November 16th, 2009

Microsoft makes available new high performance Windows Server test build

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:00 am

Categories: Azure, Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Office 2010/Office 14, Red Dog, Resellers, System builders, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server"), Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Windows Server, High-performance, Server, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Supercomputing, HPC Server, Leadership, Management

Microsoft made available on November 16 a code-complete beta of Windows HPC (High Performance Computing) Server 2008 R2 to selected testers.

The company made the announcement at the Supercomputing 2009 show in Portland, Oreg., where officials said they planned to provide all of the 4,500 or so of the attendees with the bits today. Microsoft also will be providing select testers with access to the downloadable beta via the Connect site today. Microsoft is expecting to release at least one more beta of HPC Server 2008 R2 before rolling out the final version some time in 2010.

HPC Server enables cluster supercomputing on x64 versions of Windows Server 2008 R2. The new release that is in testing is Microsoft’s third iteration of the product.

With the HPC Server 2008 R2 beta, testers can run the test builds of Excel 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, supporting the development and use of parallel and scalable applications, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft and its partners have been making a concerted effort to increase the appeal of its HPC Server product beyond the small segment of scientists and engineers who typically use supercomputers. Last week, Dell announced it would be the exclusive distributor of the Cray CX1 supercomputing workstation, which runs Windows 7 integrated with HPC Server on a single box.

“We’re trying to make HPC more mainstream and accessible” to more engineers, financial quants and others in a variety of large and mid-size organizations, said Vince Mendillo, Microsoft Senior Director of High Performance Computing. To do this, the team is focused on providing new tools and techniques making HPC Server easier to set up and deploy, Mendillo said.

When Microsoft introduced the first version of HPC Server, Linux dominated the supercomputing market. Since then, Microsoft has been making inroads in market share and performance. Last year, Microsoft added “thousands of customers in large scale organizations” for the product, Mendillo said. (He declined provide any more specific data.) Microsoft now has 159 independent software vendor partners developing applications for HPC Server, Mendillo added.

Because HPC Server is part of the overall Windows Server family, MIcrosoft will fold back into the core Windows Server codebase new developments made by the HPC team. Mendillo said that some of the new parallel enhancements in the new HPC Server release would likely be useful to the Windows Azure team, which is building MIcrosoft’s cloud-computing offering.

November 12th, 2009

PDC 2009: Tune in for our live blogging frenzy next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:31 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Big Brains, Multicore/distributed computing, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Research, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Professional Developers Conference Keynote, Blogging, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 kicks off the week of November 16. Like we did last year, a handful of us Microsoft watchers will be live blogging the keynotes as a group.

The PDC keynotes are slated for Tuesday November 17 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PT and Wednesday November 18 from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. We’ll be using CoverItLive to blog, so the more of you who chime in and comment along with us, the merrier. Your group-blogging hosts (besides me) will be Ed Bott, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and Long Zheng

Come back here next week and watch along with us as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie; Server and Tools President Bob Muglia; Kurt DelBene, Senior VP of Microsoft’s Office Business Productivity Group and more talk about what’s coming for developers in the next year. (I’ll post the CoverItLive viewer on my site during keynote viewing hours next week.)

There will be new info on Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating environment, .Net 4.0, Oslo, Office 2010, Silverlight, SQL Server and more. And more than a few of the “Big Brains” — Microsoft’s Technical Fellows — are on tap to present during the four-day confab.  I’ve already posted about some of what’s on tap (and not on tap) for PDC 2009 over the past few weeks. Expect lots more PDC news on my blog throughout the week next week.

Hope to see you (virtually) and/or live in Los Angeles next week!

November 10th, 2009

New tool aids .Net developers in writing Linux, Mac OS X apps

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:48 am

Categories: .Net Framework, App Compatibility, Apple, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Novell, Open source, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Mono, Developer, Linux, Tool, Teamprise Add-on, .Net, Development Tools, Microsoft Visual Studio, Productivity, Open Source

Not all .Net developers are writing Windows apps. Some (besides Miguel de Icaza and his merry band of Mono folks) may be interested in writing Linux, Unix and Mac OS X apps, too.

On November 10, Novell rolled out the final version of a new Visual Studio add-on aimed at these developers. Known as Mono Tools for Visual Studio, the product comes in three flavors: A Professional Edition (individual) for $99; Enterprise Edition (for one developer in an organization) for $249; and Ultimate Edition for $2,499 which includes a limited commercial license to redistribute Mono on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and includes five enterprise developer licenses.

Mono Tools for Visual Studio allows developers to port their existing .Net Windows apps to non-Windows operating systems, as well as to write brand-new apps. The new product is based on Mono — which is an open-source implementation of .Net — but doesn’t require it.  Novell has been testing externally Mono Tools for Visual Studio since September.

The goal of Mono Tools for Visual Studio is to make it easier for programmers to use Visual Studio’s testing, debugging and deployment features, which may be more familiar to some developers than the open-source-specific tool alternatives, said de Icaza, Mono project founder and Vice President of Developer Platforms at Novell.

The new Mono Visual Studio Tools also enables integration with SuSE Online, a tool for building and testing turnkey virtual appliances that are based on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server or openSuSE.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced some tool-interoperability news of its own; the Redmondians are buying Teamprise and plan to make it an add-on to Visual Studio. The Teamprise add-on is designed to allow Java developers using Eclipse-based development environments to collaborate with .Net developers via Team Foundation Server.

November 9th, 2009

Microsoft 'builds a branch to Java developers" with Teamprise buy

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 4:45 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Java Developer, Java, Microsoft Corp., Eclipse, Teamprise, Java Development Tools, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Development Tools, Open Source, Development Tools

Microsoft has bought the Teamprise assets from SourceGear LLC for an undisclosed amount, company officials announced on November 9.

Teamprise allows developers using the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) running on operating systems including Unix, Linux and Mac OS X to build applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. (Team Foundation Server is Microsoft’s team-collaboration tool for developers.)

Microsoft plans to release a Microsoft-branded and -updated version of Teamprise that will plug into Visual Studio 2010 on or around the same date that it launches Visual Studio 2010, which is March 22, 2010, officials said.

“We just built a branch to Java developers,” said Dave Mendlen, Senior Director of Developer Marketing. “Many customers have developers targeting Java using Eclipse, as well as .Net using Visual Studio. They need a common repository and source-control tool. This is unified through Team Foundation Server” with the Teamprise add-on.

Microsoft is acquiring three Teamprise technologies as part of the arrangement: A plug-in for Eclipse that integrates into the Eclipse IDE; the Teamprise Explorer user interface; and a command-line client. The plug-in supports Eclipse and Eclipse-based  IDEs, such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop and Adobe Flex Builder. Microsoft also has hired some of the Teamprise developers as part of the deal, Redmond officials said.

Under terms of the agreement, Teamprise — a Microsoft partner — will continue to do sales and support for Teamprise until Microsoft releases the Microsoft-branded version of the product. After that point, existing Teamprise users will be upgraded to the Microsoft-branded product.

New users will be able to buy Team Foundation Server plus Teamprise shipped as a single package. The bundle will be offered as part of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate SKU or at retail for approximately $799.

October 30th, 2009

Pre-Halloween scare-off: Bing middle school jingle vs. VS 2010 bug killer

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:59 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Housekeeping, Search, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: School, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Development Tools, Corporate Communications, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Which is more frightening — Microsoft convincing a bunch of middle school students to sing the Bing jingle or the antics of sleep-depraved developers trying to stomp the remaining bugs out of Visual Studio 2010?

It’s the pre-Halloween scare-off. Here’s the Channel 9 night of the living bug killers video:

And the Pennsylvania middle school Bing squad in action:

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Happy Halloween!

October 19th, 2009

SharePoint: What's coming when with the 2010 release?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:05 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, SharePoint Server, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Even though Microsoft released a private beta of its SharePoint 2010 product to testers in July, the company has said relatively little about the next release of its collaboration platform — until October 19.

Today is the opening day of the SharePoint conference, which is being attended by 7,000 or so customers, partners, developers and analysts/press. Microsoft is sharing a few news tidbits today, specifically:

• The public beta of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 are slated for November (not this week, as some  SharePoint testers had been hoping/expecting)
• When SharePoint 2010 ships in the first half of next year (word is May/June 2010, the date Office 2010 is due), there will be two new SKUs on the line-up for users with Internet-facing sites: An on-premises one for companies with small and mid-sized Web sites; and a hosted one for those who want their Web sites hosted by Microsoft.

The head of Microsoft’s SharePoint business, Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper, itemized in an October 19 blog post the 40 feature areas that Microsoft is highlighting with SharePoint 2010. CEO Steve Ballmer, who is keynoting the SharePoint conference today, is planning on highlighting a few of them, including the new Ribbon interface; Office integration (with social tagging, Backstage integration and document lifecycle management; new content-management features; integration with Visual Studio 2010; new business connectivity services for developers building line-of-business apps and Web services; and support for Silverlight, REST and LINQ.

SharePoint is a $1.3 billion business for Microsoft — despite the fact that many customers still ask Ballmer what SharePoint is, as he acknowledged during his conference keynote remarks. The 2010 release, as I mentioned Friday, the SharePoint 2010 release the fourth iteration of SharePoint that Microsoft has fielded in the past eight years. How did it become the fastest growing server product at Microsoft?

“SharePoint hit the market just as collaboration, particularly workspace technologies, were getting very hot. The suite message with portal, search, content, BI and application development along with the core need for better collaboration resonated,” said Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz.

SharePoint analyst Janus Boye of J. Boye consulting had a different take as to how SharePoint sales have skyrocketed.

Boye attirbuted the growth to “mostly clever sales and marketing (on Microsoft’s part)by bundling the product with Office and other licensing agreements. This means that project managers and others have had to argue with management why NOT to choose SharePoint before getting permission to do a proper market evaluation. Since many customers have had the impression that they have already paid for SharePoint, many have had to fight hard to get to use something else.

In the coming months, Microsoft will be playing up SharePoint’s developer-centric capabilities; the ways that the product is improving on the enterprise social-networking capabilities that it introduced several of years ago; and the tighter synergies between the on-premises and online versions of SharePoint.

Microsoft has its work cut out for it with the new release of SharePoint, company watchers say. Even though the new capabilities coming in 2010 are all needed, IT budgets remain tight. And even though Microsoft execs are playing up SharePoint 2010 as a major new release, there aren’t any revolutionary features in the product; instead the new capabilities are more evolutionary, market analysts say.

“SharePoint is strong in collaboration but less mature in social, ECM (enterprise content management) and application development” — all areas Microsoft is emphasizing with the 2010 release, Koplowitz said. In the enterprise social-networking space, in particular, “SharePoint is more of a fast follower than a leader and will look to make a big leap forward with 2010,” he added.

Update: A few more things to know about the SharePoint 2010 release: It’s 64-bit only and requires Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  Recommended memory is a minimum of 8 GB. It also requires SQL Server 2005 SP3 with CU (Cumulative Update) 3 or SQL Server 2008 SP (Service Pack) 1 with CU2 or SQL Server 2008 R2 (still in beta but will be supported when RTM).

Previously: What makes Microsoft’s SharePoint tick?

October 19th, 2009

Testers to get Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 this week; final by March 2010

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:44 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Multicore/distributed computing, SharePoint Server, Silverlight (wpf/e), Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: Microsoft Developer Network, Microsoft Corp., Beta, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Development Tools, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is making what may be the last beta of Visual Studio 2010 and the accompanying .Net Framework 4 before they launch next March available to testers this week, company officials said.

MSDN testers will be able to download Beta 2 on October 19. Microsoft plans to open the beta to the public on October 21. The company is planning to launch the final version of its latest development suite on March 22, 2010, officials said. Microsoft’s goal is to deliver the actual bits by that date, not just to hold a launch.

Microsoft launched Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 in May.This past summer, Microsoft officials told partners to expect the marketing/training/sales push for Visual Studio 2010 to begin in April 2010, so it sounds like the development is running on schedule.

Microsoft is positioning Visual Studio 2010 as its tool platform to support Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Azure, SQL Server, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Support for SharePoint 2010 is new, as of Beta 2, officials confirmed. SharePoint is the “fastest growing platform, from a developer mindset,” for Microsoft at this point, said Dave Mendlen, Senior Director of Developer Marketing.

Visual Studio 2010 also includes new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation; interoperability with the ASP.Net model view controller (MVC), better multicore support and UML support.

Microsoft is touting .Net 4 as being 81 percent smaller than its predecessors, making it quicker and easier to download and install. Also unlike its predecessors, .Net 4 can be installed side-by-side with the previously released .Net 3.5. It adds support for the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), giving programmers more language choices; and is more suited for parallel-programming, workflow-centric and service-oriented application development, according to the company.

“Beta 2 is not about dramatic changes to the features but is more about improvements to the performance and quality,” said Soma Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Developer Division.

Microsoft officials also shared on October 19 more details about the planned packaging and pricing for Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft is cutting the number of SKUs of Visual Studio to four main ones, and is doing away with the database, architect and test versions. The four:

• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN. Includes all of the current Visual Studio Team System functionality. $11,924 for a new license ; $3,841 for a renewal
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN. $5,469 new; $2,299 renewal
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN. $1,199 new; $799 renewal
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional without MSDN. $799

MSDN subscribers will be getting unlimited access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 (upon release), its team-collaboration server; a set (variable) number of compute hours per month for Windows Azure development; and up to 40 hours per year of e-learning classes per subscriber.

To attempt to get developers to move to MSDN Premium before Visual Studio 2010 launches, Microsoft has created the Ultimate Offer for VS developers. Anyone who is an active subscriber to MSDN Premium by the time Visual Studio 2010 launches next March will be transitioned automatically to the next higher level VS 2010 SKU with an MSDN subscription at launch.

September 9th, 2009

Microsoft in 2010: What do IT managers need to know?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:08 am

Categories: Azure, Corporate strategy, Exchange Server, Management tools, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, SharePoint Server, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 /("Windows 7 Server")

Tags: IT Manager, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

I’m presenting via Webcast on Thursday September 24 as part of Keystone Learning’s Smart IT Sessions virtual conference.

My topics are both IT-specific. I’ll be providing a roadmap for a number of Microsoft’s business products and services that are expected over the next 12 months in the “Microsoft in 2010: What IT Managers Need to Know” session at noon ET. And at 2 p.m. ET, I’m going to be talking about Office 2010 and doing my best to separate the fact and fiction surrounding Microsoft’s next Office release.

Hope you can join in for one or both sessions. There are a number of other interesting IT-specific presentations slated for the conference by a variety of Microsoft-savvy speakers that are also worth checking out. Meanwhile, f you’re an IT manager and have any topics you’d like to make sure I touch upon in my Webcasts, please e-mail me with your thoughts. Confidentiality is guaranteed (unless you’d prefer a mention, of course).

Meanwhile, speaking of Office, on the latest episode of the “Microbite” podcast, my co-host Gavin Clarke of The Register and I had plenty to say about Microsoft’s challenges with Office 2010, Windows Mobile and more. You can listen here to “Ballmer’s Last Laugh” (which does not include any actual CEO guffaws, just to be clear)….

September 2nd, 2009

More Microsoft PDC 2009 sessions revealed

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:31 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Red Dog, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Windows Mobile, Windows client, Windows server

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Session, PDC, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Advertising & Promotion, Operating Systems, Software, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

When Microsoft opened up registration for its Professional Developers Conference in early August, company officials shared previews of 25 of the planned sessions.

On September 1, Microsoft published 31 more PDC session descriptions. Not too surprisingly, given that Microsoft plans to remove the “beta” designation from its Azure hosting platform around the time of the show, there are lots more Azure developer sessions now on the PDC docket (including one that promises to detail how Azure has changed since Microsoft first described it at last year’s PDC and where it’s going in the future). As I blogged recently, Microsoft’s been removing a number of the pieces of the Azure cloud platform company officials outlined last year.

There are a couple of new sessions on the SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight realtime complex-event-processing technology that Microsoft recently released to testers. For Windows and Windows Server developers, there are some new sessions on Windows Communications Foundation 4.0 and the Dublin app server.

This year’s PDC is slated for mid-November. I’m hearing Microsoft may be moving back toward making PDC an annual event, but no official confirmation of that… Also, somewhat surprisingly, there are still no sessions listed on Windows Mobile (either 6.5 or 7.0). But Microsoft is trickling out the session abstracts gradually, so there’s still hope for mobile developers looking for more meat.

August 21st, 2009

PHP developers get a new bridge to .Net

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:06 am

Categories: .Net Framework, App Compatibility, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Open source, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii"), Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas)

Tags: Data Service, Developer, Team, Microsoft ADO.NET, PHP, Microsoft Corp., ADO.Net Data Services, PHP Toolkit, Scripting Languages, Team Management

Microsoft’s Interoperability Strategy Team released on August 21 an open-source tookit for PHP developers who want  to use Microsoft’s ADO.Net Data Services (codename “Astoria”).

ADO.Net Data Services exposes data, represented as Entity Data Model (EDM) objects, via web services accessed over HTTP. The data can be addressed using a REST-like URI.

The toolkit, which is available for download from Microsoft’s CodePlex repository site, was funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. The goal of the toolkit is to allow developers to connect to and take advantage of services built using ADO .NET Data Services, which are part of the larger .Net Framework. It is available under a BSD license.

Microsoft already suppots ADO.Net Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and will be supporting it next year with Visual Studio 2010, as well.

The new PHP toolkit is one of 25 or so projects being developed and/or funded by Microsoft’s Interoperability Strategy team. The team, which consists of between 100 and 130 developers, is charged with supplementing Microsoft product teams with technologies that will make Microsoft products more interoperable with those from other vendors, said Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect for Interoperability Strategy.

“We are like a SWAT team,” Rajagopalan said. “We can quickly develop technology bridges. We’ve set up a heat map, based on feedback from our Customer Interoperability Council.” Once priorities are set, Microsoft often provides seed money and program managers to help build missing interoperability pieces.

Earlier this year, the team made available a PHP development kit for Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-based operating system.