Latest Microsoft Blogs

For the past five years, Microsoft has been working with a diverse group of companies to develop the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. The group of 20+ companies consisted of tech vendors, including Red Hat and VMware, and enterprises like JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse. The goal has been to build an open, wire-level protocol standard for messaging that enables easy interoperability between different vendor products. Back in October 2012, the OASIS standards organization announced the approval of AMQP 1.0 as an OASIS Standard and, on the same day, we released a preview implementation of it with Windows Azure Service Bus. Today, I’m pleased to announce that AMQP 1.0 support in Windows Azure Service Bus has been released as...

I’m excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3.  WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010 , and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js.   Today’s release includes a ton of great new features.  You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video: Some of the highlights of today’s release include deep Windows Azure integration, source control tooling for Git and TFS, and a new remote editing experience.  Windows Azure Integration With WebMatrix 3, we are making it really easy to move to the cloud.  The first time you launch WebMatrix 3, there’s an option to sign into Windows Azure.  You...

This morning we released the v2.0 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK with some really great new features and enhancements.  These new capabilities include: Web Sites : Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Visual Studio Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data Storage : Storage Client 2.0 is now included in new projects & Visual Studio Server Explorer now supports working with Storage Tables Service Bus : Updated client library with message pump programming model support, support for browsing messages, and auto-deleting idle messaging entities...

We’ve seen a huge adoption of ASP.NET Web API since its initial release.  In February we shipped the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update – which added a number of additional enhancements to both Web API and the other components of ASP.NET.  The ASP.NET Team has been hard at work on developing the next set of features (lots of cool stuff coming).  One of the great things about this work has been how the team has used the open source development process – which we announced we were adopting last spring - to collaborate even more closely with the community to both validate the features early, as well as enable developers in the community to directly contribute to the development of them. Below are some updates on two of the great...

I really like jQuery’s pattern of attribute getters and setters. They are fluent and work really well with HTML and XML DOMs. If you specify a value in addition to the name, it’s setting, otherwise it’s getting. In C#, we have an OK API for XML, XElement, but it’s not as easy to use as jQuery’s attr methods. It is also missing the flexibility of Javascript with regards to parameter types. To recreate the simplicity of attr in C#, I built a set of extension methods for the most common simple types: var el = new XElement("node"); el.Attr("foo", "bar") .Attr("baz", 42) .Attr("really", true); var answer = el.Attr("baz"); The element built by this code looks like this: <node foo="bar"...

Today we released some great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Active Directory : General Availability release of Windows Azure AD – it is now ready for production use! Backup Service : New Service that enables secure offsite backups of Windows Servers in the cloud Web Sites : Monitoring and Diagnostic Enhancements All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services are still in preview). Below are more details on them: Active Directory: Announcing the General Availability release I’m excited to announce the General Availability (GA) release of Windows Azure Active Directory!  This means it is ready for production use. All Windows Azure customers can now easily create...

Today we released a number of great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Mobile Services : HTML5/JS (CORS) Client + PhoneGap + Windows Phone 7.5 + .NET Portable Library support Web Sites : Mercurial Source Control + DropBox Deployment support HDInsight : New service that enables you to easily deploy and manage Hadoop Clusters on Azure All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services are still in preview). Below are more details on them: Mobile Services: HTML5/JS Client (CORS), PhoneGap, Windows Phone 7.5 Today we are adding support to enable pure HTML5/JS clients (and PhoneGap apps) as well as Windows Phone 7.5 clients to use Windows Azure Mobile Services as a backend. ...

This past weekend we released a number of enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Mobile Services: Android support, East Asia Region Support, iOS dev content SQL Reporting Services: Support in the management portal Active Directory: Support in the azure management portal, user and domain management Availability Monitoring for Cloud Services. Virtual Machines, Web Sites, and Mobile Services Service Bus: New configuration tab and metrics Storage: Ability to download blobs directly in management portal Media Services: New monitoring metrics and quickstart experience Cloud Services: Support for .cer certificate files upload Localization support for five new languages Windows Azure Store Support in 22 Additional Countries All...

I’m excited to announce the final release of the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update .  This update is a free download for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, and adds some great additional features to both ASP.NET and Visual Studio. Today’s update makes no changes to the existing ASP.NET runtime, and so it is fully compatible with your existing projects and development environment. Whether you use Web Forms, MVC, Web API, or any other ASP.NET technology, there is something in this update for you.  Click here to download and install it today! This ASP.NET and Web Tools update will also be included with the upcoming Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (aka VS2012.2). Visual Studio Web Tooling Enhancements With today’s release, all of the ASP.NET...

Today we released a number of great enhancements to Windows Azure.  I blogged earlier today about the general availability (GA) release of Windows Azure Media Services .  Windows Azure Media Services provides everything you need to quickly build great, extremely scalable, end-to-end media solutions for streaming on-demand video to consumers on any device. We also today released a preview of a really cool new Windows Azure capability – Notification Hubs.  Notification Hubs provide an extremely scalable, cross-platform, push notification infrastructure that enables you to efficiently route push notification messages to millions of mobile users and devices.  Broadcast Push Notifications with Notification Hubs Push notifications...