager at Microsoft (posted Feb. 9.)
Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure by Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos, MSDN Magazine (Feb. 2012.)
Forecast: Cloudy – Windows Azure Deployment Domains by Joseph Fultz, MSDN Magazine (Feb. 2012.)
Tips for Replicating Data in The Cloud by Rutrell Yasin, Government Computer News (posted Feb. 9.)
Microsoft Ireland and CJ Fallon to Offer Schoolbooks through the Cloud by Laura O’Brien, SiliconRepublic (posted Feb. 9.)

Help us ensure that these weekly roundups are useful to you by telling us what type of content would you like to see here. And please share any articles you come across that you think we should highlight, or content of your own that you’d like to share. You can use the comments section below, or talk to us on Twitter @WindowsAzure.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu

Real World Windows Azure: Interview with Vishwas Lele, CTO at Applied Information Sciences

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:46:00 GMT

As part of the Real World Windows Azure interview series, I talked to Vishwas Lele, CTO at Applied Information Sciences (AIS) and Microsoft Regional Director, about their use of Windows Azure. Here’s what he had to say.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Tell me about AIS.

Vishwas Lele: Since 1982, AIS (Applied Information Sciences, Inc.) has provided software and systems engineering services to enterprise companies and the U.S. government. AIS specializes in application development, business intelligence, portals and collaboration services and cloud computing services on the Microsoft platform.

HKS: And how have you been using Windows Azure over at AIS?

VL: Starting with ISVs (who were amongst the earliest adopters), to digital publishing houses, to a B2B commerce apps, to NGOs and federal agencies, we have helped a wide cross section of customers leverage Windows Azure. A few of our key Windows Azure related projects are:

MetaStorm - Cloud based modeling tool – We helped MetaStorm (an ISV) to migrate their on-premise modeling tool to Windows Azure. Details here.
Pandora Jewelry - We developed a B2B commerce system that supports dealer purchases and leverages Windows Azure Service Bus to integrate with Pandora’s on-premises ERP systems. Details here.'
Department of Treasury – We implemented a solution based on Windows Azure Service Bus that connects their public facing site with on-premise SharePoint infrastructure.
Bondi Digital Publishing - We utilized Windows Azure to develop a SaaS solution for online periodical distribution to traditional computing devices as well as tablet and mobile devices leveraging HTML5 touch and Silverlight technologies. The application was recently covered on CBS “Sunday Morning”.
i2i Systems – We developed a healthcare reporting system that takes advantage of elastic compute capability offered by Windows Azure.
Population Services International (PSI) – We developed a solution to collect and consolidate financial information from a workforce that is distributed across the globe. Windows Azure Storage and Windows Azure Service Bus capabilities were used to simplify the geo-distributed requirements of the solution.
Towers Watson – We are currently developing a High Performance Computing (HPC) solution that utilizes Windows Azure for the compute node infrastructure. This solution is utilizing the HPC/Azure infrastructure to schedule large numbers of Excel compute jobs.

HKS: That is an impressive list. So having worked on a large number of solutions using Windows Azure, how would you summarize the benefits your customers, and you, have seen?

VL: Here are the key benefits that our customers have realized by moving to Windows Azure:

Agility – Access to services such as Windows Azure HPC and SQL Azure is allowing our customers to reduce the time-to-market for new features and enhancements.
Simplicity – By “outsourcing” a number of moving parts including authentication, access control, caching, and reporting to Windows Azure based services, our customers have been able to simplify their overall application architecture.
Growth – As Windows Azure has risen rapidly in terms of new capabilities and features, Azure hosted apps have risen with it. For instance, max size of SQL Azure databases, geo-replication for Windows Azure Storage, max number of communication endpoints etc.
Cost - The economy of scale of a multi-tenant infrastructure, combined with built-in monitoring of hardware and software health, considerably lowers the overall TCO of Windows Azure hosted apps.

While the above are great benefits to our customers, frankly to us as an SI, the biggest benefit of Windows Azure has been the freedom to focus on what we do best - “build great software” and leave the hosting, patching, monitoring etc. to Microsoft.

HKS: What are some trends that you have seen, and what are your expectations as you look forward to 2012?

VL: Initially customers have looked to move their existing applications to Windows Azure. While such migrated applications may benefit from robust hosting capabilities of Windows Azure, they cannot take full advantage of the platform including scaling out individual tiers of the application, leveraging various platform services etc.

As the benefits of PaaS are better understood by customers, we expect them to be more amenable to refactor their existing applications to take full advantage of Windows Azure. We are also encouraged to see new projects being architected to take advantage of the PaaS platforms.

Achieving the ISO 27001 last month was a great step forward. As the Windows Azure platform achieves additional compliance certifications, we expect to reach a wider audience of potential companies wanting to take advantage of Windows Azure.

Weekly Releases – Notes for 2/9/2012

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:22:36 GMT

We have been a bit quiet on this blog recently, but rest assured we are planning some exciting features and changes to the CodePlex site! One change we are making is switching to a weekly release schedule so that we can respond and iterate on user feedback more quickly. As part of that change we will be posting our latest release notes on this blog each week. Some weeks (like today’s notes) may only contain bug fixes if we are working on some larger features that are not ready to be launched yet. Keep watching this space for more developments to come.

Notes for 2/9/2012 release

Fixed an issue in our insert code snippet dialog for our wiki editor. Thanks to Marc D Anderson for reporting this issue!

Windows Azure ISV Blog Series: sociobridge, by ReedRex

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:15:00 GMT

The purpose of the Windows Azure ISV blog series is to highlight some of the accomplishments from the ISVs we’ve worked with during their Windows Azure application development and deployment. Today’s post, written by Naoki Sato, Windows Azure developer evangelist at Microsoft Japan, is about Windows Azure ISV ReedRex Co. LTD and how they’re using Windows Azure to deliver their CMS service for Facebook pages.

ReedRex recently launched a new SaaS offering called sociobridge, a Content Management System (CMS) service specifically for Facebook pages. Distributed by top Japanese Ad Company Dentsu Razorfish, sociobridge was jointly established by Dentsu and Razorfish.

Company and ad agency staff can use sociobridge to do the following:

Create and maintain Facebook pages
Schedule posts
Monitor walls, comments, and likes

sociobridge consists of two multi-tenant web applications written in ASP.NET MVC with Facebook C# SDK . One Web Role runs a subscriber portal, which is a content management application for subscribers (customer companies and ad agencies). The other runs an application runtime, which hosts public Facebook pages for end users.

There are also Worker Role instances, which are responsible for Facebook monitoring and other background processing.

sociobridge uses Windows Azure Storage (Table and Blob) as a persistent data store. This is because Windows Azure Storage provides higher scalability with much lower cost.

Information about subscriptions (tenants), user accounts, scheduled posts, poll results, statistics and others are stored in Table Storage. There are only two tables in Windows Azure Table Storage:

Subscription metadata
Subscriber data

In Table Storage, tables are partitioned to support load balancing across storage nodes. A table’s entities are organized by partition. A partition is a consecutive range of entities possessing the same partition key value.

Relational database systems, such as SQL Azure, provide transactional support, with properties often referred to as ACID:

Atomic: Everything in a transaction succeeds, or is rolled back.
Consistent. A transaction cannot leave the database in an inconsistent state.
Isolated. Transactions cannot interfere with each other.
Durable. The results of a transaction are stored permanently.

Unlike relational database system, Windows Azure Table Storage does not support multiple operations (such as Insert, Update and Delete Entity) within a transaction in general. But if all entities subject to operations as part of the transaction have the same partition key value (and belong to a same partition), you can perform these operations in a batch update known as an “entity group transaction” or EGT. More details about EGT’s may be found here.

To leverage the schema-less data model and EGT of Table Storage, different type of data are stored in a single data table. Subscription ID is used as a partition key, so each subscription’s data are stored in different partitions, and table access is spread over many storage servers for scalability. The row key is a combination of data type and some kind of unique row ID.

Every table query from Subscriber Portal is carefully designed to specify the partition key (subscription ID), so that they query is limited to a single partition and a full table scan over many partitions never happens.

There are transactions of two or more types of data in a single subscriptions’ data, but there are no transactions of two or more subscriptions’ data. So, this table design enables atomic transactions using EGT (entity group transaction) because data in a single transaction reside in a single partition in a single table.

Currently, Windows Azure Storage Analytics provides metrics data per storage account. With this table design, it is not possible to estimate cost of table storage per subscriber. This table design was chosen because of benefit described above and quota of number of storage accounts.

Staff in a customer company and/or an ad agency create and maintain Facebook pages in the subscriber portal. When definitions and metadata of Facebook pages are created or modified, actual web content of Facebook pages are generated in advance, and stored in Blob Storage.

A Subscriber may create multiple custom tabs in a single Facebook page. Each custom tab has its own Blob container, and web content of each tab is stored there. Permissions of Blob containers are set to public, because Facebook pages are inherently public.

At runtime:

An end user browses a Facebook page (included in Facebook using an HTML inline
frame).
The web browser sends a HTTP POST request to the application runtime on Web Role.
The application runtime accesses Table Storage to query a Blob Storage URL.
The application runtime returns the Blob Storage URL (using HTTP 302 Found).
The web browser is redirected to the web content in Blob Storage.

The purpose of this architecture is to reduce the workload of Web Role by avoiding dynamic web content generation, and to achieve much higher scalability to process huge requests from many Facebook users.

Facebook pages are required to handle HTTP POST requests. But the “Get Blob” operation in Blob Service REST API needs to be a HTTP GET request as its name suggests. Because of this, direct access to Blob Storage does not work, and the application runtime is necessary to handle HTTP POST.

Partition Key for Blob Storage is a combination of container Name and Blob name, so access to different Facebook pages (Blobs) are spread over different partitions.

According to “Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability Targets”, the target throughput of a single Blob is up to 60 MB/sec. Performance tests revealed that the throughput of the sociobridge application runtime (on one Small instance) is about 200 requests/sec.

At a rough estimate, if only one Facebook page is hosted and the size of Facebook page is less than 300KB, the application runtime becomes a bottleneck. If it is greater than 300KB, Blob Storage becomes a bottleneck. It is possible to remove these bottlenecks by adding more Web Role instances and leveraging Windows Azure CDN respectively. Note that usually multiple Facebook pages (Blobs) are hosted, and Blob access will scale out.

sociobridge was designed to utilize the power of Windows Azure, especially Windows Azure Storage. The sophisticated table design (with the tenant ID as a partition key) and the usage of EGT (entity group transaction) will be helpful in designing your multi-tenant application!

For additional information about scalability of Windows Azure Storage, refer to these blog posts:

Special thanks to Takekazu Omi, Lead Architect of sociobridge at ReedRex, for help on this post.

NEW! Wiki launched for Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Although Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure is currently only available via CTP, you can get a jumpstart learning all about it by visiting the Apache Hadoop on Windows wiki. This wiki also covers Apache Hadoop on Windows Server.

The wiki contains overview information about Apache Hadoop, as well as information about the Hadoop offerings on Windows and related Microsoft technologies, including Windows Azure. It also provides links to more detailed technical content from various sources and in various formats: How-to topics, Code Samples, Videos, and more.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Topics	Content Types
Hadoop Overview	How To
Hadoop on Windows Overview	Code Examples
Apache Hadoop on Windows Server	Videos
Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure
Elastic Map Reduce on Windows Azure
Learning Hadoop
General
Hadoop on Windows
Hadoop Best Practices
Managing Hadoop
Developing with Hadoop
Using Hadoop with other BI Technologies

This wiki is relatively new and we would absolutely appreciate any feedback or requests for additional information. Moreover, since it is a wiki, feel free to update any of the wiki articles or add new ones!

An error occurs when using Windows Internet Explorer 8 or Windows Internet Explorer 7 to view a Web site: “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:30:00 GMT

When you use Windows Internet Explorer 8 or Windows Internet Explorer 7 to access a Web site, you may receive an error message similar to the following in the web browser: This problem may occur when you access a Web site that uses both IPv4 and IPv6 as...

Solve ‘Complex Data Restructuring’ Using the ‘List’ Operations in the Service Bus EAI/EDI Mapper

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:34:00 GMT

Problem at Hand

Anyone who has done serious mapping would have encountered the problem of transforming related data from one set of complex structures to another. This is because of the fact that different applications and systems use different ways to normalize data to best suit their needs. When such systems need to interoperate the data must be mapped from one schema structure to another.

Observed Pattern

One of the most prevalent patterns used to solve this problem, especially when dealing with complex restructuring, is to de-normalize the data into one flat structure and then normalize it to the target schema structure(s). BizTalk users had to deal with this logic using scripts (in the language of their choice). This was because BizTalk had no support storing intermediate de-normalized data, while the scripting languages did (For example, XSLT programmers typically de-normalize the data into one or more hashtables of complex data strings and then parse them out to the destination).

Lack of support for storing intermediate data would force users to develop scripts by themselves or scripting experts. The more such cases in a map the more it becomes a collection of scripts making mapping a programmer’s domain and mostly unmanageable and unreadable for non-programmers (IT pros, SMEs, Business Analysts). In most such cases, the visual mapping tool is typically sacrificed and a programming tool is adopted, resulting in higher costs in development and maintenance.

Good News, You Don’t Have to Know/Use Scripting to Solve the Problem

In the new transforms functionality of the Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs release, we have introduced support for storing intermediate data in Lists, and perform operations on Lists, the same way one would on source message tree. And all this through visual modelling on the mapper surface. Lists can store multiple members making them two-dimensional and almost equivalent to storing data in tables. Let me illustrate the usage of Lists in solving a complex problem of heterogeneous structural mapping.

The Much Dreaded LIN Loop with SDQ Segments in EDI Mapping

LIN Loops commonly help capture the information of items in an inventory tracking application. A nested structure of LIN segments, ZA and SDQ segments full information pivoted on each item type is reflected. The SDQ segment is a bit complicated as it stacks up multiple location and quantity pairs for the different line items. Mapping this structure to a target application structure that is pivoted on locations makes a challenging task; this can be addressed in a two stage procedure.

Stage1: De-normalize LIN,ZA,SDQ data into a list containing all the data. Here are the steps we followed:

This nested set of loop operations within List scope helped us denormalize all the item/location/qty/qty_type data. This data can now be restructured into any relevant target structure.

Stage 2: Use the denormalized data to build the target structure. Here are the steps we followed:

This second stage operations help us complete the target schema structure that is pivoted on locations and items within each location.

SUCCESS!!! Once you get the hang of it, this two-stage procedure supported by the new mapper, is simple, intuitive and readable. You could apply this to more complex HL Loop and other complex nested structures.

Please use Discretion

With great power comes great responsibility; storing data in Lists will add tax to the performance and other SLAs. For not-so-complex structural transformations, one could do without intermediate storage. We recommend that you use Lists only when you don’t have a workable alternative.

We are continuously striving to provide you with more usable and powerful mapping tools. Do optimize their usage against your maintainability and performance needs. And kindly share your feedback and suggestions to help us improve the mapper tools.

Ravi Bollapragada, Senior Program Manager

Don’t Miss FREE MSDN Webcast, Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts (Part 1) “Get Started with Cloud Computing and Windows Azure”, Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 11 am PT

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:48:00 GMT

If you’re new to the world of Cloud Computing, the new MSDN webcast series, Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts, will be a great place to start learning what it’s all about. Hosted by Microsoft Cloud Evangelist Mike Benkovich, the first session of this new series premieres February 7, 2012 at 11AM PST. From understanding concepts of compute, storage, and roles, to exploring the various services and technologies that make up Windows Azure and SQL Azure, this “Soup to Nuts” series starts at the beginning and takes you all the way to being a Windows Azure expert.

You can watch the latest webcasts live, every Tuesday at 11AM PST. Visit the Cloud Computing “Soup to Nuts” series homepage for registration links and on-demand replays of episodes you’ve missed or want to watch again.

Read the blog post, “New Webcast Series–Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts” on Mike Benkovich’s blog to learn more about the full series.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #5)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:07:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

Gartner Says Platform as a Service is on the Cusp of Several Years of Strategic Growth, HPC in the Cloud (posted Feb. 1.)

Indiana Students Receive $100k to Research Cloud Computing by Charlie Osborne, ZDNet (posted Feb. 1.)

More Business Intelligence Moving to the Cloud: Survey by Joe McKendrick, Forbes (posted Jan. 30.)

Microsoft Rolls Out Test Security Service for SQL Azure by Kurt Mackie, Redmondmag.com (posted Jan. 31.)

Europe Stumps up £8 Million for Cloud Computing Strategy by Jennifer Baker, Computerworld UK (posted Jan. 27.)

New Book Featuring Windows Azure Case Studies (thanks to @ApolloGonzalez for the tweet.)

Bytes by MSDN Interview: Vishwas Lele, CTO of AIS and Tim Huckaby, Founder of Interknowlogy and Actus Software (posted Jan. 24.)

CloudCover Episode 68 – Throttling SQL Azure with Scott Klein (posted Jan. 29.)

Get Started with Node.js + Windows Azure: Resources blog post by Peter Laudati, developer evangelist at Microsoft (posted Feb. 1.

Windows Azure Data Security (Cleansing and Leakage) blog post by Walter Myers III, principal consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services (posted Feb. 1.)

Hosting Your Moodle on Windows Azure blog post by Lee Stott, academic evangelist at Microsoft UK (posted Jan. 30.)

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

How do I remove Internet Explorer 8 from Windows as a troubleshooting step?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:50:00 GMT

Describes how to automatically remove Internet Explorer 8 and restore a previous version of Internet Explorer to help troubleshoot an issue. Also describes the steps to do it yourself in Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP, and in...

How to Delete the Contents of the Temporary Internet Files Folder

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:40:00 GMT

Describes how to delete the contents of the Temporary Internet Files folder from the computer. This article includes the "Fix it for me" option that can omplete the procedure automatically for you. Or you can follow the manual steps to complete the...

Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Updates

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:52:00 GMT

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games makes it easier for developers to quickly build social and casual games using Windows Azure. Last week, we released version 1.2.2 of the toolkit. You can download the source here or the self-extracting package here. This version adds significant performance increases, improved stability, and now uses Autofac for dependency injection. Additionally, as part of this release, we have moved the toolkit Github – this allows you to easily fork, clone, and contribute back to the toolkit in the same fashion you can with the open sourced Windows Azure SDKs.

For those who haven’t downloaded or used the social gaming toolkit yet I would encourage you to check it out. There are a lot of common patterns and tons of reusable code in the toolkit that applies for many scenarios besides the gaming space. With more and more applications relying on real-time communication, sharing, and feedback the mechanisms that are used in games can be applied to many kinds of software.

The core features of this toolkit are:

Samples Games (Tic-Tac-Toe and Four in a Row)
Authentication with ACS (Access Control service)
JavaScript Tests
Leaderboard
Game Friends
User Profiles
Invites and Notifications
Tests for both server and client code
Reusable JavaScript libraries

You can read more about the social gaming toolkit on the project site’s wiki. We have documents that will help you get started using the toolkit and deploying the toolkit. Additionally, you will find blog posts about this release and other on my blog.

How to reinstall or repair Internet Explorer in Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:20:00 GMT

Describes how to reinstall or repair Internet Explorer in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Need to Change Your Go-To-Market for SaaS? Here’s How One ISV Did It with Windows Azure

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:20:00 GMT

In a previous post, I wrote about traditional ISVs creating spinoffs to market and sell their Software-as-A-Service (SaaS) apps. Recently I was surprised to see Glassboard from Sepia Labs, a spinoff of NewsGator, come across my desk. I’m familiar with NewsGator. Based in Denver, CO, they have 8 years experience in SaaS, and multiple Windows Azure apps under their belt. Why would they go to the trouble of creating a spinoff for their latest Windows Azure app? Almost a third of their revenue is already subscription based, and they are by no means new to the rigors of SLAs, uptime and support – issues that challenge many SaaS newcomers. I called JB Holston, CEO of NewsGator and Walker Fenton, CEO of Sepia Labs to find out. Turns out, they have lot in common with many traditional ISVs using Windows Azure and SaaS for the first time – they are trying to reach a new customer segment. And which customers you’re going after can change everything. Here’s their story…

According to Holston, Facebook is defining the way people interact online. Consumers like what Facebook offers and want more of it in the corporate space. Both NewsGator and Glassboard take their cues from that reality, operating in the social computing space. NewsGator’s marquee offering, Social Sites 2010, is an enterprise social computing product that’s attached to SharePoint 2010. By all accounts it’s doing pretty well… per a Jan 11, 2012 TechCrunch article NewsGator added one million new paid seats over the course of 2011, on top of its existing two million. Forrester’s Q3 2011 report rates them among the leaders in enterprise social platforms. Customers are global 2000 enterprises worldwide, reached through a direct sales force about 35 strong, augmented by 50+ channel partners. It’s largely installed on premises, and sold most often through a perpetual license pricing strategy. Most of that should sound pretty familiar to other traditional ISVs.

The newer Glassboard offering, which launched in Aug 2011, still operates in the social computing arena. Glassboard is about sharing privately with groups - essentially Facebook without the ads, with better privacy, and with very cool Bing maps integration for location.

Watch this Channel 9 video for more on the technical reasons behind why they chose Windows Azure, including a demo of how different phone platforms process messages using notifications.

However, beyond the common social computing focus of the two products, most aspects of the Glassboard opportunity are completely different from Social Sites 2010. Glassboard is completely cloud-based and integrates with SharePoint Online. But the differences go deeper than that:

WHO they target: Glassboard targets small businesses (SMBs) looking for private social collaboration they can easily use internally and with partners, suppliers and customers. Glassboard even extends into the consumer space, as the app is popular amongst teachers, families, and others who are uncomfortable with Facebook’s privacy policies. To encourage trial among these price sensitive customers, they use a Freemium pricing model i.e. the app is free until you pass a certain threshold of use.
WHAT they offer: SMBs and consumers need turnkey, low touch, intuitive apps. That dictates a different design and engineering ethic. Fenton called it a “mobile first interface” that works on iPhones, Androids, and WP7. In fact, Fenton’s goal for his design center was “an app my Mom can download from an app store and use without asking anyone.” In other words, entirely self-provisioning. That’s a growing trend in enterprise apps, but an imperative in lower-end small business and consumer apps.
HOW they make it happen: Glassboard reaches SMBs and consumers in four ways, all via marketing:
- Online marketplaces – see their listings in Office 365 Marketplace, Windows Phone Marketplace, the iTunes Store, Android Market and Amazon’s Appstore for Android.
- Digital marketing – online advertising, primarily Facebook ads
- Social marketing – they are active on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Viral marketing – users get additional free product above the Freemium threshold for referring colleagues and friends.

Well when you put it that way, if the WHO, the WHAT and the HOW is different, a spinoff begins to make a ton of sense. Though NewsGator is successful with Social Sites 2010, they’d probably struggle with Sepia Lab’s Glassboard. Direct sales don’t work too well in reaching numerous and fragmented SMBs and consumers. Neither does a freemium pricing model get a commission-based sales force very excited. Glassboard called for a wholly new Go-To-Market strategy, namely a switch from sales-led to marketing-led demand generation. When Holston realized he had a team of folks within NewsGator that were passionate about this new category, he created a spinoff to release those passions. Walker Fenton had been responsible for the mobile group within NewsGator so Holston put him in charge of Sepia Labs. He gave him some personnel, some office space as well as HR and accounting support from the parent company. He also gave him NewsGator’s legacy online services. Fenton continues to manage those under Sepia Labs and uses the revenue streams to partially fund new product development, like Glassboard. He makes it look easy. To learn more, follow the official Glassboard blog.

Webpages may appear garbled or distorted and the colors may be displayed incorrectly in Internet Explorer 9

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:35:00 GMT

Provides a workaround for an issue in which some webpages are not displayed correctly in Internet Explorer 9.

IFS 360 Scheduling – Always Optimal on Windows Azure

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:04:00 GMT

IFS has announced the immediate availability of IFS 360 Scheduling on Windows Azure as part of its strategy to leverage cloud computing, citing Windows Azure as a cost-efficient platform for innovative business solutions.

IFS 360 Scheduling empowers organizations to deliver on-site customer service excellence. Optimizing resource plans to minimize travel and maximize productive work time for hundreds, or even thousands, of technicians is a complex and compute-intensive task, and IFS 360 Scheduling’s ‘always optimizing’ approach means the schedule is constantly up-to-date no matter what is happening out in the field – for organizations with tight deadlines to meet, minutes matter.

Meeting tough customer expectations and providing consistent service demands a reliable and robust computing infrastructure. The speed of deployment on Windows Azure and on-demand scaling of resources echo the needs of these dynamic environments, for which resource scheduling is mission critical.

You can read more on the IFS announcement on their website, more about the work of IFS 360 Scheduling here, and a recent blog posting by IFS’ CTO Dan Matthews on cloud computing.

Real-World Windows Azure: Interview with Michael Ross, VP of Delivery at Aidmatrix

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:33:00 GMT

As part of the Real World Windows Azure interview series, I talked to Michael Ross, vice president for Delivery at Aidmatrix, about using Windows Azure to help power its humanitarian aid delivery solutions. Here’s what he had to say.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Tell me about the Aidmatrix Foundation.

Michael Ross: Well, we create web-based supply-chain management (SCM) solutions that help our partners optimize distributing humanitarian relief. We started in 2001 and are headquartered in Dallas, with offices in Wisconsin, Washington D.C., Germany and India. More than 40,000 leading nonprofit, business, and government partners leverage our solutions to mobilize more than $1.5 billion in aid annually, worldwide. The donated goods, money and services impact the lives of more than 65 million people.

HKS: How does Aidmatrix leverage technology to deliver humanitarian aid?

MR: Increasingly, technology plays a vital role in enabling the rapid, targeted distribution of relief supplies to those in need. Our solutions help NGOs procure, manage and deliver humanitarian relief more efficiently by having real-time access to know what inventory is on hand and what unmet needs still exist. In this way, NGOs can save money in their purchasing, be more efficient in their distribution, and more responsive and transparent with their donors. .

HKS: Are there also technology challenges you face?

MR: To perform optimally both in daily humanitarian relief and unplanned disasters, we need to ensure that our applications can consistently deliver the highest levels of stability and throughput performance. And because we work with so many different kinds of partner organizations, our solutions need to synchronize with business systems that run on diverse operating system platforms. They also need to flexibly scale to handle massive bursts in demand. Following several recent natural disasters, our applications have experienced usage spikes on the order of 1,000 times the standard rate.

HKS: How much demand is there for technology for humanitarian aid from Aidmatrix?

MR: In 2010, we noted a 20 percent year-over-year increase in the number of people who used our applications. And as more NGOs adopt technology as a strategic part of their global operational success, the demand will continue to grow.

HKS: How has this increase in demand impacted your ability to meet global needs?

MR: This rapid growth has only compounded the challenges that we face in deploying, configuring, and scaling online relief management solutions. For example, for several years, we hosted our applications in data centers in the United States but in response to recent requests for services from humanitarian organizations in Europe, we’ve needed to locate additional server resources overseas. Setting up and maintaining data centers around the globe can be expensive and time-consuming. In a few cases, we’ve needed to pre-position assets and leave them turned off. Instead of paying for what we use, we’ve ended up investing up front for resources that we may or may not eventually need. But that’s all part of being ready for unplanned disasters.

We also found that the time required to source and deploy new hardware impacted our agility. In mid-2010, we began a partnership with a large food bank network that has locations spread across the United Kingdom. After a few weeks, we noticed that the distance between our servers and end users caused the application to run slowly and even time out before people could complete their donations.

HKS: What was the solution?

MR: To empower more partners to help more people around the world, we needed the ability to scale applications at a moment’s notice while maintaining reliable performance. With an eye on keeping operating costs as low as possible, we began to investigate the advantages of moving to the cloud. In considering this change, we wanted to minimize the time needed to migrate existing applications and placed a priority on a cloud technology platform that would support the agile development of new functionality, along with the creation of new solutions to meet the unforeseen demands of future humanitarian crises.

HKS: What led you to choose Windows Azure?

MR: After evaluating several cloud services technologies, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), we decided to adopt Windows Azure because, simply put, Windows Azure gives us all the tools we need to be more agile. It offers platform-as-a-service capabilities, so we don’t have to push out updates or worry about building out our own redundancy system. Plus, it incorporates a familiar development environment, so we can maximize productivity.

HKS: Which of your solutions did you move to Windows Azure first?

MR: The first solution we moved to Windows Azure was the Aidmatrix Program Metrics and Evaluation, which one of our U.S. partners uses to track the services delivered to clients at more than 1,000 locations. Moving the database component to Microsoft SQL Azure took five minutes, and we instantly gained high availability, along with reliable fault tolerance and security, at a fraction of what it would cost to build out those capabilities ourselves.

In early 2011, working with Accenture and Avanade, we also moved our Online Warehouse solution, which provides end-to-end inventory management tools for tracking relief supplies, to Windows Azure. The conversion process for each of these applications took approximately six weeks to complete.

We also recently used Windows Azure to configure and deploy a web portal application built by Microsoft to assist Second Harvest Japan, the Japanese food banking network. I deployed the application to the Microsoft data center in Hong Kong from home following the tsunami and I didn’t need to worry about how many instances to deploy because I could quickly scale out server resources if needed.

HKS: Are you using any other Windows Azure technologies?

MR: We take advantage of several Windows Azure technologies to ensure reliable, scalable performance. For example, we will use Windows Azure Connect to enable data sharing between our Online Warehouse solution and the on-premises operational systems used by our partners, including Oracle and SAP enterprise resource planning systems. And we rely on Windows Azure storage services to collect data on session state management so our staff can monitor application performance and troubleshoot issues in near real time.

HKS: What are some of the benefits you’ve seen from your move to Windows Azure?

MR: One of the key benefits has been noticeable cost savings. Because we no longer need to purchase, set up, and maintain database management and web servers, we expect to save 20 percent on data center costs, which could mean up to $100,000 in savings. We will be able to redirect the time and money we save toward creating and enhancing applications that help save lives. And instead of spending valuable resources on server upkeep, we can redirect time and cost savings to higher-value tasks, like developing a new module for one of our applications.

Another benefit is the global availability of Microsoft data centers and the pay-as-you-go model, which enables us to ensure cost-efficient dynamic scalability for our solutions. Our applications need to handle usages spikes of 1,000 times the normal load. With Windows Azure, we can scale up or down in a very agile and efficient way, which is essential for the kind of work we do.

Finally, the growing ecosystem of ISVs that have adopted Windows Azure allows us to accelerate our own development lifecycle. Taking advantage of functionality from other ISVs speeds our development and ultimately increases the value of our solutions. This is a major benefit of working with a cloud provider like Microsoft that has a large and growing network of partners.

Read the full case study. Learn how others are using Windows Azure.

Protección de datos: Reducir publicidad y noticias no deseadas

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:31:00 GMT

Descubre aquí cómo separar Spam y reducir en el futuro propagandas no deseadas por correo postal, correo electrónico y teléfono a través de las listas Robinson.

Error "Internet Explorer no puede mostrar la página web" al ver un sitio web en Internet Explorer

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:43:00 GMT

Solucionar el error: "Internet Explorer no puede mostrar la página web"

No se puede obtener acceso a algunos sitios web en Internet Explorer

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:21:00 GMT

Obtenga ayuda para resolver problemas que le impiden obtener acceso a algunos sitios web en Internet Explorer.

IE 9: Visualizar la barra de menú y deshabilitar la barra de Skype

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:12:00 GMT

En este artículo se explica cómo visualizar la barra de menú y cómo deshabilitar la barra de Skype en Internet Explorer 9.

Event ID 9000 and Event ID 9006 are logged when you restart the Application Host Helper Service on Windows Server 2008

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:26:00 GMT

Describes that Event ID 9000 and Event ID 9006 are written to the event log when you restart the Application Host Helper Service on Windows Server 2008.

Microsoft BizSpark to Offer Startups $60,000 in Cloud Services on Windows Azure

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:47:00 GMT

Today Microsoft announced BizSpark Plus, an extension of the BizSpark program, which provides higher value offers to startup accelerators around the globe.

BizSpark Plus will provide up to $60,000 in Windows Azure compute and storage to select startup accelerators and their startups at no cost. TechStars, recently recognized as the number one accelerator in the world, is one of the first to receive this offering. TechStars will be able to empower each of its startups with this Windows Azure offering over a 24-month period, at no cost.

In addition to TechStars, Microsoft is making this Windows Azure offer available to all founders whose accelerators are part of the Global Accelerator Network.

Tech startups around the world are building products and services in the cloud. Cloud applications and smart devices are driving the new startup ecosystem, affording startups the ability to drive user adoption, scale their company and generate financial returns with far less capital, at a faster pace than ever before. Windows Azure offers a simple, comprehensive and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.

Supporting entrepreneurship is the crux of Microsoft BizSpark’s mission and the Windows Azure team is excited to be a part of this effort.

Please visit the BizSpark blog and the Microsoft News Center for more details.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #4)

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:58:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

Guthrie Talks Node.js and Windows Azure at Cloud Event by John K. Waters, ADT Magazine (posted Jan. 27.)

EU Seeks Joint National Cloud-Computing Purchases for Growth, Marthe Fourcade and Robert Vapuesta editors, BusinessWeek (posted Jan. 26.)

States Allow Voting Via Cloud for Citizens Overseas by Elizabeth Montalbano, InformationWeek (posted Jan. 25.)

Windows Azure on Cloud9, IDE by Adrian Bridgewater, Dr. Dobbs (posted Jan. 24.)

State Clouds Have Local Linings by Justin Kern, Information Management (posted Jan. 23.)

UK Windows Azure User Group Event Feb. 7, Parallel Processing with Windows Azure and HPC Server (thanks to @lwaug for the tweet.)

Webcast: How to Transform Your Dynamics Business with Windows Azure Feb. 8 at 9:00 am ET (posted Jan. 29.)

Windows Azure Camp in Toronto, Ontario, Canada March 3 (thanks to @chrduf for the tweet.)

8 Essential Best Practices in Windows Azure Blog Storage by Nuno Godinho, A Cloudy Place (posted Jan. 27.)

Cannot Create Database ‘DevelopmentStorageDb20110816’ for the Windows Azure Storage Emulator blog post by Wade Wegner, Windows Azure Technical Evangelist at Microsoft (posted Jan. 25.)

How Much Overcapacity Are You Running with Today? I Bet SQL Azure Federations Can Trim That! blog post by Cihan Biyikoglu, SQL Azure program manager at Microsoft (posted Jan. 26.)

Register for the Upcoming Windows Azure Discovery Events on the West Coast blog post by Wes Yanaga, Microsoft evangelist (posted Jan. 24.)

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

Google Toolbar causes an error message and does not start in Internet Explorer

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:50:00 GMT

Fixes a problem in which Internet Explorer stops responding or crashes because the installed Google Toolbar add-on is not compatible with the installed Internet Explorer version.

Craig Mundie: Innovation Convention

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:40:00 GMT

A transcript of remarks by Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Brussels, Belgium, Dec. 6, 2011.

Craig Mundie: Georgia Tech

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:25:00 GMT

A transcript of remarks by Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, October 27, 2011.

Changes introduced with Microsoft FTP 7.5

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:10:00 GMT

The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the changes introduced with Microsoft FTP 7.5.

Windows Azure Powers Winning Solutions at Imagine Cup

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:39:00 GMT

We are thrilled to announce that two of the four grants program for Imagine Cup will be deploying their programs on Windows Azure. The program is focused on providing opportunities for young people by helping competitors create a business or non-profit that will help solve some of the world’s toughest problems, with the aid of technology. The packages include $75,000 for each team, as well as software, cloud computing services, solution provider support, premium BizSpark account benefits and access to local resources such as the Microsoft Innovation Center.

Team Apptenders (Based in Croatia)- is working on developing a Kinect-based solution system for on-premise and remote physical therapy for children (especially those with Cerebral Palsy). The team will be using Windows Azure to deploy software that will monitor a child’s exercises and provide statistical analysis to their therapist.
Lifelens (Based in the US)– will be producing a point-of-care tool to diagnose malaria using an augmented Windows Phone 7 application, which will be hosted on Windows Azure. The project addresses the high child mortality rates caused by the lack of detection and availability of treatment of malarial diseases.

The winning teams were selected from a pool of more than 50 applicants that competed in the Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals. To learn more about the program, the winning teams, and to see photos, please check out Imagine Cup blog.

Running multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a single instance of Windows is unsupported

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:20:00 GMT

Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Refresh

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

It has been just over three months since we made the SQL Azure Data Sync Preview release available in the Windows Azure portal. We are thrilled with the adoption of the service and are pleased to make available an updated preview release with some requested features and fixes. SQL Azure Data Sync allows organizations to easily synchronize between multiple on-premises databases and SQL Azure cloud databases—a key hybrid IT scenario. If you have not used the Data Sync service and want to learn about it, there is a new video demonstration available that provides an overview of the service capabilities, target scenarios and shows the service in use. There is also a series of videos available on Channel 9 here.

This release addresses several pieces of feedback we’ve heard from customers and brings us a step closer to General Availability. This is the third update to the Preview service since October and contains the following updates:

Data Sync servers can now be created in all Windows Azure data centers, enabling Data Sync servers to be created close to the SQL Azure databases for the best possible performance.
The Data Sync section of the Windows Azure portal is now localized in ten languages.
Miscellaneous fixes and numerous usability improvements including:
- Progress indicators are now available in the log for long running synchronizations.
- Error messages have been improved to better help you troubleshoot problems.
- Synchronization of self-referencing tables is now supported.
- A new version of the Data Sync Agent is available in the Download Center and it is highly recommended that existing agents are updated to the new version (available here).

Here’s a brief summary of the changes we made in the first two service updates:

Addressed the issue that sometimes led to failed syncs for narrow tables with a small number of columns.
Allow logins when either username@server or just username are specified.
Column names with spaces are now supported.
Columns with a NewSequentialID constraint are converted to NewID for SQL Azure databases in the sync group.
Both Administrators and non-Administrators are able to install the Data Sync Agent.
A new version of the Data Sync Agent was made available on the Download Center.

The team is hard at work on future updates as we approach General Availability and we really appreciate your feedback to date! Please keep the feedback coming and use the SQL Azure Forum to ask questions or get assistance with issues. Have a feature you’d like to see in SQL Azure Data Sync? Be sure to vote on features you’d like to see added or updated using the Feature Voting Forum.

New Management API for Windows Azure Traffic Manager

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:15:00 GMT

As you may have noticed in the Windows Azure developer portal, we recently released a new management API for Windows Azure Traffic Manager. The new API improves Traffic Manager by allowing developers and IT professionals to script interactions with the service and to interface with the service programmatically.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Windows Azure Traffic Manager, it gives you control of how traffic is distributed between hosted services in different datacenters. Traffic Manager increases the perceived performance of your application by sending customer traffic to the closest datacenter, and it improves reliability by not sending traffic to hosted services that are down.

With the release of the new API, developers now have full access to the management and creation of Traffic Manager policies, including the creation of a profile from scratch. In this post, we’ll walk through how to create, update, and manage profiles using the new API. Documentation for the new Traffic Manager REST APIs can be found here.

Let's look at a typical configuration in the portal to see how we could accomplish the same configuration using the APIs. Before we get started, if you are new to Windows Azure Traffic Manager, I highly recommend reading an overview of how the service works before continuing.

For reference, I have included a screenshot of a configuration I have setup that uses the performance load balancing method to distribute traffic between an application endpoint setup in the North Central US datacenter and the North Europe datacenter.

Figure 1: Traffic Manager Policy Page

The Edit Traffic Manager Policy dialog allows you to configure a Windows Azure Traffic Manager policy in one screen. Behind the scenes there are multiple API calls that create multiple entities on your behalf that represent this policy configuration that you as a developer will need to be aware of.

So how can you accomplish the same configuration programmatically?

Understanding the entities is the first step. The policy represented above consists of a profile with a domain name specified, at least one definition, which in turn consists of the following configuration: load balancing method, DNS TTL, endpoints and a monitoring configuration among other things.

Figure 2: Traffic Manager Entities

Each profile can have multiple definitions associated with it. However, only one definition can be active at a time. Creating multiple definitions is not currently exposed in the portal. It is entirely possible to define multiple distinct definitions and provide the ability to switch between them without rebuilding them.

Create Profile API

POST	https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/WATM/profiles

Figure 3: Create Profile Request Parameters

The Create Profile API requires you to specify a profile name and the Traffic Manager Domain name. The domain name consists of a DNS prefix (host name) and .trafficmanager.net. In the management portal there is not a location for a profile name; this is generated for you when you use the portal. This is not the case when you create the profile programmatically. How the profile name is generated is something important to understand as a developer. When you create a profile from the portal the name is generated by taking the hostname of the domain name you are specifying and appending -trafficmanager-net to it. For example if the domain name you specified was: woodgrove.trafficmanager.net the internal name of the profile would be woodgrove-trafficmanager-net. When creating a profile programmatically the profile name is whatever you pass into the Create Profile API.

Create Definition API

POST	https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/WATM/profiles/<profile-name>/definitions

Figure 4: Create Definition Request Parameters

Once a profile is created, you can then create a definition using the Create Definition API to specify the rest of your Windows Azure Traffic Manager configuration.

The definition configuration is not as complex as it looks. Defining the monitor consists of specifying the relative path to an HTTP/HTTPS resource that will tell Traffic Manager the health of your application via the returned status code. You may change the port, protocol and the relative path but the remaining settings have to be set to the default values.

Each endpoint consists of the URL to one of the Windows Azure applications that you want managed in the Windows Azure Traffic Manager and a flag indicating whether it is currently enabled or disabled.

The URL specified when creating the Traffic Manager profile (<dnsprefix>.trafficmanager.net) will be mapped to one of the specified endpoints when a DNS name is resolved. Which endpoint is resolved is based on the load balancing method specified (Performance, Failover or RoundRobin).

For Example:
WoodGroveUS.cloudapp.net could reside in the North Central data center.
WoodGroveEU.cloudapp.net could reside in the North Europe data center.

WoodGrove.trafficmanager.net would be the parent domain name that when resolved would be mapped to one of the data center endpoints.

Update Profile

PUT	https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/WATM/profiles/<profile-name>

Figure 5: Update Profile Request Parameters

There can be multiple definitions associated with a profile but only at most one can be active at a time. For a Traffic Manager profile to be active you must enable one of the definitions associated with the profile. You enable a definition by calling the Update Profile API passing in the version that was returned when you called the Create Definition API.

Managing Existing Profiles and Definitions
Beyond the core operations of creating a profile and its associated definitions, the Traffic Manager REST API also supports List Profiles, Get Profile, List Definitions, Get Definition and Delete Profile. These APIs provide full functionality for building an application to manage Windows Azure Traffic Manager configurations.

If you would like to automate the management of your Windows Azure Traffic Manager profiles but you do not want to write code against the REST API to do it we also have an answer for you. We have updated the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (now version 2.2) to have full support for the Windows Azure Traffic Manager.

Windows Azure Traffic Manager Cmdlets

New-TrafficManagerProfile
Get-TrafficManagerProfile
Remove-TrafficManagerProfile
Set-TrafficManagerProfile
Get-TrafficManagerDefinition
New-TrafficManagerDefinition
Add-TrafficManagerEndpoint
New-TrafficManagerEndpoint
Set-TrafficManagerEndpoint
Remove-TrafficManagerEndpoint
New-TrafficManagerMonitor

Here is an example of how you can use PowerShell to create a new profile and definition:

Windows Azure Traffic Manager is a key technology for enabling global and highly available applications. The new REST APIs will allow application developers to build applications that make the management of Traffic Manager a native part of their application. We have also opened the door for automating deployments to Windows Azure customers by exposing this functionality in the new release of the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.2.

Happy Coding!

HP Smart Web Printing error message occurs in Internet Explorer

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:50:00 GMT

Describes how to resolve an error message that describes a compatibility issue between the HP Smart Web Printing add-on and Internet Explorer.

The Drive Letter Access add-on does not work with Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 9

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:40:00 GMT

Describes how to fix an issue that exists between Sonic Drive Letter Access and Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 9. Use this article when you see the following error message: "Internet Explorer is not compatible with your...

Announcing Native Windows Azure Libraries and Special Free Pricing Using SendGrid for Windows Azure Customers

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Last week our friends over at SendGrid shipped new native libraries on GitHub (C#, Node.JS) for Windows Azure developers that make it extremely easy to integrate their mail service into any application built and running in Windows Azure. In addition, SendGrid launched a new offer for Windows Azure customers that provides 25,000 free emails a month! We’ve heard from customers consistently that sending email was too hard and we listened! See detailed, step by step tutorials written by us on how to use SendGrid with Windows Azure in the Developer Center (C#, Node, PHP, Java).

Sending email from Windows Azure has never been so easy. For example, with C#:

Add the SendGrid NuGet package to your Visual Studio project by entering the following command in the NuGet Package Manager Console window:

PM > Install-Package SendGrid

Add the following namespace declarations:

using System.Net;

using System.Net.Mail;

using SendGridMail;

using SendGridMail.Transport;

It can be this easy

// Create an email message and set the properties.

SendGrid message = SendGrid.GenerateInstance();

message.AddTo("anna@contoso.com");

message.From = new MailAddress("john@contoso.com", "John Smith");

message.Subject = "Testing the SendGrid Library";

message.Text = "Hello World!";

// Create an SMTP transport for sending email.

var transport = SMTP.GenerateInstance(new NetworkCredential("username", "password"));

// Send the email.

transport.Deliver(message);

Signup for 25,000 free emails a month today!

Windows Azure and Cloud9 IDE at Node Summit

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:45:00 GMT

Last month we launched our new Windows Azure SDK for Node.js. The release came after months of hard work between Microsoft and Joyent. Since that time we’ve seen a lot of excitement in the Node community around the support for Node.js in Windows Azure. We’re thankful for all the support!

Today at the Node Summit in San Franciso, Scott Guthrie demonstrated the SDK, which provides a streamlined experience for Windows developers to build and deploy Node.js apps to Windows Azure using PowerShell cmdlets and their editor of choice. Scott also showed the “Azure” npm module, which enables developers hosting Node apps in any environment to utilize Windows Azure Storage services like table, queues and blob. You can find out more about the PowerShell tools and the npm package at our dev center.

Additionally, Scott showed a new way to deploy to Azure, Cloud9 IDE!

Cloud9 IDE offers a cross-platform, browser-based development environment for Node.js. It is one of the de-facto tools for Node developers today. Cloud9 runs completely in the browser, and it’s available to developers working on any OS. In the second part of his keynote, Scott demonstrated using Cloud9 IDE on a Mac to build and deploy an application to Azure.

With Cloud9 IDE you can easily create a new Node application, connect it to your Windows Azure account, and deploy. Cloud9 makes it easier for you by packaging up source, creating your hosted service, and publishing the package. It supports publishing to Staging and Production and offers Windows Azure portal integration. Combining that with Cloud9’s integration with distributed version control providers like GitHub and BitBucket offers a fantastic experience!

Below you can see a screenshot of the new Cloud9 experience.

Along with the announcement, we’ve published a brand new tutorial on our Node.js dev center to show you how easy it is to get started developing for Windows Azure in Cloud9. In addition, check out these resources from Cloud9 about their Windows Azure support.

We are very excited about the collaboration with Cloud9 and the opportunity to offer both Windows and non-Windows developers an awesome experience developing for Windows Azure.

Read more about this announcement in the most recent posts on the Cloud9 and Interoperability @ Microsoft blogs.

Get started today.

Announcing SQL Azure Import/Export Service Now in Production

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:31:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the general availability of SQL Azure Import/Export! Now available as a production service, SQL Azure Import/Export helps organizations deploy on-premises databases to SQL Azure, and archive SQL Azure and SQL Server databases to Windows Azure Storage. Key improvements in the new production release include:

Increased performance & resiliency
Progress reporting
Selective Export
Production support
New usage sample EXE

This service is provided free of charge to customers using SQL Azure and Windows Azure Storage. For more information and video tutorials visit the DAC blog.

Bring Some Game To Your Code!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:10:00 GMT

Bring Some Game To Your Code!

A software engineer's glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece of code--and all the heroics it took to write it. With Visual Studio Achievements Beta, your talents are recognized as you perform various coding feats, unlock achievements and earn badges.

Learn More About Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a powerful tool with tons of features, many of which you may not know about. Earning some of the badges may result in learning about features you didn’t even know existed!

Download It

Download it today from the Visual Studio Gallery

How It Works

With the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, achievements are unlocked based on your activity. Your code is analyzed on a background thread each time you compile. In addition, the extension listens for certain events and actions that you may perform in Visual Studio, reporting progress on these events to the server.

When you unlock an achievement, Visual Studio lets you know visually with a pop-up:

Figure 1 - Unlocking An Achievement

In addition, your Channel 9 profile is updated with any achievements you earn, recalculating your position on the leaderboard:

Figure 2 - The Visual Studio Achievements Leaderboard

Some examples of individual achievements include Regional Manager (have more than 10 regions in a single class), Close To The Metal (use 5 preprocessor directives), Stubby (generate method stubs 10 times) or Interrupting Cow (have 10 breakpoints in a file). All in all, there are 32 achievements awaiting to be unlocked, all of which are listed here. Here's what the 6 different badges look like:

The Six Categories of Achievements

Customizing Visual Studio	Don't Try This At Home	Good Housekeeping


Just For Fun	Power Coder	Unleashing Visual Studio

Share Your Flair

Each time you earn a badge, a unique page is created with your profile picture, the badge and a description. You can tweet about achievements you earn and/or share them on Facebook:

Figure 3 - Share A Page

Or, you can show a list of achievements on your blog using the Visual Studio Achievements Widget which is as simple as adding one line of script to your page. After all, those badges look so shiny and nice! Here's an example of the widget on a blog:

Figure 4 - The Visual Studio Achievements Widget On A Blog

Genesis

We have to give props to the blog While True, whose blog post What If Visual Studio Had Achievements inspired us to go build this. That post spawned a reddit post that is the thread which started it all!

Feedback

We're just getting started with Visual Studio Achievements and are hoping to release more in the future. If you have ideas for additional achievements, we'd love to hear about them. Please use the Q&A section of the achievements extension to make suggestions for future achievements. And if you have suggestions, concerns, issues or problems, again, use the Q&A section of the achievements gallery page. Give a read to the FAQ as well as your question may already be answered.

Download it today from the Visual Studio Gallery

Please note:

A fun add in
Educational but not best practices
Not a core Visual Studio team project but developed by Channel 9

Updates: Autoruns v11.21, Coreinfo v3.03, PortMon v 3.03, Process Explorer v15.12, Mark’s Blog and Mark at RSA 2012

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:09:01 GMT

Autoruns v11.21: This update to Autoruns fixes a number of minor bugs, including one that could result in a crash when certain scheduled tasks are configured.

Coreinfo v3.03: Coreinfo, a command-line utility that dumps information about a system’s CPU topology and capabilities, now reports the presence of TSC (timestamp counter) Invariant support.

Portmon v3.03: Portmon, a utility for monitoring serial and parallel port traffic, includes some minor bug fixes and user-interface consistency updates.

Process Explorer v15.12: This update to Process Explorer makes the search dialog asynchronous and reports the types of found items. It also fixes several bugs, including showing a small font when run after an older version, a bug in the restart-process functionality, working set columns not showing data, and again shows information about service processes when run from an unprivileged user account.

Mark’s Blog: The Case of My Mom’s Broken Microsoft Security Essentials Installation: Mark goes deep with the Sysinternals tools to fix a corrupt installation of MSE on his mom’s PC over the holidays.

Mark to Speak at RSA 2012: Mark will be speaking at the RSA Conference 2012 in San Francisco at the end of February in two sessions. He’ll be interviewed in the conference’s new Author’s Studio track about his novel Zero Day, joining luminaries such as Mark Bowden (Worm and Blackhawk Down) and Bruce Schneier (Applied Cryptography). In his second session, he’ll present Zero Day: A Non-Fiction View, where he’ll explore the feasibility and risk of an attack like the one he presents in Zero Day.

Happy New Year, Xbox LIVE Indie Games!

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Welcome to 2012! We’re eager to see what our developers have in store for Xbox LIVE Indie Games in the coming year and to kick things off we have an exciting announcement regarding some changes to App Hub that make it a good time to be an Xbox LIVE Indie Games developer.

Higher maximum CCGAME size

Since the start of Xbox LIVE Indie Games, CCGAME bundles submitted for Xbox LIVE Indie Games were limited to a maximum size of 150MB. We’ve heard all the great feedback on this subject and today we are pleased to inform you that developers are now able to submit CCGAME bundles up to 500MB through App Hub for publishing on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.

New limit for 80 point games

Another area we’re adjusting today is the requirement that titles larger than 50MB be priced at either 240 or 400 points. After raising our maximum size we’ve decided to also raise this limit. Starting today you can apply the 80 point price to any game with a CCGAME size under 150MB, which is three times the current limit of 50MB.

More titles per developer

The last change affects a fewer number of developers, but we still believe it’s an important update. Originally developers were limited to just eight titles on Xbox LIVE Indie Games. When Creators Club became App Hub, we raised the limit up to ten. We’re happy today to let you know that we’re again raising this limit up to twenty titles per developer.

We’re continuing to watch our developer base and adapt the system to the needs of our creators. We hope you’re all as excited as we are to kick off 2012 with these great updates to the App Hub to enable our developers to make even better content for Xbox LIVE Indie Games. If you have any questions or want to discuss these changes, feel free to post in our forum thread.

Give us your feedback on Visual Studio 11 etc. and receive a gift!

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft Visual Studio Design Research Team is looking for participants to give us direct feedback on our development tools, languages and libraries! Opportunities include usability studies of upcoming features, focus groups where we explore new ideas, as well as 1:1 interviews.

What do you get out of it?

When you are selected to participate in one of our research studies, benefits include a combination of the following:

A chance to see and use upcoming tools, features, and language/library enhancements
Interact directly with members of our development teams to discuss your requirements for efficient and effective tools,
Directly influence future design decisions, and
Receive a choice of a Microsoft product from our gratuity list - ranging from Visual Studio Pro thru Xbox games!

We have a brief enrollment form that will ask you a few questions about your company, your job, and the software and languages you actively use. We will contact you as soon as we have a research study that matches your specific background and/or interests.

Enrollment Form

This enrollment should only take 3-5 minutes to complete. For more information about the program feel free to email us at vsdr@microsoft.com. Please note that the Enrollment link originates from Microsoft User Research and is hosted by our survey software provider. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/userresearch/studies.aspx if you have any concerns. Please note that government employees and non-U.S. residents are not eligible for a Microsoft gratuity.

Thanks,
Karl Melder
UX Lead, DevDiv User Experience

Update: Process Explorer v15.11

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:59:28 GMT

Process Explorer v15.11: This minor update fixes several bugs, including the fleeting appearance of garbage characters in the status bar.

Dream.Build.Play 2012 – Adding Windows Phone

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:46:55 GMT

Microsoft’s Dream.Build.Play Challenge is back in 2012! This annual contest is sponsored by Microsoft to inspire independent developers to create games for Microsoft platforms. Developers will have the opportunity to compete for over $100,000 in total cash prizes. Like this year’s Challenge, finalists in the 2012 Dream.Build.Play Challenge will also have the chance to show off their fun and innovative game to thousands of enthusiasts during PAX 2012 in Seattle.

We’re excited to announce that new for 2012 is the addition of a category focused exclusively on games created for Windows Phone, opening the contest to a new set of talented developers. The Dream.Build.Play 2011 Challenge attracted developers from around the world, amassing 250 game submissions from 27 countries. All four of the 2011 winners are now available for players to download and play from the Xbox LIVE Indie Games marketplace.

As in previous years, finalists in the Dream.Build.Play Challenge are judged by a panel of game industry professionals from Microsoft. Games are evaluated on three criteria: Innovation, Fun Factor and Production Quality.

Details about the Dream.Build.Play 2012 Challenge, including registration, will be available soon. In the meantime, general information about the contest and past winners can be found on the official Dream.Build.Play web site and the Facebook fan page.

Welcome to the New Xbox 360 Dashboard

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Today is exciting. Why? Because today we welcome the newest update to the Xbox 360 dashboard.

What does this update mean to you, Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers? To start with, it means a new user interface and organizational and functional changes.

The new user interface uses the Metro style, the same style used by Windows Phone and Windows 8. There also are organizational and functional changes not only to improve, but to enhance, the game experience.

Today, we want to tell you about changes to the Xbox 360 dashboard we believe will most affect Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers and customers.

Rating from the game library

In the new dashboard, rating a game is easy. There now is a Rate button on the overview page for games that gives gamers quick access to rate the game's content.

The removal of the rate button from the game library in an earlier update generated considerable feedback. Its removal reduced the number of ratings given for Indie Games. We believe the permanent display of the rating button on game overview pages will increase the likelihood that your players will rate your games.

Indie exposure in the game marketplace carousel

When navigating into the game marketplace in the games section, you’ll notice the rotating carousel in the center contains an item for Xbox LIVE Indie Games. Selecting this item takes users to an Indie Games experience containing the Kotaku’s Favorites and Contest Finalists lists, as well as Indie Game specific New Releases and Most Popular lists.

This carousel item will help to push your games to even more customers by exposing Xbox LIVE Indie Games from the top level of the marketplace experience.

Bing search

Over the years, Xbox has become about more than just games. Users can now find music, movies, and television programming on their Xbox 360 consoles. With all this great new content, Bing was added to make it even easier to find what you’re looking for. Users can use Bing search to find marketplace content, including Xbox LIVE Indie Games.

The algorithms and index of content are still being improved, but we believe this exposure of Indie Game content through the Bing search engine makes it even easier for customers to find specific Indie game content without having to manually navigate the dashboard in search of the gem.

Recommendations

Another way Xbox is helping customers find great new content is through smart recommendations. Customers viewing a piece of content can now find recommendations for related games and content that might interest them.

Smart recommendations will help customers find Indie games related to games they already own and enjoy, which should translate into more opportunities for Indie developers.

We are sure each of you is as excited as we are about the new dashboard and can see all the great new ways Indie games have been exposed to our millions of Xbox LIVE subscribers. If you have feedback regarding the dashboard, please use the official Xbox.com forum.

Updates: Autoruns v11.2, Disk Usage (DU) v1.4, Process Explorer v15.1, Strings v2.42 and Mark’s Blog: Case of the Installer Service Error

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:44:00 GMT

Autoruns v11.2: This update fixes a bug in the jump-to-folder function when executed on disabled items and correctly locates print monitor DLLs when they are stored in print monitor-specific system director

Disk Usage (DU) v1.4: This update to Du, a command line utility for analyzing the disk space consumed by directories, adds a CSV output option, accounts for the file system cluster size in its on-disk size calculations, and includes alternate data streams.

Process Explorer v15.1: This update of Process Explorer, a Task Manager replacement, adds support for new Windows 8 features by giving the processes hosting immersive applications a distinct highlight color, shows immersive application package names in process tooltips and as a new process view column, lists AppContainer and capability SIDs in the process security properties, and updates the GPU support to be compatible with Windows 8. Other enhancements include GPU memory counters with more descriptive labels, display of the logon session ID on the security properties, and reporting of suspended processes as suspended in the CPU usage column.

Strings v2.42: This Strings release fixes a bug that would result in a crash when the –n or -b options are specified without a file name.

Mark’s Blog: Case of the Installer Service Error: Follow along with Mark in another of his popular ‘Case of the Unexplained’ troubleshooting examples where he retraces the steps of a network administrator that used Process Monitor to figure out why the Windows Intune installer failed on one of his systems and goes on to fix the problem.

RELEASED: Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure

patterns & practices — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 01:10:00 GMT

Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure with autoscaling, transient fault handing, and more is now available!

Updates: Autoruns v11.1, Coreinfo v3.02, AccessChk v5.02, and Microsoft Security Intelligence Report v11

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:13:00 GMT

Autoruns v11.1: This update to Autoruns adds several new autostart
locations, reports the active filter in the status bar, and highlights unsigned
images and those with no company name or description to make them easy to spot.

AccessChk v5.02: This AccessChk release includes improved error messages,
reports registry key delete permission, and includes a manifest.

Coreinfo v3.02: This minor update to Coreinfo, a command-line tool that
reports supported CPU features and topology, includes Microsoft’s SLAT term for
Intel’s Extended Page Table and AMD’s Nested Paging virtualization features.

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report v11: Microsoft’s regular report on the state of malware covering
January through June of 2011 is out and includes a primer by Mark on using the
Sysinternals tools to identify and clean malware.

Microsoft Windows Simulator Rotation and Resolution Emulation

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:35:00 GMT

The Windows Simulator is a tool provided in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview that helps debugging Metro style applications. Its main purpose is to enable debugging when developers want to test how their applications respond to the new Metro style capabilities without having a device that supports those capabilities. It is implemented as a remote connection session to the same machine, but additionally emulates common hardware functionalities available in new devices, e.g., Rotation (i.e., orientation change), High Resolution and Touch. A general introduction can be found here. This article focuses on Rotation and Resolution emulation.

Rotation and Orientation-Aware Application

Roughly, an orientation-aware application can be coded in two ways (A sample app is available here [1]):

1. It can listen to the Orientation Sensor. As shown in the sample [1], it looks like:

OrientationSensor _sensor = OrientationSensor.GetDefault();

if (_sensor != null) {

 _sensor.ReadingChanged += new TypedEventHandler<OrientationSensor,

 OrientationSensorReadingChangedEventArgs>(ReadingChanged);

2. It can also listen to the display orientation change.

This can be hooked in HTML code through @media rule. Additional customization can be achieved by adding an event handler to Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.

The Simulator doesn’t support the emulation of Orientation Sensor, and is only able to trigger a display orientation change. Therefore in the following section, we will concentrate on examples of orientation-aware applications that work with the Simulator.

Orientation-Aware Application: HTML/CSS Binding

Let’s start with an orientation-aware application that has only HTML tag.

1. Start Visual Studio Express. Then create a Blank Application, by clicking “File/New Project…”, “Templates/JavaScript/Blank Application”

2. In the generated project, you will find a file default.html. Make the following modifications to the generated code:

2.1 Add the following code to the end of <head>...</head> code block.

<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="yes" />

<style type="text/css">

 #fullscreen { }

 #fill { }

 #snapped { }

 #deviceportrait { }

 @media screen and (-ms-view-state: full-screen) {

 #fill { display: none; }

 #snapped { display: none; }

 #deviceportrait { display: none; }

 @media screen and (-ms-view-state: fill) {

 #fullscreen { display: none; }

 #snapped { display: none; }

 #deviceportrait { display: none; }

 @media screen and (-ms-view-state: snapped) {

 #fullscreen { display: none; }

 #fill { display: none; }

 #deviceportrait { display: none; }

 @media screen and (-ms-view-state: device-portrait) {

 #fullscreen { display: none; }

 #fill { display: none; }

 #snapped { display: none; }

</style>

2.2 Add the following code to the end of <body>...</body> code block.

<div id="fullscreen" class="win-contentSubtitle">Full Screen</div>

<div id="fill" class="win-contentSubtitle">Fill</div>

<div id="snapped" class="win-contentSubtitle">Snapped</div>

<div id="deviceportrait" class="win-contentSubtitle">Device Portrait</div>

Together, the above code claims that when the Metro style app is in full-screen landscape mode, the app shows “Full Screen”; when it is in full-screen portrait mode, the app shows “Device Portrait”. (Note: by MSDN definition, “a value of full-screen indicates the device is in landscape orientation and the application’s client area is the same height and width as the device’s height and width.” For a detailed explanation about -ms-view-state media feature, refer to this MSDN article[2]).

3. Now change the debug target from “Local Machine” (the default value) to “Simulator”.

4. F5 to start the debugging.

You should see the app displaying something like “Full Screen”.

5. Click the Simulator “Rotate +90 degrees” button to rotate the Simulator clockwise for 90 degrees.

You should see the app displaying something like “Device Portrait”.

In summary, we have shown a sample of how to write an orientation-aware Metro style app. Without orientation sensor, it is not straightforward to trigger –ms-view-state event so that one can test his/her Metro style app. The Simulator comes to the rescue in this case.

Orientation-Aware Application: Binding through Event Handler

Another approach to customize a Metro style app in response to an orientation change is to explicitly add an event handler. The code is as simple as:

Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.OrientationChanged +=

 new DisplayPropertiesEventHandler(DisplayProperties_OrientationChanged);

An interested reader can download the sample application [1]to try the debugging experience with the Simulator. Here are the detailed steps:

1. Download the sample project and unzip the solution to a temp folder.

2. Start Visual Studio Express and open the project OrientationCS.csproj.

3. Now change the debug target from “Local Machine” (the default value) to “Simulator”.

4. Set a breakpoint at MainPage.xaml.cs in the below code (around line 190):

if (DisplayProperties.CurrentOrientation == DisplayOrientations.Portrait

 || DisplayProperties.CurrentOrientation == DisplayOrientations.PortraitFlipped)

5. F5 to debug the app.

6. Click the Simulator “Rotate +90 degrees” button to rotate the Simulator clockwise for 90 degrees. Now you should see the breakpoint hit!

Again, without the Simulator, it would be difficult to debug such application without having an actual device with an orientation sensor.

Resolution

Assume a developer has a computer with “mismatched” video adapter and monitor: the video adapter supports a high resolution while the monitor doesn’t. In such case it would be difficult for the developer to test his Metro style app in the high resolution. Again, the Simulator helps in this case: It displays common resolutions that are supported by the video adapter, and allows the user to choose each resolution for testing purpose inside the Simulator. For example, in the below screenshot of the Simulator, it shows various resolutions supported by my computer’s video driver. Here I am able to test a Metro style app with a high resolution of 2560*1440, even though my monitor doesn’t display such high resolution.

I hope that you have enjoyed this post. By now you should have a good understanding about the support for rotation and resolution in the Simulator.

Thanks,

Zebin Chen

Software Development Engineer, Visual Studio

References:

[1] OrientationSensor Sample: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/OrientationSensor-Sample-99595893

[2] –ms-view-state media feature: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465826(v=VS.85).aspx

Debugging Contracts using Windows Simulator

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

All of you might be pretty busy discovering what Windows 8 has to offer. Today I will introduce you to debugging Contracts, one of the cool features in Windows 8.

It is hard to debug contracts when you are debugging locally because they disappear as soon as the focus is lost. So, as you hit a breakpoint in Visual Studio for your app, the target app would disappear making it difficult to debug your app.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview ships with a Windows Simulator. The Simulator helps with debugging contracts as it’s a separate session and the target app does not disappear on switching focus to VS. Simulator is also useful in debugging switching between landscape and portrait modes, targeting various device sizes and resolutions, and emulating touch points. Here is an introductory post about Windows Simulator. You can also refer to this post for more information on testing touch using Simulator.

I will use the JavaScript Share Source Sample App and Share Target Sample App (provided by the Windows Developer Preview Metro style apps samples) for my demonstration.

Using Local Debugging

After downloading and unpacking the sample, open the solution ShareSource.sln in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.
Once the solution is loaded, press F5 to start app locally.
When the App is running, you can switch to Visual Studio, stop debugging and close the solution. We don’t need to debug the Source App for our illustration. We just need to have it deployed.
Now open the solution ShareTarget.sln in Visual Studio.
Change the project properties (Right click on the Project in the Solution Explorer and then click Properties) and set the value of Launch Application under Debugging tab to No. This should register the application for debugging. While Visual Studio will not launch the application, it will start debugging the application whenever it is activated.

If you are using C#/VB project, make sure to select the following option under Debug tab.

Open the file target.js and put a breakpoint in the method activatedHandler as shown below:

6. Press F5 to start debugging.

Go to the Start screen and search for Share Source Sample App. As Share Source Sample App becomes active, share some text as shown below:

List of target apps for share contract will appear on the right side, and from the list of available apps select Share Target Sample App.

You will notice that as soon as you hit the breakpoint, target app will disappear making it hard to debug your code.

Using Windows Simulator

Now let's try the same thing using Windows Simulator. Press Stop Debugging in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and start debugging again using Simulator.

Once the Simulator is up and running and your Share Target Sample App is active, click on the Windows button in the Simulator to go to the Start screen, and search for Share Source Sample App. As Share Source Sample App becomes active, start sharing with the Share Target Sample App using same steps described earlier.

You will notice that target app is still visible in the Simulator after breakpoint is hit. Continue debugging using F10, and you can still observe your target app in parallel as seen below.

I hope you will find this post useful for debugging contracts.

Thanks,
Ravneet Singh Khalsa
Software Design Engineer, Visual Studio

Activity Stream

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:16:00 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow us on Twitter @matthawley and @codeplex]

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website yesterday.

Redesigned Home Page with Activity Stream

In CodePlex we continuously look for ways to provide our users with the most recent and relevant information they are seeking. It is with this in mind that we released our latest feature, the home page activity stream.

The activity stream showcases events taking place on projects you are a part of as well as projects you are following. There are many different events in the system that causes activities to be created, including starting a discussion, creating a work item etc.

All the functionality that was available on the former home page, such as creating a new project or finding a project that needs help, is available on the right side of the new home page.

The CodePlex team values your feedback. We are frequently monitoring Twitter, our Discussions, and Issue Tracker. If you have not visited the Issue Tracker recently, please take a few minutes to suggest or vote on a feature you would like to see implemented.

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 – now available on Microsoft Update

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:10:00 GMT

As of today, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available through Microsoft Update. If you have opted into Microsoft Update and haven’t installed SP1 yet, you will soon have it offered to you. The service pack was initially released in March and includes some often requested feature improvements, fixes that improve reliability as well as the most commonly-reported customer bugs.

For more information, check out the following blog posts and links:

Enjoy!

Jack Unverferth
The Visual Studio Professional Team

An update on Visual Studio performance

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:24:00 GMT

I wanted to take the time to thank everyone who has contributed to our UserVoice performance site by entering areas you would like to see us improve and for voting on those items. To date we have had over 4700 posts and votes showing the passion you all have for Visual Studio and its performance. For those that have downloaded the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview from the Microsoft \\Build Conference I would like to encourage you to post any performance issues you are seeing with that drop of Visual Studio as well.

As I said in the initial post Visual Studio’s performance continues to be a hot topic and we appreciate the feedback we have received on this site, and through other forums. We are listening to your feedback and continuing to invest in improving performance across a number of areas you all have posted and voted for on this site along with data we are receiving through the instrumentation provided by PerfWatson described below. I wanted to reiterate that our approach to gathering the key areas to improve are twofold and include:

Collecting feedback from you to prioritize our work
Implementing instrumentation in Visual Studio to collect data in cases where the product performs poorly

Collecting Customer Feedback

Please continue to use our single stop for feedback on Visual Studio Performance at our UserVoice site and post items or vote on the performance issues you find are impacting you the most. This feedback has been, and will continue to be, incorporated into our plans as we prioritize our work.

Instrumentation

I want to spend a bit more time encouraging you to make use of Visual Studio PerfWatson, which is included in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. PerfWatson, much like regular Watson, enables us to collect data from your machine right when you experience a performance problem. This data allows us to pinpoint right when you experienced a significant pause or delay in the product and we can then debug the exact stack that is causing your Visual Studio instance to experience a performance delay. This blog post describes how we are using the data to identify and fix performance problems. By combining your feedback with this data we continue to work on addressing those issues affecting you the most.

What to look for Next

As we finish our performance work and validate the wins I will be posting some videos of before and after scenarios for you to see. Please look for these posts as we enter the new year. I continue to read the posts, comments, vote totals at the UserVoice site along with PerfWatson reports indicating stacks that are being the most problematic. This dual view of human perception along with instrumented data is invaluable to our understanding of what is impacting you the most, and again I appreciate your passion for helping us make Visual Studio better for you.

Thank you for your support,

Larry Sullivan
Director of Engineering

Roslyn Syntax Visualizers

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Hello everyone! As you may have heard, today we announced the first CTP of the Roslyn project! You can visit the Roslyn MSDN Page to learn more about the project and to download the CTP. You can also read more about Roslyn at the following links -

In this post I will present a brief overview of two samples that are installed as part of the CTP – the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window and the Syntax Debugger Visualizer – and discuss how to install and use these samples. These samples are in essence tools that can simplify inspection and exploration of Roslyn Syntax Trees. You can use these visualizers as debugging aids when you develop your own applications / code issues / code refactorings using the Roslyn APIs.

Getting Started

Lets begin by downloading and installing the CTP from Roslyn CTP Download Page. Once installed, the best place to start is to open Start Menu -> Microsoft Codename Roslyn CTP -> Getting Started. This will launch the the “Getting Started” guide which provides a great overview of what’s included in the CTP as well as links to launch the documents, walkthroughs and samples that are included in the CTP.

To understand the concepts presented in this blog post better, I would strongly recommend reading the Roslyn Project Overview Document. This document provides a great overview of the Roslyn Syntax API including Syntax Trees, Syntax Nodes, Syntax Tokens and Syntax Trivia. This document is installed on your machine when you install the CTP and you can open this document using the link in the “Getting Started” guide.

Next, lets navigate to the Samples section in the “Getting Started” guide by clicking on the link titled ‘Samples’ under the section titled ‘Contents’. Then click on the link titled ‘Roslyn Development Tools’. This should bring you to a section that gives a brief overview of two samples that are the subject of this post -

Lets take a closer look at these samples.

Syntax Visualizer Tool Window

The Syntax Visualizer Tool Window sample is a Visual Studio Extension that enables inspection of 'live' Roslyn Syntax Trees for any C# or VB code file that is open inside the Visual Studio IDE when the Roslyn Language Service is present. The Roslyn Language Service is present whenever you are running or debugging other Roslyn extensions (like code issues and code refactorings). It is also present whenever you debug (F5) or run (Ctrl + F5) the project for the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window sample.

Lets open the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window sample in Visual Studio by clicking on the link with the corresponding title in the “Getting Started” guide. Once the project is open inside Visual Studio, you should find a file named ‘Readme.html’ under the ‘SyntaxVisualizerExtension’ project as shown in the below image. This file contains a brief overview of this sample and also details the steps for installing and running this sample.

Now lets build and run this sample by clicking on Debug –> Start Debugging (F5) or Debug –> Start Without Debugging (Ctrl + F5). This should bring up a new instance of Visual Studio (within which the Roslyn Language Service is present).

In this new Visual Studio instance, click on View –> Other Windows –> Roslyn Syntax Visualizer to bring up the Syntax Visualizer.

This should bring up a tool window that looks like below. Lets dock this tool window at a convenient location inside Visual Studio. I usually dock this window on the left side.

Now in the same Visual Studio instance, create a new project by clicking on File –> New Project. You can create either a VB / C# project. As soon as Visual Studio opens the main code file for this project, you should see the Syntax Tree for this file in the visualizer tool window as shown in the below image. You can open any existing C# / VB file in this Visual Studio instance and the Syntax Tree for the opened file will be displayed in the visualizer tool window. If you have multiple code files open inside Visual Studio, the visualizer will always display the Syntax Tree for the currently active code file (i.e. the code file that has keyboard focus).

As you can see in the above image, the visualizer tool window displays the Syntax Tree at the top and a property grid at the bottom. The property grid displays the properties of the item that is currently selected in the tree, including the .NET ‘Type’ and the ‘Kind’ (SyntaxKind) of the item.

Roslyn Syntax Trees are comprised of three types of items – Syntax Nodes, Syntax Tokens and Syntax Trivia. You can read more about these types in the Roslyn Project Overview Document. Items of each type are represented using a different color. You can click on the button titled ‘Legend’ for a better understanding of this color coding.

Each item in the tree also displays its own ‘Span’. In the above example, the selected item “ModuleKeyword [0..6)” has a Span that is 6 characters wide i.e. [0..6).

There are a couple of different ways in which you can navigate the tree -

You can navigate the tree by expanding / clicking on items in the tree. If you click on an item in the tree, the visualizer will automatically select the text corresponding to this item’s Span in the code editor.
You can also navigate the tree by clicking on / selecting text in the code editor. In the above example, if you select the line containing “Module Module1” in the code editor, the visualizer will automatically navigate to the corresponding “ModuleStatement [0..14)” item in the tree. In essence, the visualizer will try to find and highlight the item in the tree whose span best matches the span of the text that you select.

Next, lets see what happens when we modify the code in the active code file. In the above example, lets type the statement “Console.WriteLine()” inside the “Sub Main()" block. As you type, notice that the visualizer refreshes the tree to match the most current version of the typed code.

Pause typing once you have typed “Console.” Notice that the tree has some items colored in pink. This is because at this point, there are errors (also referred to as ‘Diagnostics’) in the typed code. These errors are attached to Syntax Nodes / Syntax Tokens / Syntax Trivia in the Syntax Tree and the visualizer shows you which items have errors attached to them by coloring them specially. You can inspect the errors that are present on any item colored pink by hovering over the item with your mouse. Note that the visualizer will only display syntactic errors (i.e. errors related to the syntax of the typed code) – it will not display any semantic errors.

In Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate, you can also right click on any item in the visualizer tool window and click on Directed Syntax Graph. This will display a graphical representation of the sub-tree rooted at the selected item. This feature is not available in Visual Studio Professional.

Lets try this for the “SubBlock [22..47)” item in the above example. This should display a Syntax Graph that looks as follows.

As you can see the Syntax Graph also displays a legend for the coloring scheme it uses. You can hover over individual items in the Syntax Graph with the mouse to view the properties corresponding to that item.

You can view Syntax Graphs for different items in the tree repeatedly and the graphs will always be displayed in the same window inside Visual Studio. You can dock this window at a convenient location inside Visual Studio so that you don’t have to switch between tabs to view a new Syntax Graph. I usually dock this window at the bottom (below my code editor windows).

Below is the docking layout that I normally use for the visualizer tool window and the Syntax Graph window.

You can close the visualizer tool window at any time and once closed it should cease to have any impact. You can also disable / uninstall the visualizer extension completely using Tools –> Extension Manager in Visual Studio.

With that we come to the end of the overview for the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window sample.

Syntax Debugger Visualizer

Next, lets take a look at the Syntax Debugger Visualizer sample. This sample is a tool that can be used within a Visual Studio debug session to visualize Roslyn Syntax Trees, Syntax Nodes, Syntax Tokens and Syntax Trivia.

Open the Syntax Debugger Visualizer sample in Visual Studio by clicking on the link with the corresponding title in the “Getting Started” guide. Once the project is open inside Visual Studio, you should find a file named ‘Readme.html’ under the ‘SyntaxDebuggerVisualizer’ project as shown in the below image. This file contains a brief overview of this sample and also details the steps for installing and running this sample.

The ‘SyntaxDebuggerVisualizer’ project itself is just a library, and cannot be run. Lets build this project by clicking on Build –> Build Solution in Visual Studio. Next, lets navigate to the bin directory of this project and copy the files present in this directory to the ...\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Visualizers directory. You may need to create the ...\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Visualizers directory in case it doesn’t exist already on your computer.

Once copied, the debugger visualizer is ready for use within Visual Studio. Close and reopen Visual Studio to make sure that the debugger visualizer is recognized.

Lets write a small test program to test the debugger visualizer. In the new instance of Visual Studio that you just opened, create a new Roslyn Console Application using the File –> New Project dialog.

In the “Main()” function of this Roslyn Console Application, paste the following code -

var tree = Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp.SyntaxTree.ParseCompilationUnit(@"class c1 { }");

var token = tree.Root.DescendentTokens().First();

Console.WriteLine(token.Kind);

The above code uses the Roslyn API to create a Syntax Tree, selects a Syntax Token from this tree and prints the ‘Kind’ of this Syntax Token on the console. Lets put a breakpoint on the “Console.WriteLine(token.Kind);” line above and run the program under the debugger by clicking on Debug –> Start Debugging (F5).

Once the execution breaks at the breakpoint, lets bring up Visual Studio’s Autos window. Notice the magnifying glass icons that appear next to the two variables in the Autos window. The presence of this magnifying glass icon indicates that the debugger visualizer was correctly installed and that it is available for use.

In fact, once the debugger visualizer is installed, the above magnifying glass icon should appear in debugger windows next to any object with type -

Roslyn.Compilers.Common.CommonSyntaxTree
Roslyn.Compilers.Common.CommonSyntaxNodeOrToken
Roslyn.Compilers.Common.CommonSyntaxNode
Roslyn.Compilers.Common.CommonSyntaxToken
Roslyn.Compilers.Common.CommonSyntaxTrivia
Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp.SyntaxTree
Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp.SyntaxNodeOrToken
Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp.SyntaxNode
Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp.SyntaxToken
Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp.SyntaxTrivia
Roslyn.Compilers.VisualBasic.SyntaxTree
Roslyn.Compilers.VisualBasic.SyntaxNodeOrToken
Roslyn.Compilers.VisualBasic.SyntaxNode
Roslyn.Compilers.VisualBasic.SyntaxToken
Roslyn.Compilers.VisualBasic.SyntaxTrivia

Lets click on the magnifying glass that appears next to the variable “token” in the Auto’s window above. This should bring up the following debugger visualizer window. The Syntax Token that you selected in the Autos window is highlighted in the tree and the text corresponding to the Span of this Syntax Token is also highlighted in the text box.

The visualizer displays the Syntax Tree at the top and a property grid at the bottom and the operation of these controls is essentially the same as in the case of the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window sample that we discussed earlier in this post. The rich Visual Studio code editor in the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window is replaced with a read-only text box in the Syntax Debugger Visualizer. However, you can still navigate the tree by either clicking on / expanding items in the tree or by clicking on / selecting text in the text box.

For example, lets select the closing brace “}” in the text box using the mouse – this will automatically select the corresponding item in the tree as shown in the below image.

Notice also that the Line, Column and Position info corresponding to the currently selected text in the text box are displayed at the top right portion of the visualizer window.

Note: The debugger visualizer does not support visualizing the following types of objects. It will display an error message if it encounters an object that it cannot visualize correctly.

Syntax Nodes / Syntax Tokens / Syntax Trivia from a Syntax Tree that was parsed using non-default Parse Options.
Syntax Nodes / Syntax Tokens / Syntax Trivia generated using Roslyn Syntax Factory Methods (such as Syntax.ParseExpression(), Syntax.ParseStatement(), Syntax.CompilationUnit() etc.).

Note: There is a known bug in the implementation of the Syntax Debugger Visualizer sample. Please take a look at this Roslyn Forum Post (that contains a list of known issues for the Roslyn CTP) for a description of this bug and how you can fix this.

Feedback

I hope you had a fun time learning about the two Syntax Visualizers. Do try them out and use them as you explore the Roslyn APIs and develop new code issues / code refactorings!

We are very excited to get an early preview of the Roslyn technology in your hands and would love to hear your feedback, ideas and suggestions about the CTP and also about the visualizer tools described in this post. Please use the CTP to build rich code tools and extensions so that you can learn more about the APIs and provide feedback.

Please note that this is a technology preview and there are known limitations and bugs. The primary goal of this CTP is to give you an early preview of the Roslyn APIs and gather feedback. While the shape of the public API surface is complete, only a subset of the C# and Visual Basic languages have been implemented end-to-end in the CTP. You can find a complete list of known issues and non-implemented language features on this Roslyn Forum Post.

Please use the Roslyn Forum to ask questions and provide feedback and Microsoft Connect to log bugs and suggestions.

Thank You!
Shyam Namboodiripad
Software Development Engineer in Test (Roslyn Compilers Team)

Introducing the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:30:00 GMT

Today we are releasing the first Community Technology Preview of the Roslyn Project!

What is Roslyn?

In the past, our compilers have acted as black boxes – you put source text in and out the other end comes an assembly. All of that rich knowledge and information that the compiler produces is thrown away and unavailable for anyone else to use.

As Soma mentions in his blog, a part of the Visual Studio languages team is working on a project called Roslyn with a goal to rewrite the C# and VB compilers and language services in managed code. With a clean, modern, managed codebase our team can be more productive, innovate faster, and deliver more features sooner and with better quality.

More importantly, we are opening up the C# and Visual Basic compilers and exposing all that rich information and code analysis to be available for your use. We expose a public API surface and provide extension points in the C# and VB language services.

This opens up new opportunities for VS extenders to write powerful refactorings and language analysis tools, as well as allow anyone to incorporate our parsers, semantic engines, code generators and scripting in their own applications.

Download the October 2011 CTP

The CTP and supporting materials can be downloaded from:

http://msdn.com/roslyn

The main goal of this early preview is to gather feedback on the API design and to introduce the C# Interactive window (also known as REPL, or Read-Eval-Print-Loop).

This first CTP is intended for preview-use only and does not allow redistribution of the Roslyn components or allow use in a production environment.

The CTP installs on Visual Studio 2010 SP1. It also requires the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK.

Getting Started

After the installation succeeds, the best place to start is to open Start Menu -> Microsoft Codename Roslyn CTP -> Getting Started.

To get started, the “Roslyn Project Overview” document gives a look at the compiler API – how to work with syntax and semantics of your program. Several walkthrough documents are also included to provide a deep dive into various aspects of the Roslyn APIs.

The CTP ships with quite a few samples for Visual Studio Extensions, compiler API, code issues, refactorings and so on. Most of the samples are provided for both C# and Visual Basic. You can open the sample source code from the Getting Started page.

We also install several new project templates available in the New Project dialog:

These templates will help you to get started on a new Visual Studio extension that uses Roslyn.

Reference Assemblies

The Roslyn assemblies are also installed in the GAC. Switch to the Full Profile (instead of the Client Profile) to be able to also reference the Services assemblies (which contain the IDE support).

C# Interactive window

You can invoke the C# Interactive window from View -> Other Windows -> C# Interactive Window. The Interactive window is powered by the new C# language service. The architecture of Roslyn is flexible enough to allow many of the IDE features such as IntelliSense and refactorings to work the same in a normal editor and in the Interactive window.

At this time, the Interactive window is only available for C#. We’re working hard on providing the VB Interactive at a future time.

C# Script File (.csx) Editing Support

The CTP introduces a concept of a C# Script File. You can create a .csx file through File -> New File (or also use any other editor such as notepad):

You can run scripts using the new rcsi.exe, which installs into %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Codename Roslyn CTP\Binaries\rcsi.exe. You can add rcsi.exe to the path and then type rcsi <scriptfilename>.csx.

You can also copy chunks of code from a script file and send them to the C# Interactive Window (using the right-click context menu or a keyboard shortcut).

The editor for the script files is also powered by the new language services. Hence it is important to keep in mind that .csx scripts will only support the part of the language already implemented in the Roslyn compilers. For more details, see the "Introduction to Scripting" walkthrough.

Quick sample of the Roslyn API

Here’s a sample of compiling and executing a small program using the Roslyn API.

using Roslyn.Compilers;
using Roslyn.Compilers.CSharp;

...

var text = @"class Calc { public static object Eval() { return 42; } }";
 
var tree = SyntaxTree.ParseCompilationUnit(text);
var compilation = Compilation.Create(
    "calc.dll",
    options: new CompilationOptions(assemblyKind: AssemblyKind.DynamicallyLinkedLibrary),
    syntaxTrees: new[] { tree },
    references: new[] { new AssemblyFileReference(typeof(object).Assembly.Location) });
 
Assembly compiledAssembly;
using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
{
    EmitResult compileResult = compilation.Emit(stream);
    compiledAssembly = Assembly.Load(stream.GetBuffer());
}
 
Type calc = compiledAssembly.GetType("Calc");
MethodInfo eval = calc.GetMethod("Eval");
string answer = eval.Invoke(null, null).ToString();
 
Assert.AreEqual("42", answer);

Note: At this stage, only a subset of the language features has been implemented in the current CTP. We’re moving forward at a fast pace, but features such as Linq query expressions, attributes, events, dynamic, async are not yet implemented. To see a full list of non-implemented language features, see the Roslyn forums.

Although not all the language features are supported, the shape of the public API is mostly complete, so we encourage you to write extensions and tools against the Syntax, Symbols, and Flow and Region Analysis APIs.

We’re very excited to get an early preview of this technology in your hands and we welcome your feedback, ideas and suggestions. Use the forums to ask questions and provide feedback, Microsoft Connect to log bugs and suggestions, and use the #RoslynCTP hashtag on Twitter.

Thanks,

Kirill Osenkov

QA (Roslyn Services Team)

Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kirillosenkov

Twitter: @KirillOsenkov

Instant Answers and White Pages Discontinued

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:17:10 GMT

Effective December 8, 2011, we will discontinue support for both the Instant Answers source type and for Phonebook Residential White Pages results via the Bing API version 2.0. For those of you using these source types with the Bing API, this means you will no longer receive results for Instant Answers or for Phonebook White Pages (Residential) results.

We encourage you to continue using the many other source types available via the Bing API such as web, images, video, news, and more. For more information on using the API, a number of resources can be found here. This includes implementation instructions, code examples, links to forums and other helpful documentation. We hope that these resources will assist you in the transition.

Our team regularly evaluates our API to make sure we’re focusing on the right areas for our partners. Decommissioning source types allows us to dedicate more resources to supporting other parts of the API.

As always, thanks for your partnership, and we hope you continue to find the Bing API valuable in powering your products.

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Search Everywhere

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:43:00 GMT

During usability studies on previous versions of Visual Studio, we found many users were spending quite a lot of time browsing long lists of data from files in Solution Explorer to controls in the Toolbox, errors or warnings in the Error list, menus, bugs, etc. More often than not you know what you want but finding it in the list can be tedious. Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview aims at increasing productivity by reducing the amount of time it takes to traverse through these lists by adding search to a number of common windows.

Video: VS11 Developer Preview Search Everywhere

Search in Solution Explorer

Location: Between Solution Explorer toolbar and Solution

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl + ;

Navigating through huge projects or solutions to find the file, class, or member you want is extremely easy with search in Solution Explorer. Pressing Ctrl+; will place focus in the Solution Explorer search box and allow you to filter down the tree view. You don’t need to remember the entire name of a file or even how it starts, because this search is a ‘contains’ search. So as long as you know any part of the substring, type it in (no need to press ‘enter’ – Search starts the moment you start typing to give you instant results) and all results that ‘contain’ the keyword will show.

Pascal Case search is also enabled in Solution Explorer. Pascal Casing is when the first letter of every word in the name of a folder or file is capitalized. By typing in just the capitalized letters you can search for the class or member. For example, search “BJG” for the class name BlackJackGame. NOTE: The Developer Preview doesn’t support Pascal Casing on projects, files, or folders yet – only language nodes are searchable through Pascal Casing. We are looking to add full support later this release

Search in Error list

Location: Top right corner of Error List window

Finding the right error in the Error List can be challenging at times, so for VS11 we’ve added a search box to the Error List to help you find the right error, warning, or message. The search will look through all columns, not just the error description, thus allowing you to easily scope the results through a file or project name.

As a complement to search, the Error List now has a filtering button in the top-left which allows you to scope the results in the list to the errors, warnings, and messages in the Open Documents, Current Project, Current Document. When you switch files, the filter is applied to that file allowing you to zero in on just the files you are interested in.

Location: Top left corner of Error List window

Search in Other Windows

We’ve talked about two of our favorite new search additions, but you’ll find that search has been added to a number of places throughout VS, including:

Add Reference Dialog
Team Explorer – includes search filters for narrowing down the bug list.
Quick Find
Intellitrace Summary Page
Parallel Watch Window
C++ Graphics Event List
And More

Quick Launch

Location: Top right corner of IDE

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl + ` [back quote]

Probably the most useful new search box is the one in the upper right corner of VS: Quick Launch. The keyboard shortcut to place focus in Quick Launch is Ctrl + ` [back quote]. (Back Quote shares the key with ~ on US keyboards, and is to the left of the ‘1’ button). NOTE: You can change the keyboard shortcut via Tools->Options->Environment->Keyboard and searching for “Window.QuickLaunch”.

Quick Launch will search over commands, options, and open documents within VS. To create a new project, just type “new project” and press ENTER. Too add a class, just type “Add Class” and press ENTER. Quick Launch makes it very easy to execute actions inside VS. Additionally, the keyboard shortcut for the commands will be listed next to the result, allowing you to quickly memorize keyboard shortcuts.

Quick Launch will also maintain a most recently used (MRU) list of your frequently executed commands allowing common results to show up first in your search results. While Quick Launch ships with these out-of-the-box categories, we support the ability of 3^rd parties to add search categories as well.

For detailed coverage on Quick Launch functionality check out Zain Naboulsi’s blog here.

Feedback

We’d love to hear from you! All customer feedback is reviewed and constantly used to improve the product, so please let us know what you think about these new features in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.

If you encounter a bug or find something working different than you expect, please file a bug by logging onto Microsoft Connect. If you have a suggestion, please add it to User Voice and also vote on other suggestions so we know what is important to you.

Thanks! RadhikaTadinada Program Manager (Visual Studio Platform)

Improving developer productivity with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:06:00 GMT

One of the things we’ve been doing in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview (VS11) is focusing on ways to increase developer productivity and improve the performance of VS. Through careful observation of developers using Visual Studio and through talking to developers, we learned that one of the ways we could improve developer productivity would be by reducing the number of things that developers have to pay attention to and manage. Fewer tool windows, fewer toolbars, fewer irrelevant documents in the IDE would provide developers with more time to concentrate on their own code.

We’ve taken this on board and have made a few changes to the way things work in Visual Studio that we think will result in some big productivity gains. Let’s start by taking a look at how we reduce the number of documents that a developer has to manage.

Reducing Document Overload

Developers often end up with additional documents open in the IDE as a side effect of performing some other activity such as stepping through code in the debugger, triaging search results, or foraging through files in a solution. For example, imagine I am trying to track down a bug that shows up whenever I make a call to some method. I place a breakpoint on that method then step into every method that it calls, and the methods that they call, until I finally reach the buggy code. It’s not uncommon in these situations to step through a number of different methods until finally reaching the buggy code. The following call stack shows a contrived example. I placed a breakpoint in Main and stepped through a number of intermediate methods until eventually landing on the buggy method.

Each step into an intermediate method resulted in another file being opened up in the IDE. As it turns out, these files aren’t really important to helping me debug the problem but they sit there, taking up space, and forcing me to work around them. Worse still, if I get interrupted (and who doesn’t?), when I return to my task I need to read through the files to remind myself that these files aren’t really important. All wasted effort and time.

Enter the ‘Preview Tab’. In VS11, the preview tab is a special tab that we use to display the content of files that aren’t currently open in the IDE. Each time the user takes an action that would cause a new file to be opened, we open that file up in the preview tab instead. There is only one preview tab, so we refresh the content of the preview tab on each new file that gets opened. So in the above scenario, when I stepped through the files containing IntermediateMethod1, IntermediateMethod2 and IntermediateMethod3, these files were opened in the preview tab, instead of opening up in their own dedicated files. And when we step into the BuggyMethod, that too is opened in the same preview tab.

If you’re already incredibly excited at the thought of previewing files and want to try it out all for yourself, download the Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview from here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27543). This build has the preview tab turned on by default. You’ll also be able to use the preview tab if you have the Windows 8 Developer Preview installed, but you’ll need to make a couple of changes to the registry to use the preview tab with C++ and VB files.

If you have the Windows 8 Developer Preview installed, there are a couple of things you’ll need to do if you want to experiment with previewing C++ and VB files from the Solution Explorer. Add the following registry keys to enable previewing VB and C++ files from the Solution Explorer:

// Microsoft Visual Basic Editor

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VSWinExpress\11.0_Config\Editors\{2C015C70-C72C-11D0-88C3-00A0C9110049}]

"CommonPhysicalViewAttributes"=dword:00000002

// C++ Source Code editor

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VSWinExpress\11.0_Config\Editors\{D0E1A5C6-B359-4e41-9B60-3365922C2A22}]

"CommonPhysicalViewAttributes"=dword:00000002

The end result is that instead of five files being opened in the IDE, we only have one file (the file containing the Main definition) and one file in the preview tab. For example:

The tab on the right hand side (containing the file BuggyClass.cs) is the preview tab. We place it over on the right hand side, away from the other regular tabs to indicate that it is a different kind of tab.

When a file is displayed in the preview tab, you can read the content in the file, scroll through it and copy content from the file to paste elsewhere. What if you decide that you want to keep the file around to do some work on it though? How do you prevent the file disappearing as the result of some other action that causes the preview tab to refresh with new content?

There are a couple of ways to open the content in the preview tab into a regular tab.

Just start editing the content. As soon as you make any kind of edit to the file in the preview tab we’ll open that file in a regular tab automatically. No action is required on your part, just start editing the file like you normally would. We don’t want to have to force you to explicitly indicate that you want to keep the file around. We want to allow you to get on with your work so we’ll open it for you as soon as you start editing the file.
Click on the ‘Open’ button. The preview tab has a button in between the file name and the close button. It’s highlighted in red below. Click on this button to open the file in a regular, persistent tab. A new regular tab will be created showing the content of the file and the preview tab will close.

We don’t just use the preview tab while debugging. There are other scenarios that can result in files being opened as a side effect. In each of these scenarios we make use of the preview tab.

Scenario	How the preview tab is used
Goto Definition	Each time the user performs a goto definition, we’ll show the definition in the preview tab unless the file containing the definition is already open in the IDE
Find results	After performing a Find in Files command, selecting any of the results in the find results tool window will show that result in the preview tab, unless it is already open in the IDE. Double clicking will continue to open the result in a regular tab, just as it has always done.
Solution Explorer	Selecting a file in the Solution Explorer will open that file in the preview tab unless it is already open in the IDE. Double clicking will continue to open the the file in a regular tab, just as it has always done.
Search and relationship pivots in Solution Explorer (call hierarchy, base/derived types, find all references)	The Solution Explorer has new functionality in it that supports extensive code navigation scenarios. In each of these scenarios, if the user clicks on a browsable node in the Solution Explorer we’ll show the file containing that node in the preview tab (unless it’s already open).

This opens up the some interesting new experiences. For example, I can use the arrow keys to arrow up and down a list of results in the find results tool window to preview each result. So I can preview the full context of the search result instead of the single line of text that the find results tool window shows me. Since I don’t have to worry about tidying up opened files after previewing the list of results, I can quickly scan through the list of results to find the result I was looking for. Once I find that result, I can just hit the ‘Enter’ key or double click the result to open it as a normal tab (or click on the Open button on the preview tab as described above).

The same is true for the Solution Explorer. Now that we have integrated many more browsing experiences into the Solution Explorer (through the search capabilities and the ability to explore different relationships such as called by, derived from etc) it’s important to enable those experiences in such a way that the user doesn’t have to pay the tax of cleaning up behind them after they have explored through their code. So if you select a file or indeed any other object contained within a file from the Solution Explorer, we’ll show that file inside the preview tab (unless it is already open). That way you can navigate ‘without remorse’. If you don’t want to preview a file (say you just want to select a file so that you can change its name or you want to drag and drop the file somewhere, you can hold down the ‘Alt’ key when single clicking the file to prevent the preview from showing up).

We think that the preview tab will open up a new way of working with files. We’ve tried to implement it such that it doesn’t get in your way so that we don’t force you to change your habits. Our goal is that over time it will play a larger and larger role in the way that you search and work with files.

We’d really love to hear your feedback so please send comments our way.

Thanks!

Steven Clarke

User Experience Researcher (Visual Studio)

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Survey

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:23:05 GMT

Have you had a chance to play around with the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview? If so, we’d like to hear your early impressions, particularly around performance, reliability, and quality. Let us know what you think by taking the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview survey.

Thanks!
Doug Turnure – Visual Studio Program Manager

Private Extension Galleries for the Enterprise

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:20:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 2010, we introduced a feature called the Extension Manager – a new dialog that connects to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery to help a customer easily select and install extensions to Visual Studio from right inside the IDE.

Since then, enterprise customers have frequently asked us to provide a way for Visual Studio to connect to a customer-managed website that contains a private collection of Visual Studio extensions. Today I’m excited to announce a new feature available in the Developer Preview version of VS that does just that, and offers you the same smooth, simple download, install, and update experience that you’ve seen when connected to the public Visual Studio Gallery.

Configuring a private gallery

In the Extension Manager panel of the Tools/Options page, you can now add a URL to the Extension Repositories list that points to the server where your private gallery lives. Visual Studio expects to find an atom feed at this endpoint that describes the extensions available on your gallery.

Using your gallery

The next time you open the Extension Manager Online panel, you’ll see your gallery listed after the two public ones (Visual Studio Gallery and Samples Gallery).

Install looks exactly like it does for the public galleries:

Creating the gallery

On a web server, or on your local or remote file system, create a root directory for your gallery, and add sub-directories for each category in your collection. (In the illustration below, there are two categories: Project X and Project W.)

Place each VSIX file in the folder that corresponds to its category. Then it’s time to create the atom feed.

For this preview version, you’ll create the feed by hand. We’ll make some tools available to automate that process soon. Here is a sample feed, with the element values you’ll need to edit highlighted:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title type="text"></title>
<id>uuid:874a62b3-c36c-4443-aeb9-498e4c6e589d;id=1</id>
<updated>2011-09-02T01:58:50Z</updated>
<entry>
    <id>MessageInspector.Acme Corp..6b64a54c-93b9-4f0c-a962-71ba1c23c1d8</id>
    <title type="text">MessageInspector</title>
    <summary type="text">Visualizes message exchanges for Project W</summary>
    <published>2011-09-01T18:51:00-07:00</published>
    <updated>2011-09-01T18:57:18-07:00</updated>
    <author>
      <name>Acme Corp.</name>
    </author>
    <category term="ProjectW Tools" />
    <content type="application/octet-stream" src="ProjectW Tools/MessageInspector.vsix" />
    <Vsix xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vsx-syndication-schema/2010">
      <Id>MessageInspector.Acme Corp..6b64a54c-93b9-4f0c-a962-71ba1c23c1d8</Id>
      <Version>1.0</Version>
      <References />
    </Vsix>
</entry>
<entry>
    <id>DataWarehousingTools.Acme Corp..496be56f-595e-4a50-b02f-5d3da630b7b6</id>
    <title type="text">DataWarehousingTools</title>
    <summary type="text">Data warehousing tools for Project X. (Internal use only.)</summary>
    <published>2011-09-01T18:51:28-07:00</published>
    <updated>2011-09-01T18:57:27-07:00</updated>
    <author>
      <name>Acme Corp.</name>
    </author>
    <category term="ProjectX Tools" />
    <content type="application/octet-stream" src="ProjectX Tools/DataWarehousingTools.vsix" />
    <Vsix xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vsx-syndication-schema/2010">
      <Id>DataWarehousingTools.Acme Corp..496be56f-595e-4a50-b02f-5d3da630b7b6</Id>
      <Version>1.0</Version>
      <References />
    </Vsix>
</entry>
</feed>

Values highlighted in yellow are taken right from the VSIX Manifest. Those highlighted in green describe how they appear in your gallery:

The term= attribute contains the category name as it will appear in Extension Manager.
The src= attribute contains the path to the VSIX file from the gallery root.

Updating

To publish an update, all you need to do is replace the old VSIX file with the new one, and put the Version value from the new VSIX manifest in the corresponding <Version> element in the feed.

<Id>DataWarehousingTools.Acme Corp..496be56f-595e-4a50-b02f-5d3da630b7b6</Id> <Version>1.1</Version>

Then when your users open Extension Manager they’ll see the new version in the Update panel.

I’ll be blogging about tools to automate the feed generation as soon as we can make them available. In the meantime, try out the feature in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and let us know what you think!

Gary Horen
Program Manager
Visual Studio Platform

Microsoft Windows Simulator Touch Emulation

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:05:00 GMT

The Windows Simulator is a tool provided in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview that enables debugging Metro style applications in scenarios requiring hardware support such as rotation and touch. For a quick introduction to the Windows Simulator, see this blog entry. This article will introduce you to Touch Emulation in the Windows Simulator.

Touch Emulation in the Simulator enables developers to test and debug how an application reacts to different touch gestures. The Simulator does all the hard work of converting mouse events into touch events received by the running application. This is especially useful for developers who are creating Metro style applications that are touch-enabled but do not have a touch monitor to test those applications.

To demonstrate Touch Emulation inside the Windows Simulator, we will use the Touch Events Sample provided by the Windows Developer Preview Metro style apps samples. After downloading and unpacking the sample, open the solution TouchEvents.sln in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, then Debug the sample targeting the Windows Simulator:

The sample will run inside the Windows Simulator and will look something like this:

This sample code recognizes touch events in the right rectangle and displays the information about those events in the left rectangle. Using the Windows Simulator Touch Controls found on the Simulator palette, we can switch between Mouse mode and Touch mode:

When in Touch mode, the Windows Simulator shows a special mouse pointer indicating that it is in Touch Emulation mode. The Simulator will convert mouse clicks into touch events, and the application receives touch events exactly as it would if they were generated by a physical touch device.

The Windows Simulator can also simulate two finger gestures, such as the Pinch/Zoom gesture and the Rotate gesture. When using the two finger gestures, the Windows Simulator will display two contact points.

In Pinch/Zoom mode, use the mouse wheel to set the two contact points closer or farther apart from each other. If you click the left mouse button and rotate the wheel simultaneously, the Windows Simulator will send touch events to the target application as if the user was performing a Pinch/Zoom gesture on a physical touch device. Similarly, in Rotate mode you can use the wheel to rotate the two contact points relative to each other.

The Windows Simulator allows emulating the following touch gestures:

Tap (single contact)
Hold (single contact)
Double Tap (single contact)
Pan/Swipe (single contact)
Flick/Inertia (single contact)
Pinch/Zoom (2 contact points)
Rotate (2 contact points)

We encourage you to use the Touch Emulation features in the Windows Simulator to develop your Windows 8 applications. These features allow you to test and debug your applications to ensure they work correctly for touch - without having a physical touch device.

To learn more about Touch input in Metro style applications, see the following articles:

Responding to Touch Input
Touch Input Quickstart

Thanks,
Mynor Ivan Muralles
Software Design Engineer, Visual Studio

First look at Windows Simulator

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:45:00 GMT

Many friends of mine have been asking me what my team is working on these days. I finally have an opportunity to share with all of you the really cool stuff we’ve been working on for the past many months.

My team built the Windows Simulator enabling users to debug Metro style apps for Windows 8 in a Windows environment.

There are three primary ways to debug a Metro style app.

Local Machine
Remote Machine
Simulator

Primary Usage Scenarios for Windows Simulator

There are certain features and traits in Metro style applications that helps them stand out compared to classic windows applications. For a better understanding of Metro style applications, I strongly recommend viewing the BUILD session by Jensen Harris on 8 traits of great Metro style apps before you start writing any Metro style applications.

The Windows Simulator is really handy when you need to verify how Metro style applications measure against these traits. I will introduce them here briefly and later we will have a detailed blog post on each of them.

Touch Emulation
Rotation
Different target screen resolutions
Contracts

Under the hood

Under the hood the Windows Simulator is a Remote Desktop Session into your local machine.

Developers need to be careful while modifying the state of the operating system in the Simulator because any changes in the Simulator will be reflected on the local machine itself. Multiple instances of Visual Studio and Expression Blend share the same instance of the Windows Simulator.

Using Simulator to debug Metro style applications in Visual Studio

To debug an Metro style application using Windows Simulator, Open the application project in Visual Studio and choose Simulator from the debugging options in the Visual Studio toolbar.

Or you can enable Simulator from the Debugging tab of Project Property Pages.

After selecting Simulator to debug the application, simply press F5 or start debugging from the tool bar to launch a Metro style application in the Windows Simulator.

Here is a screenshot of a JavaScript Grid Application running in the Simulator.

To stop debugging choose "Stop Debugging" from the Debug menu of Visual Studio.

Using the Simulator from Expression Blend

Open the project in Expression Blend and then switch to the Platform panel and choose the Simulator as the Deploy target.

Then press F5 to launch application in Windows Simulator.

Touch Emulation

This feature is very useful to test Touch responsiveness for the application on developer machines that do not have touch devices. The Simulator supports single finger touch, tap and hold, pinch and zoom, and rotation. The touch controls are available in the Simulator Palette.

To switch out of touch emulation mode and back into mouse mode, select the mouse pointer. To learn more about Touch Emulation, see this blog entry.

Rotation

Metro style applications should support Landscape and Portrait modes. Visual Studio templates are pre-configured for default behavior for landscape and portrait modes.

Without using an actual tablet device it is not easy to test the application in Portrait and Landscape mode. The Simulator is your friend here.

It is very easy to test the Landscape and Portrait modes using the rotation controls on the Simulator Palette.

Multiple screen Resolutions

Windows 8 can run on PCs of different screen sizes and Resolutions. Metro style applications should adjust to accommodate various screen sizes and resolutions. Using The Simulator it is very easy to test applications for different screen resolutions. You can use the "Change Resolution" button on the Palette to choose a resolution. The availability of resolutions in the Palette depends upon the supported resolutions of your video card.

Contracts

Almost all the contracts in Metro style applications disappear once they lose focus or hit a breakpoint in debugger. It is not possible to debug contracts on your Local Machine without the Simulator. The Simulator is running a different desktop session, so when a breakpoint is hit in the debugger it does not result in a loss of focus in the simulator session.

I hope that you will find Simulator handy in time of need :), please post comments if you have any questions or feedback.

To learn more about developing Metro style applications for Windows 8 I highly recommend following //BUILD presentations.

8 traits of great Metro style apps
Platform for Metro style apps
Tools for building Metro style apps

Thanks,
Navneet Gupta
Software Design Engineer, Visual Studio

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Quick Launch

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:16:00 GMT

In the past, finding things deep in the IDE has been a challenge. Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview introduces search abilities at almost every level of the product. Perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of Quick Launch which specifically addresses how to dig inside Visual Studio to find features you need. Let’s take a look.

Shortcut: CTRL + ` [back quote]

Versions: Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

Quick Launch: Basic Use

You can find Quick Launch in the upper right corner of the IDE:

The most basic scenario for using Quick Launch is finding an item that you have forgotten (or don’t know) the location of. Let’s say you are interested in something deep in the menu system like viewing your white space. You know what it’s called but can’t remember where it is at. Just press CTRL + ` [back quote] and enter the word white:

All searches are contains operations so the results will show anything that has the word white anywhere in it. The results are grouped into categories and you simply either select the item from the list using your keyboard, mouse or, if there is a keyboard shortcut listed, take advantage of the shortcut. In this case, you could press CTRL+R, CTRL+W to show the white space and then go on with your work.

Finally

I absolutely love this feature! My passion is around helping people be more productive in the IDE and I think Quick Launch is probably one of the biggest steps forward for discovery of VS features that I have ever seen. I’ve been using it for several weeks and am at the point now where I can’t imagine not having it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Thanks,
Zain Naboulsi
Senior Developer Evangelist (Blog)

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Find & Replace

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 09:25:00 GMT

In Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview we’ve streamlined and modernized our vast array of Find experiences. Find and Replace is now a lightweight control within documents, delivering incremental search results as you type. The Find and Replace in Files dialog has been simplified while at the same time gaining additional functionality such as Find Next and Find Previous. Both Find experiences now let you use .NET Regular Expressions to perform complex search and replace operations, even across multiple lines.

The new Find and Replace Control

The new Find control sits at the top of the document as a search box. Ctrl + F now brings up this control, instead of the dialog. The new control affords all the capabilities of the dialog. You can Find Next, Find Previous, set Search Options, Replace etc.

Performing a simple Find

With the new Find control, you can perform a search exactly as you would with the VS 2010. Just hit Ctrl+F and type the search term. What you would notice however, is that now the search is instant and incremental. As you type, you get the matches highlighted and the first match selected by default. No need to click an additional Find Next button. Hit Enter to navigate among the matches in the document.

Find Next

Find Previous

Performing an Advanced Find

As I mentioned earlier, the new Find control affords all the capabilities of the Find Dialog. This means that you can search using advanced options (Match Case, Match whole word, Use Regular Expression) just the same as in the Find dialog. For this, simply click on the drop down next to the magnifying glass, in the search box. You can also hit Alt+Down when inside the search box.

Notice that setting Search Options acts like a filter instead of starting a new search. So if you searched for “Button”, without Match case, this would highlight all matches – button as well as Button. Checking Match case would filter this result set to only matches for Button (with the uppercase “B”)

MRU (Search History)

Find control maintains a history of the previously performed searches of up to five terms. This is displayed as a MRU (Most Recently Used) list. The list can be accessed by bringing up the dropdown from within the Find search box (or hitting the Alt+Down arrow key)

Performing a Replace

You can perform a Replace operation right within the new control. Just hit Ctrl+H / click on the drop down arrow to the left of the search box. This brings up the expanded version of the Find & Replace control. The replace box is below the Find box. Type your replace term and Hit Enter, or Atl+R or the Replace Next or Replace All buttons.

Replace Next and Replace All

Changing the Scope

The Find control allows you to change the scope for Find & Replace operations. To change the scope, click on the Drop down arrow, as in the case of Replace. This brings up the expanded Find control with the scope selection dropdown.

“No Results” Alert

The Find control allows you to quickly find out when there are no results for the current search term with the current search criteria. When there are no results to show, the search box is highlighted with a red border indicating that there are currently no results to display.

Using Regular Expressions (.NET Regular Expression syntax only)

One of the major changes we have made, in response to customer feedback, with the new Find experience is moving away from the POSIX style regex syntax to .Net Regex syntax. You can do all your searches using the familiar .Net style regular expressions. The VS2010 style regular expression syntax has been discontinued. So, to search for a “Start Game”, I would type

In Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Start\s+Game

In VS 2010 (This will not work in VS 11 Developer Preview): Start:b+Game

A complete reference for .NET Regular expressions can be found here .NET Regular Expression Cheat Sheet.

Find In Files Dialog

You can still do everything that you were used to doing with VS2010 Find Dialog with the new experience. To bring up the Find In Files dialog, simply hit Ctrl+Shift+F (or Ctrl+Shift+H for replace). This brings up the familiar dialog. We have simplified this dialog to a large extent. There are just 2 tabs – Find In Files and Replace In Files.

Find In Files

Now there are only two tabs – Find In Files and Replace in Files. We have added Find Next and Find Previous. Note that you can also bring up the Find In files dialog from within the Find control, in the Search Options dropdown.

Find Symbol has been discontinued

With the new Find experience we have relooked at the Find dialog and redesigned it for simplicity. Based on the usage data we have received from our Customer Experience Improvement program, the Find Symbol features was rarely ever used by our customers. With the new Find, the support for Find Symbol has been removed from the UI. However, you can still search for symbols using the Find All References from within the Editor.

Find & Replace Cheat Sheet

You can of course use the same short-cuts and accelerator keys that you are used to with the Find dialog, with the Find control. Here is a list of shortcuts and accelerator keys you can use to work with Find & Replace in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.

Shortcuts:

Command	VS 11 Developer Preview Action	Command
Ctrl+F	New Quick Find	Edit.Find
F3	Find Next	Edit.FindNext
Shift+F3	Find Previous	Edit.FindPrevious
Ctrl+F3	Find Next Selected term	Edit.FindNextSelected
Ctrl+Shift+F3	Find Previous Selected term	Edit.FindPreviousSelected
Ctrl+I	New Quick Find / Forward incremental search	Edit.IncrementalSearch
Ctrl+Shift+I	New Quick Find / Reverse incremental search	Edit.ReverseIncrementalSearch
Ctrl+Shift+F	Find in Files	Edit.FindInFiles
Ctrl+Shift+H	Replace in Files	Edit.ReplaceinFiles
Ctrl+H	Quick Replace	Edit.Replace
Enter	Find Next	Edit.FindNext
Shift+Enter	Find Previous	Edit.FindPrevious

Accelerator Keys:

Shortcut	VS 11 Developer Preview Action
Alt+F	Find Next, Find All (buttons)
Alt+R	Replace, Find Next
Alt+A	Replace All (button)
Alt+I	Skip File (button
Alt+C	Toggle Match Case
Alt+W	Toggle Whole Word
Alt+E	Toggle Regular Expressions
Alt+N	Focus in Find What Box
Alt+P	Focus in Replace With Box

We want to hear from you!

Because Find is such a critical and integral part of the Developer experience, we need your feedback on how well the new experiences are (or are not!) working for you. We are listening to your feedback.

If you have any additional questions, feel free to leave comments below. If you’re experience problems with Find & Replace, please file a Connect Bug, and we’ll investigate

You can write to us here: VSFindFeedback2@microsoft.com

You can also send your feedback from within the Find control:

Thanks,
Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha
Program Manager - Visual Studio Code Experience

Known Issues

As you might imagine, with the new release, we have completely revamped the Find experience for our customers. With this huge change, there are some known issues and unfortunately we didn’t have time to fix by the time of this release of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. However, these issues are already fixed in internal builds and you would be able to get these when you install a subsequent release J.

Unable to Find All with the Current Document scope

In the current version, you will not be able to perform a Find All when the scope is current document. However, when you search for a term using the new Find Control, all of the matches in the current document are highlighted. This should hopefully allow you to work around this issue. And like I mentioned, this issue has been fixed for a subsequent release.

Find in Files does not clear the Find results

In the current version, when you perform a Find in Files, the results are appended to the Find Results window. The results of the previous search are not cleared. To work around this issue, you can still clear out the Find Results window manually. We understand this is inconvenient and this has been fixed, but you will have to wait for a subsequent release. J

Search Criteria is missing from the Find Results window

When you perform a Find All operation, the search results are populated in the Find results window. In the current version, the results are still populated, but a line mentioning the search criteria is missing. For subsequent releases, this issue is also fixed.

Updates: Autoruns v11, Coreinfo v3.01, ProcDump v4.01, Process Explorer v15.05, and Mark at BUILD.

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:29:00 GMT

Autoruns v11: This update to Autoruns, a GUI and command-line tool that lists executables configured to run when you boot, logon or run common applications, adds a “jump to folder” command and several additional autostart locations. The command-line version, Autorunsc, adds a new switch to show file hashes and an option to display the autostart entries for all user accounts registered on a system.

Coreinfo v3.01: This update to Coreinfo, a command-line utility that shows processor features and topology, fixes a bug in the way it reports hyper-threading and gives a warning when showing virtualization features and a hypervisor is running.

ProcDump v4.01: This release of ProcDump, a tool for capturing process memory dumps, adds a context record for 1st chance exception dumps so that registers and the call stack of the faulting thread are captured.

Process Explorer v15.05: This update fixes a bug in cycle CPU usage calculation on Windows 7.

Mark at BUILD: Introduction to Windows Azure, Inside Windows Azure: Mark’s highly-related BUILD sessions are now available for on-demand viewing. In Introduction to Windows Azure: The Cloud OS, Mark defines cloud computing, presents the different types and positions Windows Azure. Then he describes Windows Azure’s implementation of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), including how it makes it easy for developers to write highly-available, highly-scalable cloud applications. In Inside Windows Azure: The Cloud OS, Mark goes deeper than ever before to show Microsoft’s datacenter architecture and explain the steps Windows Azure follows to deploy and runs cloud applications. He concludes by revealing how the Windows Azure team develops and operates Windows Azure.

Visual Studio BUILD sessions and Tips & Tricks Cheat Sheet

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:10:00 GMT

As I settle back into my desk after an exciting week at BUILD, I wanted to send a reminder that all of the sessions should be available for streaming on http://channel9.msdn.com/events/BUILD/BUILD2011.

Since this is a Visual Studio blog, here are links to the main VS sessions at BUILD:

What’s new in Visual Studio 11 – Jason Zander
Tips & Tricks: How to Use Visual Studio to the Fullest – Weston Hutchins and Phil Price
What's new in Visual Studio 11 for Application Lifecycle Management – Cameron Skinner and Brian Keller

For the Tips & Tricks talk, Phil and I created a “cheat sheet” of the features and tips we walked through in the session that you can download below.

Thanks,
Weston Hutchins
Program Manager – VS Platform

Addressing Visual Studio performance

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:31:00 GMT

Visual Studio’s performance continues to be a hot topic for a lot of customers. We hear you and are investing to improve the performance of the product in those areas that are important to you. There are two key parts to our approach:

Collecting feedback from you to prioritize our work
Using instrumentation in Visual Studio v-next to collect data in cases where the product performs poorly

Collecting Customer Feedback
We are working to make your feedback less ad hoc and give you a single place for feedback on Visual Studio Performance by implementing a UserVoice site specifically focused on performance. Please vote on the performance issues on the UserVoice site. This feedback will be incorporated into our plans as we prioritize our work.

Instrumentation
Visual Studio PerfWatson is now a part of Visual Studio v-next. It enables us to collect data from when you experience a performance problem. This blog post describes how we are using the data to identify and fix performance problems. You can help by using PerfWatson with Visual Studio v-next. By combining your feedback with this data we a working to address those issues affecting you the most.

Thank you for your support,

Larry Sullivan
Director of Engineering

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Announced

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:38:00 GMT

Today in his keynote at BUILD, Jason Zander announced the availability of the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview, Microsoft® Visual Studio® 11 Developer Preview and Microsoft® Team Server Preview. If you are an MSDN subscriber, you can download the preview immediately via this link. For everyone else, Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server 11 will be generally available starting at 10:00 AM PDT on Friday.

What’s New in the Visual Studio 11 IDE?

A key goal with the Visual Studio 11 release was to improve the developer experience by focusing on the tasks that developers do the most frequently. In our research, we found that many users weren’t discovering features that could make them most productive. To solve this, we streamlined our UI and enhanced high usage tool windows such as the Solution Explorer so that its easier than ever to discover and use the features that make you most productive. Users also want to use search as a primary means of navigating their IDE and Solutions and so we’ve integrated search and made it more prominent in many places in the product.

One of the first changes that you’ll notice as you get started with Visual Studio 11 are the Simplified Toolbars. In the image below, you can see that we’ve eliminated the clutter and ensured that you only ever need one row of toolbars to get your job done. This was accomplished by taking a hard look at each of the commands that was on the main toolbars and focusing only on the commands that are more frequently used on the toolbars. We also know that the most frequently used commands vary by user which is why we’ve made it easy to add commands back via the down arrow on the toolbar.

Many of you may already be familiar with the Productivity Power Tools which are a set of popular extensions to Visual Studio 2010. One of the key themes in the Power Tools was to provide users with better search capabilities. Based on user feedback, we have taken the best of these features and fully-integrated them into Visual Studio 11. The improved Solution Explorer (shown below) allows you to search and browse the relationships of types and members within VB, C# and C++ projects. The new Find Control integrates the power of incremental search with a streamlined UI that ensures that your code remains front and center. Quick Launch is an integrated version of the Quick Access power tool that allows you to easily launch project templates, commands and options for a searchable UI that is always present on the main menu. We’ve also added search capabilities to the Toolbox and Add Reference Dialog.

In past releases, evaluating a CTP or Beta took a bit of work as it required upgrading your projects to the new version. With this Developer Preview, we have introduced Project Compatibility which eliminates the need to upgrade most project types so that you can seamlessly work on the same solution using Visual Studio 11 or Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

Related Blogs

Visual Studio 11 contains many more IDE enhancements than can be called out in a single blog post. Over the coming weeks, stay tuned to this blog for more articles that talk about these features in depth and introduce some new ones. I’d also like to highlight that each of the languages in Visual Studio have made significant improvements to their developer experience and the best place to learn about them is on their team blogs:

VB Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbteam/

C# Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/csharpfaq/

C++ Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/

F# Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/

We Want Your Feedback!

Your feedback is an important part of our software development cycle. We review every comment that we receive and are constantly using this feedback to improve the product. If you encounter a bug or find something that doesn’t work as you would expect, please log on to Microsoft Connect and file a bug: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio. If you have a suggestion for a great new feature addition, take a look at our User Voice site where you can vote on other user suggestions and add your own: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio.

Sean Laberee

Lead Program Manager

Visual Studio Pro Experience Team

Project Silk: Client-side Web Development for Modern Browsers

patterns & practices — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:35:00 GMT

Using a reference application and a guide, Project Silk helps developers build rich web applications using standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript5 with modern technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 9, and ASP.NET MVC3

Updates: Coreinfo v3, DebugView v4.77, SDelete v1.6, and Process Explorer v15.04

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:43:00 GMT

Coreinfo v3: Coreinfo is a command-line utility that reports detailed information about processor cores and topology, including cache sizes, core-to-socket mappings and NUMA memory latencies. It now shows the processor features supported by the system’s processors. For example, Coreinfo will show if the processor supports hardware-assisted virtualization and advanced virtualization features like Second Level Address Translation.

DebugView v4.77: This update to DebugView, a graphic debug output monitor useful for application and device driver development, adds a command-line switch to enable or disable kernel-mode capture, a switch to enable millisecond clock display, and a number of bug fixes.

SDelete v1.6: SDelete, a command-line utility for securely deleting files and zeroing volume free space, fixes a bug that prevented it from accessing some files on 64-bit Windows and swaps the zero-free-space and clean-free-space arguments to make them more intuitive.

Process Explorer v15.04: This release fixes several minor bugs, including a tooltip display bug and one that could result in a miscalculation of CPU usage on Windows 7 in the refresh immediately following the termination of a CPU-intensive process.

Integration with AppHarbor

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:30:00 GMT

[Do you tweet? Follow us on Twitter @matthawley and @codeplex]

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex website yesterday.

AppHarbor

In CodePlex, we continue to look for ways to enhance our project hosting offering by partnering with other companies and their services. AppHarbor is a platform to build, execute unit tests, and deploy ASP.NET web applications to the cloud. They provide a free single web instance with a small shared database, which is perfect for .NET OSS applications to provide instant online sample sites.

Setup Instructions

To get started using AppHarbor with an existing CodePlex project, follow the below steps, which I’ve used to setup WikiPlex’s sample site on AppHarbor:

Register for an account (or sign in to an existing account) on AppHarbor, and later confirming your account creation.
Create your first application once you’re signed in to AppHarbor.
Set up a Database, if needed. Executing any SQL scripts manually.
Retrieve your Create build URL from the main page of your application.
Edit your project details on CodePlex, paste the build URL in the textbox, and save.
Make any changes necessary to your codebase to support AppHarbor deployment and commit/push these changes. For example
- If you have multiple solution files or multiple ASP.NET websites in a solution, create an AppHarbor.sln file with only the necessary projects and single ASP.NET website you want deployed.
- If you have any code to determine if you’re running in AppHarbor or not, utilize the Environment appSettings key (Debug is local, Release is running in AppHarbor).
- If you want unit tests to run, make sure you’re using a supported unit testing framework and version.
Sit back, let it compile and deploy!

Source Control Support

You still might be wondering what Source Control types our integration with AppHarbor supports, and I’m excited to say we support both TFS and Mercurial! Additionally, we support the Subversion folder structure (trunk/branches/tags) within TFS projects to correctly extract and send the right branch information to AppHarbor. If your TFS project does not have the standard Subversion folder structure, the entire source repository is treated as the “trunk.” TFS build notifications will have a delay of up to 15 minutes.

When triggering build notifications for Mercurial, CodePlex will always send across all non-closed branches. Mercurial build notifications will be instantaneous when pushing changes to your project’s repository. AppHarbor currently supports only “trunk” or “default” branches when building, testing, and deploying.

Continuous Integration

A feature that has been in our top 10 requests queue for quite some time is project build support. While we still do not offer build support on CodePlex, we do have a few recommendations. Firstly, we have been in discussions with the AppHarbor team in regards to supporting a more formalized continuous integration (CI) solution. No details have been solidified around this yet. Alternatively, CodeBetter provides a CI server farm for OSS projects for a while now, which utilizes TeamCity. You can find more details and setup information on their CI page and join the growing list of CodePlex projects.

How we use your PerfWatson data to identify Unresponsive areas

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:37:00 GMT

At the end of April, we released a telemetry system to monitor and report the performance issues that our customers face during their everyday use of the product. To start off, I would like to thank everyone who installed Visual Studio PerfWatson! These reports have provided valuable insight into where you are encountering issues, and have helped us prioritize our performance investments for the next version of Visual Studio (“vNext”).

How are we using PerfWatson Data?

As many of you have seen, PerfWatson monitors delays on the UI thread, and submits error reports on these delays with the user’s consent. These reports include information on the duration of each delay and a mini heap dump of the root cause for the delay.

When we receive these error reports, we aggregate the data collected, extract the stacks from the mini dump, and analyze the results to identify the largest and most frequently seen delays. We also aggregate the data collected with the delays we have seen using PerfWatson internally. Periodically throughout each milestone, bugs are generated for each team in the division to track the specific subsets of frames (or methods) that are responsible for these performance issues.

Bugs are prioritized based on a combination of the total number of delays we have seen with that frame and the average length of the delay. This ensures that both very long delays and frequently encountered delays receive our attention. Because we have live data associated with each bug, we can track progress across the entire product, within specific teams, and also across internal “dogfood” builds, enabling teams to easily verify the progress they are making.

Below is an example of a bug we have fixed for vNext. The PerfWatson data shows that this bug was reported 16588 times in total for the released build of Visual Studio 2010 SP1. This data is an aggregation of all results we have collected both internally and from our customers.

Total PerfWatson hits per build. X axes are subsequent build numbers.

As the chart below shows, after fixing the bug, the number of delays seen for this issue has gone down significantly or have completely disappeared with every new build of the product created with the code fix.

Total PerfWatson hits per build. X axes are subsequent build numbers.

If you are interested in learning more about this process, or seeing some of the tools in action, check out this Channel9 video, where Cameron McColl from our product team discusses these mechanics in more detail.

So with all the data we have collected so far, what trends have we seen? Below are three areas that have stood out:

Solution Open

While we had received feedback that loading a solution can be slow, PerfWatson has given us a much clearer picture into where, specifically, delays are most likely to occur. A number of steps take place when a solution is opening, each contributing a certain amount of cost to the overall experience. However, when looking at the data, we’ve found that several tasks were more expensive than we expected. For example: reopening files that were open in the last session, or retrieving the solution settings, such as breakpoints and window layout, from SUO file (Solution User Options) can take more than a few milliseconds extending the overall cost of loading the solution.

One way we have found to help improve this experience is to reduce the overall document clutter. There are several ways that a number of files get opened besides clicking on them in Solution Explorer – Go To Definition, Debugging, Find etc. This experience has now been simplified with the introduction of a “preview tab” for opening files that are not yet needed by the user. This new IDE feature was demoed during the TechEd conference held mid-May (see Channel 9 coverage at 00:27:20 minute marker).

In addition to simplifying certain scenarios like opening files, the Visual Studio team is investigating several ways to optimize the solution open scenario for vNext. One method, for example, we are investigating is moving operations away from solution load time to when there is less competition for system resources. The PerfWatson data is helping us understand which areas would benefit from applying these improvements along with making sure there are no regressions.

Idle Loop Processing

Visual Studio has a mechanism for components to queue up non-blocking work for a time when CPU cycles are less constrained (aka, the system is “idle”). These idle operations take place on the UI thread when the message queue is empty. For information on Idle Loop Processing please refer to the MSDN documentation here.

This mechanism worked well when the product was smaller, processors were single core, and only a few operations utilized this mechanism. However, as the product has grown, this mechanism has hit its scalability limits as more tasks have started to schedule recurring computations and expensive IO operations during the “idle loop”.

PerfWatson has enabled us to quickly identify which of these scheduled tasks can become potentially expensive. The following are a few examples that we are tracking as bugs:

Refreshing the Task and Error Lists.
Initializing the Toolbox.
Updating the outlining for VC++ code windows.
Updating command bars and menus.
Saving backup copies of all open files for auto recovery.

For each task, we look at a variety of ways to improve the performance. For tasks which iterate on large data sets, we look at ways to break assumptions that the operation needs to be completed as a single operation. This allows the task to be partitioned into much finer increments, quickly yielding back to the UI thread. For example, our Auto-recover mechanism has been updated to do this. Rather than saving all changed documents at once, we instead save one at a time, yielding back to the UI thread after each save. For others, we’ve rewritten the tasks to execute asynchronously off of the UI thread, allowing us to take better advantage of multi-core hardware and remove expensive IO operations from the UI thread.

Idle issues are not easy to reproduce; however with the use of PerfWatson data collected both internally and from you, our customers, we have been able to identify and open bugs for over 30 idle specific issues.

Build

PerfWatson data indicates that one of the more frequent areas that cause the IDE to be unresponsive is solution build. For vNext, we have made significant investments to improve the overall build responsiveness by moving the build off the UI thread for VB and C# builds (C++ already does this). This feature was demoed at the TechEd conference (Channel 9 coverage at 00:45:00 minute marker).

As part of doing this work, we found that not only could we make the UI more responsive during build but, for C#, we were even able to parallelize the build, improving both build throughput and memory utilization. (VB was best optimized by moving it off the UI thread).

We hope this blog post has given you some insight into how we’re using the PerfWatson data to make improvements to the product. Thanks again to everybody who has already downloaded and installed the extension. For those of you who have not yet done so, the extension can be downloaded from here. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback!

Thanks!

Shibani Basava
Software Development Engineer in Test, VS Team

Update: Process Explorer v15.03

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:02:51 GMT

Process Explorer v15.03: This fixes a bug introduced in v15.02 that would result in a crash of Process Explorer when run with standard user rights and the System Information dialog is opened.

High school students at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment build a WP application from scratch in a week

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 07:17:00 GMT

By Alice Lee

Developing a full-fledged Windows Phone app in one week – that’s pretty ambitious, right?

Last week, at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE)’s weekly Summer Cyber Camp, a team of talented high and middle school students set out to do just that. I followed them for one week, documenting the process of creating their 3D game for Windows Phone 7 (WP7), called Color Break. Some of the students began with minimal programming experience while others had been using C# for a few years. At the end of the week, however, they were all capable of writing code, creating graphics, and incorporating more advanced concepts such as physics into the game. By Friday, they’d finished and ported the application to the phone - just five days later (check out the app in action in the video)! It just goes to show that whether you’re an absolute beginner or a seasoned expert, developing for the WP can be a simple, fun, and extremely educational process. One student, who had never even coded in C# before, began developing a first person shooter. As a college student myself, I was impressed.

So, how do you get started? Well it’s simple – check out http://create.msdn.com to access the plethora of resources, downloads, and tutorials. If you’re a student, there are also a ton of free, easy-to-use WP-related development tools available, including:
- Dreamspark (http://dreamspark.microsoft.com), to get access to Visual Studio 2010 Professional, the IDE that the students are using in this video.

- The Windows Phone Student Developer page (http://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/techstudent/handson/phone-development.aspx) for resources as well as a student developer account to get started.

Updates: ProcDump v4.0, Process Monitor v2.96, Process Explorer v15.02, Mark’s Blog: The Case of the Hung Game Launcher, and Zero Day Malware Cleaning with the Sysinternals Tools

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:16:00 GMT

ProcDump v4.0: This update for ProcDump, a trigger-based process dump capture utility, enables you to control the contents of the dump with your own minidump callback DLL and adds a new switch, -w, that has ProcDump wait for a specified process to start.

Process Monitor v2.96: This release changes the appearance of its tooltips to the default theme, fixes a drawing bug in the treeview, and updates the graphs to match the style introduced in Process Explorer v15.

Process Explorer v15.02: Process Explorer v15.02 includes minor updates to the drawing routines.

Mark’s Blog: The Case of the Hung Game Launcher: Read Mark’s latest blog post where he uses the Sysinternals utilities to solve a problem he ran into one Sunday morning when trying to play a computer game.

Zero Day Malware Cleaning with the Sysinternals Tools (link to PDF): Mark has posted the slides from the highly-attended and well received Blackhat 2011 Workshop he delivered last week, Zero Day Malware Cleaning with the Sysinternals Tools, which demonstrates how to use the Sysinternals tools to hunt down and eliminate malware.

Updates: Process Explorer v15.01 and TCPView v3.05

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:51:00 GMT

Process Explorer v15.01: This update adds the ability to select a custom graph background color, adds paged and nonpaged pool quota columns to the process view, fixes incorrect information on the disk and network process properties dialog on 32-bit Windows, and fixes a GPU tray icon bug.

TCPView v3.05: This update fixes a bug when sorting by the state column.

Preliminary backlog for the Windows Azure Integration Pack published

patterns & practices — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:10:00 GMT

The preliminary backlog for the Windows Azure Integration Pack for Microsoft Enterprise Library is published. Voting is now open. Feel free to comment on stories or suggest new ones, and be heard!

We’ve moved developer posts to the Inside Windows Live blog

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:59:56 GMT

I haven’t blogged here in a while, but that’s because I’ve started posting over on Inside Windows Live instead. You may have seen a couple of my blog posts there, explaining what OAuth 2.0 means for developers who want to connect their apps, services, and devices to Windows Live, and how just a few lines of JavaScript can connect your site to Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive.

Because the Inside Windows Live blog already has a ton of interesting content about the engineering, architecture, and the technical challenges that go into building and updating Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive, it just made more sense for me to blog there too. That way, developers who are interested in Windows Live can just follow one blog.

You may want to subscribe to the Inside Windows Live RSS feed so you don’t miss any more posts!

Dare Obasanjo
Lead Program Manager, Messenger Connect Platform

Updates: release of The Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference, Process Explorer v15, Listdlls v3.1, new utility Findlinks v1, and Mark to Speak at Black Hat US 2011

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:23:00 GMT

The Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference: We are excited and proud to announce the release of the official Sysinternals book, The Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference, from Microsoft Press. Written by Sysinternals founder and tool author Mark Russinovich, and Windows expert Aaron Margosis, the book is over 450 pages and covers all 70+ tools in detail, with full chapters on the major tools like Process Explorer and Autoruns. In addition to tips and tricks in the tool chapters, it includes 17 "Case of the Unexplained…" examples of the tools used by users to solve real-world problems. Buy the book today and take your Windows troubleshooting and systems management skills to the next level.

Process Explorer v15: Process Explorer v15 celebrates the release of the Sysinternals Administrator Reference and the upcoming 15th anniversary of Sysinternals. This major update to Process Explorer, a powerful tool for inspecting and controlling processes, threads, loaded DLLs, and more, adds GPU utilization and memory monitoring on Vista and higher. It also adds the ability to restart services, has a smaller memory footprint, and has visually cleaner performance graphs.

Listdlls v3.1: Listdlls, a command-line utility for listing and searching for loaded DLLs, now dumps full file version information, including digital signatures. It also adds a new option designed to aid in malware hunting that filters output to include only unsigned DLLs.

Findlinks v1: This new command-line utility lists the hard links associated with a specified file.

Mark to Speak at Black Hat US 2011: Learn how to hunt down malware with the Sysinternals tools in Mark's two-hour Black Hat workshop, Zero Day Malware Cleaning with the Sysinternals Tools, on August 4 in Las Vegas. Whether you're new to the tools or an experienced Sysinternals troubleshooter, you'll take away new tips and techniques to add to your malware hunting toolkit.

Survey Results: Open Source Developer Preferences (June 2011)

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:56:36 GMT

We recently conducted a survey of open source developers to learn about their current preferences on hosting sites and source control systems. We have run this survey twice before so we now have some trending information on the direction that preferences are moving.

The survey was advertised via Twitter, initially posted to http://twitter.com/msdn, but was also re-tweeted by over 100 people. We chose the MSDN twitter account versus the CodePlex one to try and prevent bias towards a specific open source project hosting site.

We had over 1,000 responses to the latest survey, so a good sample size although the statistical degree of certainty is unknown based on the Twitter audience. One of the survey questions was what your preferred operating system for development is so that we can report the results by operating system preference.

Table 1 – Preferences by what is preferred operating system for development

As you can see from the results, the preferences of open source developers are very different between developers preferring Windows, Linux, or Mac, and those preferences are also following different trends.

For Windows users, CodePlex and GitHub are virtually tied with CodePlex having a slight edge to take back rank #1 from GitHub after temporarily falling to #2 in the last survey. GitHub actually saw a decline in preference reversing its trend of skyrocketing popularity, with only CodePlex and Bitbucket showing an increase in the latest results. Source control preferences show a similar result, with TFS showing the biggest increase and Git showing the biggest decline. Distributed version control systems again represent the preference for over 50% of open source developers using Windows.

For Linux and Mac users, GitHub continues to extend its dominant lead in popularity, primarily at the expense of Bitbucket. Git is winning the distributed version control system war among Linux and Mac users, with Mercurial preference dropping sharply. Subversion usage showed a slight resurgence, but distributed version control still dominates being the preference for over 80% of developers using Linux and Mac.

Overall the preferences of open source developers using Windows seem to be getting more divergent from the ones using the Linux and Mac operating systems. Git and GitHub are becoming the de facto standard for Linux and Mac developers, while CodePlex as well as TFS, Mercurial, and Subversion are sharing a large and collectively increasing preference among Windows developers. Generally distributed version control usage is high across all open source developers and seems to be continuing to increase.

New Games Developer Education on App Hub

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:05:00 GMT

Today, two brand-new educational items are available on App Hub for XNA Game Studio game developers, as well as a set of Visual Basic updates to our popular Windows Phone Mango educational items. Check out the Game Development educational page on App Hub to download these and other great educational items. Here’s what you’ll find there:

Compiled Content Format (XNB)

This article documents the format of the compiled data files (.xnb) produced by the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Content Pipeline build process, and includes a sample parser written in C++ to illustrate how to work with the format.

Windows Phone Localization for Games

This article provides a step-by-step guide and recommended practices to ensure a Windows Phone game project made in XNA Game Studio is localizable, using the Catapult Wars Lab as an example.

Visual Basic Updates to Mango Samples and Articles

Several of the popular Windows Phone Mango samples and articles have been updated to include Visual Basic support. Get in and try out the new VB versions today:

Game State Management

Paddle Battle

Migration Guide: Moving to Silverlight/XNA

Silverlight XNA Components

All of these items are also available on the Game Development education page.

SQL Azure Blog is moving to the Official Windows Azure Platform Team Blog

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

In an effort to make it easier for you to stay on top of the latest product releases, resources, tools and news around the Windows Azure platform, today, we’re excited to announce that the SQL Azure blog is moving into what will now be called the ‘Windows Azure Platform Team Blog’. From now on, you can find all SQL Azure blog posts at www.WindowsAzureBlog.com.

This one-stop-shop blog is where you’ll be able to find the latest information about the Windows Azure platform and all its components, including SQL Azure. This blog will continue to cover the wide range of topics we have always addressed, from product announcements, to technical “how-to” posts, and conversations with our customers. If you’re primarily interested in just the posts about SQL Azure, you can subscribe to a dedicated RSS feed for that. Alternatively, you have the option of getting all the Windows Azure platform posts in one integrated RSS feed.

To continue to provide a single view of the Windows Azure platform, expect to see a similar evolution across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube over the coming weeks. We’ll be sure to notify you when those properties are integrated. In the meantime, we hope these changes will make your life a little easier by making the Windows Azure Platform blog your single destination for all the latest news and information about SQL Azure and the rest of Windows Azure Platform.

-- Steve

MSDN Wiki Article: Q&A on Open Data Protocol (Odata)

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

MSDN has created a Q&A article on Odata (Open Data Protocol). OData applies web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. As web development continues to move forward, learning about new languages, like OData, will become more invaluable. Making an OData feed from a SQL Azure or SQL Server database is incredibly easy, usually requiring just a few lines of code.

Let me know your thoughts after reading the article.

Click here to open the article: Open Data Protocol Q&A.

-Steve

Considerations When Building Database Schema with Federations in SQL Azure

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:45:00 GMT

Cihan Biyikoglu has written an interesting article on database schema when working with Federations.

“With federations, you take parts of your schema and scale it out. With each federation in the root database, a subset of objects are scaled-out. You may create multiple federations because distribution characteristics and scalability requirements may vary across sets of tables. For example, with an ecommerce app, you may both have a large customer-orders set of tables and a very large product catalog that may have completely different distribution requirements.”

To learn more, click here for the article from Cihan Biyikoglu’s blog, “Considerations When Building Database Schema with Federations in SQL Azure.

-Steve

StackOverflow Careers now includes user activity from CodePlex

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:54:00 GMT

Stack Overflow Careers is an innovative new job site for programmers. One thing they have recognized is that participation in open source projects is a great way for potential employers to learn more about a job candidate, and also give developers a new way of differentiating themselves with employers. So they have now announced the ability to automatically incorporate your work on CodePlex projects into your StackOverflow Careers 2.0 profile.

We provide a secure way for StackOverflow to confirm that you are indeed a member of your CodePlex projects, and then display those projects on your profile.

Additionally, since StackOverflow Careers is invitation only, they have provided a mechanism where you can prequalify to join if you are an active developer on CodePlex.

You can check to see if you prequalify here.

Troubleshooting and Optimizing Queries with SQL Azure

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Dinakar Nethi has written an interesting TechNet Article about how the Dynamic Management Views that are available in SQL Azure and how they can be used for troubleshooting purposes. Take a look and get a feel for how easy it is to use SQL Azure.

Click here for the TechNet article, “Troubleshooting and Optimizing Queries with SQL Azure.

-Steve

Video How To: Synchronize and Share Data

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

This walkthrough shows how to use SQL Azure Data Sync to provide bi-directional synchronization and data-management capabilities with on-premises and cloud databases. The video covers both the benefits and features of SQL Azure and explains how businesses can use SQL Azure Data Sync to share information efficiently.

The demonstration portion of the video covers how to establish synchronization between an on-premises SQL Server database and SQL Azure, as well as between two SQL Azure databases. It also shows the sync results in real time within a web application. The conclusion offers additional resource information to help users get started with SQL Azure and SQL Azure Data Sync.

View this video as a WMV

We have several other walkthroughs you can watch and download code for. Visit http://sqlazure.codeplex.com .

Thanks!

-Steve

Dream.Build.Play 2011: Only Days Left to Submit!

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:06:00 GMT

This is a friendly reminder that the submission deadline for the Dream.Build.Play 2011 Challenge is rapidly approaching. The submission period closes next Tuesday, June 14, at 1:59 p.m. CDT.

Developers tend to submit their games at the last minute, so avoid potential delays or timeouts while you upload your game by planning ahead and completing your submission at your earliest convenience.

Good luck! We look forward to seeing the awesome games you've been working on.

Visit Dream.Build.Play 2011.

FAQ about Features of SQL Azure

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:00:00 GMT

We’ve been receiving questions about top on-going trends with regards to SQL Azure surrounding SQL Server limitations, and the access capabilities of co-administrators. Fortunately, the answers to both of these questions have been addressed in a MSDN article about SQL Server limitations, and a MSDN blog post focusing on co-administrators scenarios.

Take a few moments to give the above articles a quick read – they answer some of the more common questions surrounding SQL Azure.

-Steve

Integrating SQL Azure with SharePoint 2010 and Windows Azure

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Steve Peschka wrote a great TechNet article a little while back about how to integrate SQL Azure services with Sharepoint 2010. He shares a few SQL Azure tips and tricks to get you more incorporated more quickly into new development projects. He provides detailed steps and instructions to how to integrate the two services, plus some additional reference links which makes this an involving read.

Click here to view the TechNet article

-Steve

Video How-To: Creating Line of Business Applications using SQL Azure

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

This walkthrough explains how to easily create Line of Business (LOB) applications for the cloud by using Visual Studio LightSwitch and SQL Azure. The video highlights the benefits of Visual Studio LightSwitch and explains how you can quickly create powerful and interactive Silverlight applications with little or no code.

The demo portion of the video shows how to build an expense application and deploy it using the Windows Azure portal. The conclusion points you to additional resources to help you get started creating your own applications.

Please take a look and if you have any questions, leave a comment. We have other several great how-to videos and code samples available on the SQL Azure CodePlex site at: http://sqlazure.codeplex.com.

View this video as a WMV

-Steve

Video How-To: Extending SQL Azure Data to Android and Other Platforms

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

This video demonstrates how easy it is to extend, share, and integrate SQL Azure data with mobile and heterogeneous applications using other programming platforms via an OData service.

The video shows how easy it is to expose data by creating an OData service and how a variety of different client applications, including an Android phone, can easily and efficiently interact with a SQL Azure database. The video concludes by referring users to additional resources that offer further support.

Take a look at the source code on Codeplex.

Check it out, and if you have any questions, please leave a comment. Thanks!

View this video as a WMV

-Steve

Video How-To: Extending SQL Azure to Microsoft Applications

Mon, 30 May 2011 08:00:00 GMT

This walkthrough demonstrates how easy it is to extend, share, and integrate SQL Azure data with Microsoft applications via an OData service. The video starts by reviewing the benefits of using SQL Azure, then goes on to show you how to enable cloud application to expose the data via an OData service.

By utilizing OData, SQL Azure data is made available to a variety of new user scenarios and client applications such as Windows Phone, Excel, and Javascript. We also include a lot of additional resources that offer further support.

Watch the video, and follow along by downloading the source code, all available on our page on Codeplex.

Take a look and if you have any questions leave a comment. Thanks!

View this video as a WMV

-Steve

Introducing OData: Data Access for the Web, Cloud, Devices, and More

Fri, 27 May 2011 13:00:00 GMT

David Chappell recently completed a whitepaper on OData that I encourage you to take a look at. You can view it here, or download a PDF version. David does an outstanding job providing an overview of OData, the problems it solves, practical usage scenarios, and a look at the protocol itself. If you’re quitting work for the day, stop here and read David’s whitepaper. If you have a few more minutes to spare, then continue reading. :)

Many of our partners have started using OData in their commercial releases. Two notable recent ones are SAP, who are making it an integral part of their Netweaver offering to extend SAP data to devices and social applications. You can read more about it here.

EastBanc is also utilizing OData and SQL Azure to share real-time data from Washington metro area transit systems to share up to date schedules for trains and buses. A case study on that is here.

If you’re not already familiar with the Open Data Protocol (OData), it’s a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

At this point you may be asking – why talk about OData on the SQL Azure blog? Because OData is an open protocol and what I like to call “the language of data on the web”. Let’s take an example of a web service that does a lookup of an employee. The tricky thing here is that this turns into multiple service calls, or methods with multiple input parameters to get results with different input and output criteria, like:

GetEmployeeByLastName
GetEmployeeByID
GetEmployeeStartingWith

…and so on, making a simple lookup pretty complicated with multiple options based on different search criteria, and if multiple results are returned – having to factor in paging or selecting the top 50 results if there happen to be thousands. OData reduces this complexity by being able to accomplish all these queries and also allow updates to data in one service method. If you visit the OData SDK page, there are libraries for utilizing OData in PHP, Java & Android, Ruby, Windows Phone 7, iOS, Silverlight, and .NET (of course!). There’s also a library to interact with OData via JavaScript and jQuery, called DataJS.

One Service Powering Multiple Experiences

In addition to powering mobile experiences, the openness of the OData protocol can power multiple user experiences. In the videos below we show how to utilize OData to access SQL Azure cloud data on both Android and Windows Phone 7 devices. OData is also natively supported in PowerPivot, making complex BI attainable today with SQL Azure cloud databases – again using the same OData service that can power an Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and web experience.

Things get even more interesting for BI when you consider Windows Azure DataMarket, our one-stop shop for accessing public domain and commercial data-sets – all consistently accessible via OData. Joining that data with your application’s data can create some interesting new insights. Is there a relationship between retail sales and weather? Hmm…DataMarket has weather data available from WeatherBug.

View this video as a WMV

Sharing Data with Android and SQL Azure via OData

View this video as a WMV

Sharing Data with Windows Phone and SQL Azure via OData

Is it Hard?

No. And more partners are using it, like SAP and EastBanc I mentioned at the top. As I mentioned earlier there are libraries for most platforms. Here are some links to get started with SQL Azure:

SQL Azure Labs has an OData service you can get started with today that will create an OData endpoint for your SQL Azure database.
For .NET developers, you can also create your own in about 5 lines of code utilizing WCF Data Services that you can deploy locally, or in a web role in Windows Azure. These libraries are already included in the .NET Framework.

Hope this has whetted your appetite just a bit to get started. For all of you in the U.S., have a great Memorial Day weekend!

-Steve

Feedback Opportunity: Command Complexity in Visual Studio

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:34:00 GMT

By Sam Zaiss

Update: We're happy to set anyone up with the new reduced toolbar set, whether you are in the US or not. Unfortunately the rule about the Microsoft gratuity is strict, but if you're willing, we'd still love to get your feedback. Please send mail to VSToolbarFeedback@microsoft.com if you're interested.

Update 2: Thanks everyone for your interest! The formal survey is now full, and the gratuities have all been claimed. However, we're still happy to share the reduced toolbars with any interested customer. Please contact VSToolbarFeedback@microsoft.com if you're interested in checking it out; we can still accept your feedback via email!!

One thing that we hear about is how daunting Visual Studio can be for newcomers, and customers have told us that the abundance of commands in VS definitely plays a role in that perception. As we work on the next release of Visual Studio, my core focus has been to find ways we can get our command complexity under control without taking away any of the functionality that our customers depend on.

Improving the state of the VS toolbars is one area that we’re taking on for vNext. Today, it’s entirely possible to end up with 2-3 completely full rows of toolbars:

Not only does this take away space from your code, but toolbars that show/hide for specific files can also cause your document tabs to vertically shift when switching from one file to another. We know we can do better! Keeping the toolbars confined to a single row is a goal for our next release.

We have a good start on this work, but now we need your feedback! If you’re currently using Visual Studio 2010 (with or without SP1) for 20+ hours a week, we’d like to set you up with a single row of toolbars, and get your feedback on the reduction choices we’ve made. Here’s what would be involved:

We’d send you a settings file that, when imported, will reduce your toolbars down to one row. It won’t remove any functionality from VS, nor will it do anything besides rearrange your toolbars. The change can be easily undone at any time.
Work as you normally would for a week. If you run into any issues with the reduced toolbars, make a note of them.
At the end of the week, fill out a survey to let us know what you think. As a thank you, the first 150 people to participate will receive a Microsoft Gratuity*, which entitles you to one free piece of Microsoft software or XBox 360 game!

* Due to regulations around Microsoft Gratuities, we can unfortunately only accept participants who have a US Social Security Number or Tax ID number. [Update] However, we are more than happy to set any interested customer up with the settings file and accept their feedback. Please feel free to send mail and we'll get you set up!

If you’re interested in participating, please send mail to VSToolbarFeedback@microsoft.com and we’ll get you set up!

Thanks!
Sam Zaiss
UX Researcher, Visual Studio IDE Platform & Editor

SQL Azure Federations: Product Evaluation Program Now Open for Nominations!

Thu, 26 May 2011 16:00:00 GMT

Cihan Biyikoglu, Senior Program Manager of SQL Azure, has posted information on the Microsoft SQL Azure Federations Product Evaluation Program. Nominations for the Microsoft SQL Azure Federations Product Evaluation Program are now open.

To learn more and discover how you can get involved, I encourage you to visit his blog entry here.

If you’re getting up to speed on the concept of federations, you can find an overview of the technology here.