Contents tagged with .NET
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I’m speaking at a Free AzureCraft event in London on June 3rd
I’ll be in the UK next week presenting at the free AzureCraft event being held on June 3rd and 4th. This event was created by the UK Azure User Group and is a great way to learn about Azure as well as engage with the Azure community in the UK.
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Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft
As the role of mobile devices in people's lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.
As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.
In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.
Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies - and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.
Microsoft has had a longstanding partnership with Xamarin, and have jointly built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and our Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms. We have also worked closely together to offer the training, tools, services and workflows developers need to succeed.
With today’s acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and enable seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure delivers a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything a developer needs to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device. We are really excited to see what you build with it.
We are looking forward to providing more information about our plans in the near future – starting at the Microsoft //Build conference coming up in a few weeks, followed by Xamarin Evolve in late April. Be sure to watch my Build keynote and get a front row seat at Evolve to learn more!
Thanks,
Scott
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Online AzureCon Conference this Tuesday
This Tuesday, Sept 29th, we are hosting our online AzureCon event – which is a free online event with 60 technical sessions on Azure presented by both the Azure engineering team as well as MVPs and customers who use Azure today and will share their best practices.
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Announcing Windows Server 2016 Containers Preview
At DockerCon this year, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, demonstrated the first ever application built using code running in both a Windows Server Container and a Linux container connected together. This demo helped demonstrate Microsoft's vision that in partnership with Docker, we can help bring the Windows and Linux ecosystems together by enabling developers to build container-based distributed applications using the tools and platforms of their choice.
Today we are excited to release the first preview of Windows Server Containers as part of our Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 release. We’re also announcing great updates from our close collaboration with Docker, including enabling support for the Windows platform in the Docker Engine and a preview of the Docker Engine for Windows. Our Visual Studio Tools for Docker, which we previewed earlier this year, have also been updated to support Windows Server Containers, providing you a seamless end-to-end experience straight from Visual Studio to develop and deploy code to both Windows Server and Linux containers. Last but not least, we’ve made it easy to get started with Windows Server Containers in Azure via a dedicated virtual machine image.
Windows Server Containers
Windows Server Containers create a highly agile Windows Server environment, enabling you to accelerate the DevOps process to efficiently build and deploy modern applications. With today’s preview release, millions of Windows developers will be able to experience the benefits of containers for the first time using the languages of their choice – whether .NET, ASP.NET, PowerShell or Python, Ruby on Rails, Java and many others.
Today’s announcement delivers on the promise we made in partnership with Docker, the fast-growing open platform for distributed applications, to offer container and DevOps benefits to Linux and Windows Server users alike. Windows Server Containers are now part of the Docker open source project, and Microsoft is a founding member of the Open Container Initiative. Windows Server Containers can be deployed and managed either using the Docker client or PowerShell.
Getting Started using Visual Studio
The preview of our Visual Studio Tools for Docker, which enables developers to build and publish ASP.NET 5 Web Apps or console applications directly to a Docker container, has been updated to include support for today’s preview of Windows Server Containers. The extension automates creating and configuring your container host in Azure, building a container image which includes your application, and publishing it directly to your container host. You can download and install this extension, and read more about it, at the Visual Studio Gallery here: http://aka.ms/vslovesdocker.
Once installed, developers can right-click on their projects within Visual Studio and select “Publish”:
Doing so will display a Publish dialog which will now include the ability to deploy to a Docker Container (on either a Windows Server or Linux machine):
You can choose to deploy to any existing Docker host you already have running:
Or use the dialog to create a new Virtual Machine running either Window Server or Linux with containers enabled. The below screen-shot shows how easy it is to create a new VM hosted on Azure that runs today’s Windows Server 2016 TP3 preview that supports Containers – you can do all of this (and deploy your apps to it) easily without ever having to leave the Visual Studio IDE:
Getting Started Using Azure
In June of last year, at the first DockerCon, we enabled a streamlined Azure experience for creating and managing Docker hosts in the cloud. Up until now these hosts have only run on Linux. With the new preview of Windows Server 2016 supporting Windows Server Containers, we have enabled a parallel experience for Windows users.
Directly from the Azure Marketplace, users can now deploy a Windows Server 2016 virtual machine pre-configured with the container feature enabled and Docker Engine installed. Our quick start guide has all of the details including screen shots and a walkthrough video so take a look here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/azure_setup.
Once your container host is up and running, the quick start guide includes step by step guides for creating and managing containers using both Docker and PowerShell.
Getting Started Locally Using Hyper-V
Creating a virtual machine on your local machine using Hyper-V to act as your container host is now really easy. We’ve published some PowerShell scripts to GitHub that automate nearly the whole process so that you can get started experimenting with Windows Server Containers as quickly as possible. The quick start guide has all of the details at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/container_setup.
Once your container host is up and running the quick start guide includes step by step guides for creating and managing containers using both Docker and PowerShell.
Additional Information and Resources
A great list of resources including links to past presentations on containers, blogs and samples can be found in the community section of our documentation. We have also setup a dedicated Windows containers forum where you can provide feedback, ask questions and report bugs. If you want to learn more about the technology behind containers I would highly recommend reading Mark Russinovich’s blog on “Containers: Docker, Windows and Trends” that was published earlier this week.
Summary
At the //Build conference earlier this year we talked about our plan to make containers a fundamental part of our application platform, and today’s releases are a set of significant steps in making this a reality.’ The decision we made to embrace Docker and the Docker ecosystem to enable this in both Azure and Windows Server has generated a lot of positive feedback and we are just getting started.
While there is still more work to be done, now users in the Window Server ecosystem can begin experiencing the world of containers. I highly recommend you download the Visual Studio Tools for Docker, create a Windows Container host in Azure or locally, and try out our PowerShell and Docker support. Most importantly, we look forward to hearing feedback on your experience.
Hope this helps,
Scott
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Released Today: Visual Studio 2015, ASP.NET 4.6, ASP.NET 5 & EF 7 Previews
Today is a big day with major release announcements for Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013 Update 5, and .NET Framework 4.6. All these releases have been covered in great detail on Soma’s Blog, Visual Studio Blog, and .NET Blog.
Join us online for the Visual Studio 2015 Release Event, where you can see Soma, Brian Harry, Scott Hanselman, and many other demo new Visual Studio 2015 features and technologies. This year, in a new segment called “In The Code”, we share how a team of Microsoft engineers created a real app in 3 days. There will be opportunities along the way to interact in live Q&A with the team on subjects such as Agile development, web and cloud development, cross-platform mobile dev and much more.
In this post I’d like to specifically talk about some of the ground we have covered in ASP.NET and Entity Framework. In this release of Visual Studio, we are releasing ASP.NET 4.6, updating our Visual Studio Web Development Tools, and updating the latest beta release of our new ASP.NET 5 framework. Below are details on just a few of the great updates available today:
ASP.NET Tooling Improvements
Today’s VS 2015 release delivers some great updates for web development. Here are just a few of the updates we are shipping in this release:
JSON Editor
JSON has become a first class experience in Visual Studio 2015 and we are now giving you a great editor to allow you to maintain your JSON content. With support for JSON Schema validation, intellisense, and support for SchemaStore.org writing and producing JSON content has never been as easy. We’ve also added intellisense support for bower.json and package.json files for bower and npm package manager use.
HTML Editor Updates
Our HTML editor received a lot of attention in this update. We wanted to deliver an editor that kept up with HTML 5 standards and provided rich support for popular new frameworks and libraries. We previously shipped the bootstrap responsive web framework with our ASP.NET templates, and we are now providing intellisense for their classes with an indicator icon to show that they are bootstrap CSS classes.
This helps you keep clear the classes that you wrote in your project, like the page-inner class above, and the bootstrap classes marked with the B icon.
We are also keeping up with support for the emerging web components standard with the import link for the web components that markup imports.
We are also providing intellisense for AngularJS directives and attributes with an appropriate Angular icon so you know you’re triggering AngularJS functionality
JavaScript Editor Improvements
With the VS 2015 release we are introducing support for AngularJS structures including controllers, services, factories, directives and animations. There is also support for the new EcmaScript 6 features such as classes, arrow functions, and template strings. We are also bringing a navigation bar to the editor to help you navigate between the major elements of your JavaScript. With JSDoc support to deliver intellisense, JavaScript development gets easier.
ReactJS Editor Support
We spent some time with the folks at Facebook to make sure that we delivered first class capabilities for developers using their ReactJS framework. With appropriate syntax highlighting and intellisense for React methods, developers should be very comfortable building React applications with the new Visual Studio:
Support for JavaScript package managers like Grunt and Gulp and Task Runners
JavaScript and modern web development techniques are the new recommended way to build client-side code for your web application. We support these tools and programming techniques with our new Task Runner Explorer that executes grunt and gulp task runners. You can open this tool window with the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace hotkey combination.
Execute any of the tasks defined in your gruntfile.js or gulpfile.js by right-clicking on the task name in the left panel and choosing “Run” from the context menu that appears. You can even use this context menu to attach grunt or gulp tasks to project build events in Visual Studio like “After Build” as shown in the figure above. Every time the .NET objects in your web project are completed compiling, the ‘build’ task will be executed from the gruntfile.js
Combined with the intellisense support for JavaScript and JSON editors, we think that developers wanting to use grunt and gulp tasks will really enjoy this new Visual Studio experience. You can add grunt and gulp tasks with the newly integrated npm package manager capabilities. When you create a package.json file in your web project, we will install and upgrade local copies of all packages referenced. Not only do we deliver syntax highlighting and intellisense for package.json terms, we also provide package name and version lookup against the npmjs.org gallery.
The bower package manager is also supported with great intellisense, syntax highlighting and the same package name and version support in the bower.json file that we provide for package.json.
These improvements in managing and writing JavaScript configuration files and executing grunt or gulp tasks brings a new level of functionality to Visual Studio 2015 that we think web developers will really enjoy.
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Introducing ASP.NET 5
The first preview release of ASP.NET 1.0 came out almost 15 years ago. Since then millions of developers have used it to build and run great web applications, and over the years we have added and evolved many, many capabilities to it.
I'm excited today to post about a new release of ASP.NET that we are working on that we are calling ASP.NET 5. This new release is one of the most significant architectural updates we've done to ASP.NET. As part of this release we are making ASP.NET leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized. The ASP.NET 5 preview is now available as a preview release, and you can start using it today by downloading the latest CTP of Visual Studio 2015 which we just made available.
ASP.NET 5 is an open source web framework for building modern web applications that can be developed and run on Windows, Linux and the Mac. It includes the MVC 6 framework, which now combines the features of MVC and Web API into a single web programming framework. ASP.NET 5 will also be the basis for SignalR 3 - enabling you to add real time functionality to cloud connected applications. ASP.NET 5 is built on the .NET Core runtime, but it can also be run on the full .NET Framework for maximum compatibility.
With ASP.NET 5 we are making a number of architectural changes that makes the core web framework much leaner (it no longer requires System.Web.dll) and more modular (almost all features are now implemented as NuGet modules - allowing you to optimize your app to have just what you need). With ASP.NET 5 you gain the following foundational improvements:
- Build and run cross-platform ASP.NET apps on Windows, Mac and Linux
- Built on .NET Core, which supports true side-by-side app versioning
- New tooling that simplifies modern Web development
- Single aligned web stack for Web UI and Web APIs
- Cloud-ready environment-based configuration
- Integrated support for creating and using NuGet packages
- Built-in support for dependency injection
- Ability to host on IIS or self-host in your own process
The end result is an ASP.NET that you'll feel very familiar with, and which is also now even more tuned for modern web development.
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Azure: Machine Learning Service, Hadoop Storm, Cluster Scaling, Linux Support, Site Recovery and More
Today we released a number of great enhancements to Microsoft Azure. These include:
- Machine Learning: General Availability of the Azure Machine Learning Service
- Hadoop: General Availability of Apache Storm Support, Hadoop 2.6 support, Cluster Scaling, Node Size Selection and preview of next Linux OS support
- Site Recovery: General Availability of DR capabilities with SAN arrays
I've also included details in this blog post of other great Azure features that went live earlier this month:
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Azure: Premium Storage, RemoteApp, SQL Database Update, Live Media Streaming, Search and More
Today we released a number of great enhancements to Microsoft Azure. These include:
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Announcing Open Source of .NET Core Framework, .NET Core Distribution for Linux/OSX, and Free Visual Studio Community Edition
This week we are holding our Connect() developer event in New York City. This is an event that is being streamed online for free, and it covers some of the great new capabilities coming with the Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 5 releases. You can watch the event live as well as on-demand here.
I just finished giving the opening keynote of the event during which I made several big announcements:
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Azure: Announcing New Real-time Data Streaming and Data Factory Services
The last three weeks have been busy ones for Azure. Two weeks ago we announced a partnership with Docker to enable great container-based development experiences on Linux, Windows Server and Microsoft Azure.
Last week we held our Cloud Day event and announced our new G-Series of Virtual Machines as well as Premium Storage offering. The G-Series VMs provide the largest VM sizes available in the public cloud today (nearly 2x more memory than the largest AWS offering, and 4x more memory than the largest Google offering). The new Premium Storage offering (which will work with both our D-series and G-series of VMs) will support up to 32TB of storage per VM, >50,000 IOPS of disk IO per VM, and enable sub-1ms read latency. Combined they provide an enormous amount of power that enables you to run even bigger and better solutions in the cloud.
Earlier this week, we officially opened our new Azure Australia regions – which are our 18th and 19th Azure regions open for business around the world. Then at TechEd Europe we announced another round of new features – including the launch of the new Azure MarketPlace, a bunch of great network improvements, our new Batch computing service, general availability of our Azure Automation service and more.
Today, I’m excited to blog about even more new services we have released this week in the Azure Data space. These include:
