.NET News
| Cloud Services with Windows Azure - Part 1 Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services strategy represents a view of
the world where the growing feature-set of devices and the increasing
ubiquity of the Web are combined to deliver more compelling solutions.
Software-plus-Services represents an evolutionary step that is based on
existing best practices in IT and extends the application potential of
core service-orientation design principles. The Windows Azure platform
represents one of the major components of the Software-plus-Services
strategy, as Microsoft’s cloud computing operating environment,
designed from the outset to holistically manage pools of computation,
storage and networking; all encapsulated by one or more services. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/30/10 11:45 AM
CLM Matrix Joins Microsoft in the Clouds Matrix-Online is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that runs on
the Windows Azure and SQL Azure Platform as a Service (Paas). The
solution provides a cloud-based contract management repository where
companies can track, search and set alerts for all of your active
contracts. No IT staff is needed, no additional licenses, access to all
future upgrades and releases with minimal configuration. As Microsoft
signs up additional customers on the Azure platform, CLM Matrix intends
to broaden their customer reach by having the Matrix-Online service
fully enabled within the cloud environment. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/30/10 10:30 AM
Microsoft’s Vampire OS Microsoft was supposed to terminate so-called XP downgrade rights with
the release of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, which went to beta this week.
But now it says it’s not going to because people continue to cling
to the thing. With 74% of the enterprise still on XP, Microsoft has to
pay attention when its business customers tell it, as it says, that
“removing end-user downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional
could be confusing, given the rights change would be made for new PCs
pre-installed with Windows 7 and managing a hybrid environment with PCs
that have different end-user rights based on date of purchase would be
challenging to track.” So XP will continue to be installed until
Win7 is in its grave in 10 years time. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/16/10 8:11 PM
Microsoft Helps Service Providers Capture Cloud Services Opportunities Microsoft is highlighting market opportunities for hosting and
communications service providers as adoption of cloud services among
small and midsize business (SMBs) continues to rise. Microsoft is
helping service providers take advantage of those opportunities through
its software, services and programs that enable them to become trusted
advisors and full-service IT providers to businesses. "Microsoft
sees service providers becoming more important as the cloud becomes more
predominant. Given their experience in deploying and selling
infrastructure and software as a service, businesses will depend on them
for IT as a service," said John Zanni, general manager of Worldwide
Hosting for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. "The next step
for service providers is to look beyond their current hosted offerings
to become full-service IT providers and trusted advisors to businesses." dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/15/10 1:15 AM
Azure Cloud Platform Deployable to Enterprises Microsoft has announced and released a new version of its Windows Azure
platform which will operate as an appliance. This platform, which
is supported by a strong partner community (including Dell, Fujitsu and
HP), provides enhanced means for enterprises to run cloud services,
either internally or for their own customers. This is not, in my
opinion, just your basic run of the mill IT news. At least not to
technologists who track and seek to implement enterprise based cloud
capabilities. Background: Enterprises were the pioneers of enhanced
delivery of capability via clouds, with modern enterprise data center
environments providing many scalable, efficient, optimized resources.
But for the most part these capabilities have been focused on
things that matter to IT departments more than to end users. End
users want continually increasing contributions to the mission and, for
the most part, do not focus on cost savings, power savings or elastic
computing constructs. Now consider the potential of this Azure
announcement. Microsoft’s platform for cloud computing is
available in an appliance. This means companies and government
organizations can now buy something that delivers Azure capabilities
from inside their enterprise. And they can do that in a way that
[...] Related posts:
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Others Sued for Patent Infringement NTP Inc, the patent troll that nicked Research in Motion and its
Blackberry for a cool $612.5 million in 2006, sued Apple, Google,
Microsoft, Motorola, LG Electronics and HTC last Thursday charging their
smartphones infringe the same Ur-wireless e-mail patents that RIM ran
afoul of. In Apple’s case the suit names the iPhone, iPad, server
software and MobileMe. The suits were filed in federal court in
Virginia near where NTP lives. NTP is already suing AT&T, Verizon,
Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Palm. RIM wound up settling because an
injunction could have barred it from the market, a situation
that’s unlikely to happen again thanks to a subsequent Supreme
Court decision limiting the imposition of injunctions when the claimant
is a “non-practicing entity.” So NTP’s chances of
getting giant settlements from its new suits are supposedly slim and NTP
said it would prefer to settle. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/13/10 11:45 AM
NetApp Integrates with Microsoft Toolkit NetApp on Monday announced enhanced integration with Microsoft to
deliver enterprise-class data protection solutions to cloud service
providers by leveraging the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for
Hosters. Although enterprise-class data protection has historically been
too expensive for most small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to
implement themselves, NetApp and Microsoft now enable service providers
to offer enterprise-class data protection to their SMB customers.
Additionally, NetApp announced the availability of new professional
service offerings and additional resources and guidance for service
providers to build a variety of enterprise-class cloud services.
"SMB customers have many of the same disaster recovery and business
continuity requirements as large enterprise organizations, but often
times don't have the necessary skill set or budget needed to achieve the
desired results," said Laura DuBois, program vice president,
Storage Software and Solutions, IDC. "Solutions that address this
gap by providing enterprise-level data protection along with the support
and guidance needed to deploy will be integral in helping SMBs realize
the true benefits of a cloud infrastructure." dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/13/10 2:00 AM
Cloud Computing Creates Tremendous Value: Ballmer "For customers, cloud computing creates tremendous value, which
translates to massive opportunity for Microsoft and its partners,"
said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today, in his keynote address at day
one of the company's Worldwide Partners Conference (WPC). Ballmer
highlighted the critical role Microsoft's partners will continue to play
in driving the IT industry’s transformation to cloud computing and
helping fuel economic growth and job creation in local communities
around the world. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/12/10 6:00 PM
Microsoft and Fujitsu in Major Cloud Push According to the Nikkei July 10 morning edition, Fujitsu and Microsoft
are planning to share data centers worldwide in a bid to catch up to the
world's Cloud computing pioneers in the business of providing software
and computing services online. The two companies are considering joint
investment in new data centers, the Nikkei reported. In the meantime,
the report added, Fujitsu will begin to host Microsoft cloud services at
its Tatebayashi center in Gunma Prefecture. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/12/10 11:15 AM
Microsoft's Cloud Services Approach Twenty million businesses and over a billion people use Microsoft cloud
services, and many of the Microsoft products that we know and trust are
available in the cloud. Like SQL. Office. And Windows. In his general
session at Cloud Expo East, Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer and
lead architect for Windows Azure, discussed Microsoft's cloud computing
vision and investments. He also outlined Microsoft’s cloud
strategy and portfolio, then discussed the benefits to customers and
partners such as business agility, and the array of choice from
on-premise into the cloud. In addition, Khalidi detailed the Windows
Azure platform pillars and how they fit into Microsoft’s cloud
computing initiatives. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/7/10 12:15 PM
One Less Thing for Flash to Worry About Move Networks, a once-promising adaptive bit-rate video streaming house
whose pricey plug-in-based technology was used at least briefly by
Fox.com and ABC.com, has hit the wall running taking over $90 million in
investments from Microsoft and Cisco, Hummer Winblad, Comcast, Benchmark
Capital and Steamboat Ventures and Televista with it. Officially
it’s looking for a buyer after failing to raise another $20
million. Staff has been laid off and its CEO, former DirecTV COO Roxanne
Austin, is gone, replaced by its biz dev guy. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/4/10 9:00 PM
EC Wants to Legislate Interoperability Having forced a dominant player like Microsoft to open up some of its
interfaces in the name of interoperability, the European Commission is
now proposing to force any “significant” player like, oh,
say, Apple and Adobe or RIM and Nokia to open up their proprietary
interfaces so it can create a brave new kumbayah level playing field.
It forced Microsoft to do it by dint of antitrust prosecution and heavy
fines but now it’s proposing to legislate the licensing of
interfaces and data formats outside of antitrust considerations by 2012.
According to EC’s new digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes,
who’s proving to be a very dangerous woman, “Any kind of IT
product should be able to communicate with any type of service in the
future.” dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/3/10 4:00 PM
Windows 8 Slides Apparently Leak Apparently Microsoft had a chin wag with computer makers in April about
what Windows 8 might look like so they can make plans because a set of
the “NDA” “Microsoft Confidential” PowerPoints
used at the meeting seem to have turned up on an Italian web site called
Windowsette over the weekend. They are evidently real. At least they
are widely accepted as genuine and seem to have been in the possession
of an HP engineer named Derek Goode. Not that they’re all that
revealing or even a “plan of record,” but it looks like
Microsoft is expecting to release the next-generation operating system
some time in 2012 and that Internet Explorer 9 will hit beta this
August. dotnet.sys-con.com |
7/2/10 4:54 PM
How ASP.NET PostBacks and Redirects Work Last week I got the following two questions from one of our clients
* “We use ASP.NET PostBacks but can’t find the PurePath for
the request triggering the PostBack handler – any hints?”
* “We see many ThreadAbortExceptions in our ASP.NET Application
and we are not sure why they happen – are they expected?”
Time for a little blog that gives some internals on PostBacks as well as
Redirects (which are commonly used in PostBack handlers). dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/30/10 9:39 PM
Salesforce Sues Microsoft Back In what has become a typical negotiating tactic in patent cases,
salesforce.com has answered Microsoft’s charge of patent
infringement with a countersuit. For amusement’s sake, it’s
using Microsoft’s old nemesis David Boies for the job. He’s
the hired gun the Justice Department brought in to argue its antitrust
case against Redmond. Oracle just hired Boies too. It wants him to win
in its great billion-dollar IP theft suit against SAP and its
now-defunct TomorrowNow maintenance subsidiary. Not winning SCO’s
litigation against Novell and IBM seems to have worked wonders for Boies
and his firm. He didn’t win the presidency for Al Gore either and
the Microsoft break-up order handed down at trial didn’t stick. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/29/10 2:15 PM
Salesforce Sues Microsoft Back In what has become a typical negotiating tactic in patent cases,
salesforce.com has answered Microsoft’s charge of patent
infringement with a countersuit. For amusement’s sake, it’s
using Microsoft’s old nemesis David Boies for the job. He’s
the hired gun the Justice Department brought in to argue its antitrust
case against Redmond. Oracle just hired Boies too. It wants him to win
in its great billion-dollar IP theft suit against SAP and its
now-defunct TomorrowNow maintenance subsidiary. Not winning SCO’s
litigation against Novell and IBM seems to have worked wonders for Boies
and his firm. He didn’t win the presidency for Al Gore either and
the Microsoft break-up order handed down at trial didn’t stick. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/28/10 1:27 PM
Amazon S3 for C# Developers Amazon S3 is a simple storage service that can be used for storing
key-value pairs or files. So it can be used as a static HTTP server. But
it has some other interesting features. I like to find things that are
easy themselves and that can be easily used. Amazon S3 is a convenient
place to store data in. But I found that it's not simply a storage. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/23/10 7:51 PM
Amazon S3 for C# Developers Amazon S3 is a simple storage service that can be used for storing
key-value pairs or files. So it can be used as a static HTTP server. But
it has some other interesting features. I like to find things that are
easy themselves and that can be easily used. Amazon S3 is a convenient
place to store data in. But I found that it's not simply a storage. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/23/10 7:51 PM
Let the Games Begin Office 2010 went on sale to consumers and small businesses Tuesday and
Microsoft’s free lightweight Office Web Apps version of Word,
Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint, its answer to the three-year-old Google
Apps, was made generally available. The webby stuff is good on Macs and
phones as well as PCs and users with a Hotmail account can make use of
SkyDrive, the 25GB of free storage Microsoft offers. To recap, the Home
and Student version cost $150 ($120 downloaded); the Home and Business
edition, which adds Outlook, is $280 ($200 downloaded); Office
Professional, which includes Publisher and Access, lists for $500 ($350
downloaded). Office has traditional accounted for half of
Microsoft’s earnings and a third of its revenue, which may explain
why it’s spending a reported $80 million to advertise the new stuff. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/20/10 9:00 PM
Let the Games Begin Office 2010 went on sale to consumers and small businesses Tuesday and
Microsoft’s free lightweight Office Web Apps version of Word,
Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint, its answer to the three-year-old Google
Apps, was made generally available. The webby stuff is good on Macs and
phones as well as PCs and users with a Hotmail account can make use of
SkyDrive, the 25GB of free storage Microsoft offers. To recap, the Home
and Student version cost $150 ($120 downloaded); the Home and Business
edition, which adds Outlook, is $280 ($200 downloaded); Office
Professional, which includes Publisher and Access, lists for $500 ($350
downloaded). Office has traditional accounted for half of
Microsoft’s earnings and a third of its revenue, which may explain
why it’s spending a reported $80 million to advertise the new stuff. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/18/10 8:05 PM
Many Companies Caught in Lurch as Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP 2 On July 13, Microsoft will officially retire Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Although it will continue to provide security updates for XP Service
Pack 3, it will stop providing patches for the older SP2. Microsoft
offers support for its products for five years and extended support for
another five years. For XP SP2, that journey comes to an end on July 13.
Windows XP 3 will be supported until April 2014. Microsoft issues
security updates and other core operating system patches every second
Tuesday of the month, known as Patch Tuesday. Whereas most home users
typically install these patches automatically, corporate users usually
install service packs and security updates manually and only after
extensive testing. For large corporate environments, operating system
upgrades are often a very perilous and expensive exercise. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/17/10 4:08 PM
Many Companies Caught in Lurch as Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP 2 On July 13, Microsoft will officially retire Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Although it will continue to provide security updates for XP Service
Pack 3, it will stop providing patches for the older SP2. Microsoft
offers support for its products for five years and extended support for
another five years. For XP SP2, that journey comes to an end on July 13.
Windows XP 3 will be supported until April 2014. Microsoft issues
security updates and other core operating system patches every second
Tuesday of the month, known as Patch Tuesday. Whereas most home users
typically install these patches automatically, corporate users usually
install service packs and security updates manually and only after
extensive testing. For large corporate environments, operating system
upgrades are often a very perilous and expensive exercise. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/17/10 4:08 PM
Managed Runtimes Suck; Azul Organizing Rescue Party Azul Systems, the Java server appliance house, says Java, Ruby and, for
that matter, .NET managed runtimes are pushed to their limits and
basically crippled. Their response times are inconsistent, their scale
is limited, and they’re unable to exploit modern commodity
hardware with its multi-cores and memory. They’re unstable and
need continuous tuning. They suffer from daily restarts, garbage
collection pauses and out-of-memory errors. Operating systems
aren’t optimized for them and virtualization and the cloud
aggravate the scaling issue. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/17/10 7:30 AM
Managed Runtimes Suck; Azul Organizing Rescue Party Azul Systems, the Java server appliance house, says Java, Ruby and, for
that matter, .NET managed runtimes are pushed to their limits and
basically crippled. Their response times are inconsistent, their scale
is limited, and they’re unable to exploit modern commodity
hardware with its multi-cores and memory. They’re unstable and
need continuous tuning. They suffer from daily restarts, garbage
collection pauses and out-of-memory errors. Operating systems
aren’t optimized for them and virtualization and the cloud
aggravate the scaling issue. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/17/10 7:30 AM
Fast & Secure Computing Using the Cloud at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Like other desktop-centric technologies such as anti-malware, PC tune-up
utilities (disk de-fragmentation, registry cleaners, junk removers,
etc.) have primarily been a localized technology that relied on the user
installing software on the computer to analyze and resolve problems that
affect performance. This session will introduce a new approach that
takes PC tune-up and security strategies to a new level utilizing the
power of the cloud as a means of delivery. In his session at the 7th
International Cloud Expo, Ryan Sherstobitoff, Chief Corporate Evangelist
at SafeKidZone and CEO of ForwardK, will introduce new methodologies to
use the intelligence of the community and the power of the cloud to
accomplish computer maintenance at a lower total cost of ownership than
traditional desktop technologies. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/15/10 11:00 PM
Enterprise Usage of OpenNebula at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Future enterprise data centers will look like private clouds supporting
a flexible and agile execution of virtualized services, and combining
local with public cloud-based infrastructure to enable highly scalable
hosting environments. The key component in these cloud architectures
will be the cloud management system, also called the cloud operating
system (OS), which is responsible for the secure, efficient and scalable
management of cloud resources. Cloud OSes are displacing
"traditional" OSes, which will be part of the application
stack. In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Ignacio M.
Llorente, Professor of the DSA Research Group at UCM, will discuss the
OpenNebula Ecosystem, which was recently established in order to promote
the different tools, extensions and plug-ins that are available to
complement OpenNebula from a wide variety of projects, companies and
research centers. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/15/10 10:00 PM
Get These Web Development Tools for Free You are a developer and you are short of cash (who is not in these days
of gloom and doom with millions out of jobs)to buy all the fancy
software. You could go to Open Source, or get programs for free. The
evaluation editions are great but they can be a headache. By evaluating,
you are helping the company make a better product in exchange for your
headache. They have expiration dates and you have to fiddle with your
control panel. I almost don't use evaluation software with less than 120
days of useful life. Now come the express editions. They are free and you do not have to worry about the expiration date but the downside is some features are not there in the express series. Well, beggars or not choosers. Microsoft started making these express editions (others also like Oracle and IBM) a while ago and now all of this is consolidated on thier web site expressely set for the express series. Check out: http://www.microsoft.com/express/Default.aspx Here you can find the latest express editions as well as the Microsoft Web Platform Installer which will bring home all the goodies to your desktop/laptop/notebook. You can get express programs for all of these in one place: Web Visual Studio 2010 Express Windows Microsoft VB, C# and C++ Express Phone Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone 7 Database SQL Server 2008 R2 Express (x32 and x64) These same products can be used for developing applications for Windows Azure as well. This is a good selling point.  Get These Web Development Tools for Free You are a developer and you are short of cash (who is not in these days
of gloom and doom with millions out of jobs)to buy all the fancy
software. You could go to Open Source, or get programs for free. The
evaluation editions are great but they can be a headache. By evaluating,
you are helping the company make a better product in exchange for your
headache. They have expiration dates and you have to fiddle with your
control panel. I almost don't use evaluation software with less than 120
days of useful life. Now come the express editions. They are free and you do not have to worry about the expiration date but the downside is some features are not there in the express series. Well, beggars or not choosers. Microsoft started making these express editions (others also like Oracle and IBM) a while ago and now all of this is consolidated on thier web site expressely set for the express series. Check out: http://www.microsoft.com/express/Default.aspx Here you can find the latest express editions as well as the Microsoft Web Platform Installer which will bring home all the goodies to your desktop/laptop/notebook. You can get express programs for all of these in one place: Web Visual Studio 2010 Express Windows Microsoft VB, C# and C++ Express Phone Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone 7 Database SQL Server 2008 R2 Express (x32 and x64) These same products can be used for developing applications for Windows Azure as well. This is a good selling point. I/O Logical Check Failure Causes SQL Server Database Corruption Like other databases and files, Microsoft SQL Server database may also
come across various corruption issues. The corruption can take place due
to various reasons, including the internal database or SQL Server
application issues and system related problems. One major system related
problem, which can cause MDF (Master Database File) corruption, is I/O
logical check failure. In such situations, the database becomes totally
inaccessible and you come across severe data loss situations. In order
to get your mission critical data back, you need to repair and restore
the corrupt database using SQL database recovery solutions. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/14/10 7:22 AM
I/O Logical Check Failure Cause SQL Server Database Corruption Like other databases and files, Microsoft SQL Server database may also
come across various corruption issues. The corruption can take place due
to various reasons, including the internal database or SQL Server
application issues and system related dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/14/10 7:22 AM
Why Google Apps? Why Not Microsoft Web Apps? and Behold the Dark Horse! Come June 15, Google's Office Docs will be challenged by Microsoft's Web
Applications (Word, Excel, Power Point and One Note) working off the web
and Microsoft expects to make money from Ads. Microsoft will
challenge Google and steal away the Google crowd while injecting
new blood into its Window Live at the same time, the core behind the
Microsoft web applications. Microsoft is already an undisputed leader in
Entreprise Office. With this new offering Microsoft will have the best
of both worlds, keep the cake while eating it. But behold the dark horse! I was recently testing out the OpenOffice and came away vastly impressed. I wonder how Microsoft is planning to challenge this one. All these happenings keep me wondering why does the CNBC's talking heads miss Microsoft's serious foray into the unknown open spaces and the cloud. In a recent Power Lunch (I think it was) after a recent Ballmer's speech the talk turned to Google, Apple and Microsoft. They heaped praise on Google and Apple and showed rather an embarassing financial (earnings per share) comparsion of Apple and Microsoft and completly ignored Microsoft's spending on its Cloud Platform, CDNs, Data centers etc. How did this happen with an untold number of Microsoft Evangelists milling around? May be Microsoft should change its game plan and become more visible on Wall Street. Disclaimer: I am neither a Microsoft employee nor hold Microsoft stocks but just a concerned webizen (Web Citizen)  Why Google Apps? Why Not Microsoft Web Apps? and Behold the Dark Horse! Come June 15, Google's Office Docs will be challenged by Microsoft's Web
Applications (Word, Excel, Power Point and One Note) working off the web
and Microsoft expects to make money from Ads. Microsoft will
challenge Google and steal away the Google crowd while injecting
new blood into its Window Live at the same time, the core behind the
Microsoft web applications. Microsoft is already an undisputed leader in
Entreprise Office. With this new offering Microsoft will have the best
of both worlds, keep the cake while eating it. But behold the dark horse! I was recently testing out the OpenOffice and came away vastly impressed. I wonder how Microsoft is planning to challenge this one. All these happenings keep me wondering why does the CNBC's talking heads miss Microsoft's serious foray into the unknown open spaces and the cloud. In a recent Power Lunch (I think it was) after a recent Ballmer's speech the talk turned to Google, Apple and Microsoft. They heaped praise on Google and Apple and showed rather an embarassing financial (earnings per share) comparsion of Apple and Microsoft and completly ignored Microsoft's spending on its Cloud Platform, CDNs, Data centers etc. How did this happen with an untold number of Microsoft Evangelists milling around? May be Microsoft should change its game plan and become more visible on Wall Street. Disclaimer: I am neither a Microsoft employee nor hold Microsoft stocks but just a concerned webizen (Web Citizen) Windows 7 SP1 Beta Due Microsoft expects to have a public beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1
(SP1) out by next month. There won’t be any new Windows 7-specific
features and most of the bug fixes have already been released making it
a largely ceremonial milestone that many companies like to pass before
they deploy. There will be some new Hyper-V features apropos of cloud
computing and graphics acceleration widgetry for remote desktops. A
public beta of a service pack for Windows Server 2008 R2 is also due in
July. By the way, Windows Server AppFabric has RTM’d. It’s
supposed to simplify the development and management of composite
applications by improving speed, elastic scale and high availability
through distributed caching capabilities and new tools. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/11/10 7:03 PM
Windows 7 SP1 Beta Due Microsoft expects to have a public beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1
(SP1) out by next month. There won’t be any new Windows 7-specific
features and most of the bug fixes have already been released making it
a largely ceremonial milestone that many companies like to pass before
they deploy. There will be some new Hyper-V features apropos of cloud
computing and graphics acceleration widgetry for remote desktops. A
public beta of a service pack for Windows Server 2008 R2 is also due in
July. By the way, Windows Server AppFabric has RTM’d. It’s
supposed to simplify the development and management of composite
applications by improving speed, elastic scale and high availability
through distributed caching capabilities and new tools. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/11/10 7:03 PM
Pentaho Open Source BI Goes On-Demand Pentaho has taken its open source business intelligence (BI) widgetry
and, through the wonders of VMware virtualization, made it into an
on-demand subscription service that it fancies will remove critical
barriers to BI adoption by giving customers control over how the
solution is deployed and managed – by Pentaho, by the customer, or
by both. See, it’s solved the portability issue because the
customer can move the image in-house. It’s also turned the venture
into a marketing gimmick called the 72-Hour Challenge. For a couple
thousand bucks, window shoppers can send Pentaho their data and it
promises to have an evaluation project up and running with key
performance indicators and relevant dashboards in three days. The
potential customer can then show the prototype around in a live webinar
and test-drive it for three weeks, even expand it, without commandeering
any of its own hardware or personnel. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/10/10 9:00 PM
Windows Phone 7 Devices It’s been an interesting handful of weeks. I’ve been
spending a lot of time in the field with our country managers as we get
ready for the coming launch of Windows Phone 7. That’s a post for
another day. I’m here at TechEd, and there’s a lot of talk
about Windows Phone 7 devices and when they are going to be made
available. One cool thing that the team is doing is handing out coupons
to event attendees redeemable for general availability devices when they
start shipping. We’re only handing out around 50 or so of these
coupons, so it’s definitely not a broad distribution. It’s
meant for people who are attending sessions or wearing Windows Phone
hats around the show floor. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/8/10 9:07 PM
Windows Phone 7 Devices It’s been an interesting handful of weeks. I’ve been
spending a lot of time in the field with our country managers as we get
ready for the coming launch of Windows Phone 7. That’s a post for
another day. I’m here at TechEd, and there’s a lot of talk
about Windows Phone 7 devices and when they are going to be made
available. One cool thing that the team is doing is handing out coupons
to event attendees redeemable for general availability devices when they
start shipping. We’re only handing out around 50 or so of these
coupons, so it’s definitely not a broad distribution. It’s
meant for people who are attending sessions or wearing Windows Phone
hats around the show floor. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/8/10 9:07 PM
Office Web Apps Inch Out Ahead of general release June 15 and following release to the corporate
world last month, Microsoft Monday said its browser-based Office Web
Apps on SkyDrive are now available to everyone in the US, UK, Canada and
Ireland, SkyDrive being its free browser-based storage and document
sharing service. The lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and
OneNote are accessible through OfficeLive.com and require an Office Live account. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/8/10 7:27 PM
Microsoft, Novell Develop Cross-Platform HPC Widgetry The unholy alliance of Microsoft and Novell says it’s got some HPC
supercomputing cross-platform widgetry developed in their joint
Interoperability Lab in Massachusetts that’s good for customers
deploying server workload management across SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
and Windows HPC Server. It should tickle their infrastructure efficiency
and cost savings by simplifying systems management through dual-boot and
hybrid cluster solutions. They can balance server workloads using both
SLES and Windows HPC Server and switch between the two environments. The
pair has got a list of highfalutin brand name customers already using
the stuff. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/7/10 4:30 PM
Microsoft, Novell Develop Cross-Platform HPC Widgetry The unholy alliance of Microsoft and Novell says it’s got some HPC
supercomputing cross-platform widgetry developed in their joint
Interoperability Lab in Massachusetts that’s good for customers
deploying server workload management across SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
and Windows HPC Server. It should tickle their infrastructure efficiency
and cost savings by simplifying systems management through dual-boot and
hybrid cluster solutions. They can balance server workloads using both
SLES and Windows HPC Server and switch between the two environments. The
pair has got a list of highfalutin brand name customers already using
the stuff. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/7/10 4:30 PM
Ballmer Gets His Two Cents in at D8 On Steve Jobs’ contention that this is now a post-PC world:
“I think that people are going to be using PCs in greater and
greater numbers for years to come.” But PCs will look different.
They’ll evolve. They’ll get smaller, get touch, get
different interfaces, their insides will change. “The real
question is what is a PC? Nothing done on a PC today will get less
relevant tomorrow. I think there will exist a general-purpose device
that does anything you want, because people don’t want multiple
devices, or can’t afford them. I think the PC as we know it will
continue to morph in form factor. So the real question is where do you
push?” Addressing Job’s truck analogy he says,
“Windows machines will not be trucks.” dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/5/10 4:00 PM
Ballmer Gets His Two Cents in at D8 On Steve Jobs’ contention that this is now a post-PC world:
“I think that people are going to be using PCs in greater and
greater numbers for years to come.” But PCs will look different.
They’ll evolve. They’ll get smaller, get touch, get
different interfaces, their insides will change. “The real
question is what is a PC? Nothing done on a PC today will get less
relevant tomorrow. I think there will exist a general-purpose device
that does anything you want, because people don’t want multiple
devices, or can’t afford them. I think the PC as we know it will
continue to morph in form factor. So the real question is where do you
push?” Addressing Job’s truck analogy he says,
“Windows machines will not be trucks.” dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/5/10 4:00 PM
Apprenda Offers Free SaaS Scaffold for .NET Apps Apprenda, a cloud middleware start-up, has released SaaSGrid Express, a
free, downloadable version of its flagship SaaSGrid application server
for software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaSGrid Express is supposed to be a
complete foundation for delivering .NET applications as a service and
you can’t beat the price. The package, essentially three servers
and a billing system, is supposed to be enough for a few hundred end
users. Apprenda’s reason for being is save others from having to
invent and maintain their own SaaS architecture and delivery systems.
For its trouble it would like to become the de facto standard. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/4/10 4:25 PM
Apprenda Offers Free SaaS Scaffold for .NET Apps Apprenda, a cloud middleware start-up, has released SaaSGrid Express, a
free, downloadable version of its flagship SaaSGrid application server
for software-as-a-service (SaaS). SaaSGrid Express is supposed to be a
complete foundation for delivering .NET applications as a service and
you can’t beat the price. The package, essentially three servers
and a billing system, is supposed to be enough for a few hundred end
users. Apprenda’s reason for being is save others from having to
invent and maintain their own SaaS architecture and delivery systems.
For its trouble it would like to become the de facto standard. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/4/10 4:25 PM
Google Seeks to Create an Army of Google Apps Pushers To encourage companies to adopt Google Apps, Google has tricked out a Go
Google cloud calculator that’s supposed to help them understand
the benefits of working in the cloud by taking a “test
drive.” The graphics projects potential time and cost savings
based on how many employees the company has. All you do is type in your
company name and how many people you’re talking about (valuable
data right there). For example, it claims a 50-man operation could save
$31,000 a year and be 2.8 times more productive. It dangles the thought
of 1,225GB of e-mail storage and the idea of saving 1,390 hours not
wrestling with spam or wasting 50 hours on updates. It claims the user
could avoid losing 30GBof data on lost or stolen laptops pocketing the
$141,000 it would cost not to mention the $7,500 needed for data
recovery. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/3/10 10:45 PM
Enterprise Architecture with PowerDesigner 15.1 This article will discuss what Enterprise Architecture is, why you need
it and how you can achieve it. The term Enterprise Architecture (EA) can
mean different things to different people. For the confines of this
article, we will use a definition from Paul Weill, Director of MIT
Center for Information Systems Research, which states, “Enterprise
Architecture is the organization of logic for business processes and IT
infrastructure, reflecting the integration and standardization
requirements of the firm’s operation model.” In breaking EA
down we understand that “enterprise” equals
“business” and “architecture” is “how
things are designed and constructed”; you can start to see that EA
in basic terms is about “how businesses are designed and
constructed.” Businesses are designed and constructed based on
their information and/or metadata and how it is managed. The way to
manage metadata is through models. Models provide abstraction to
simplify complexity, increase understanding through visual
representations, and provide governance to increase consistency and
reusability throughout the organization. dotnet.sys-con.com |
6/3/10 4:00 PM
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