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18
April
2011

Microsoft opens up Office 365 as public beta
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msoffice365

Microsoft has opened the tap on its cloud-based Office 365 and is now offering the service as a public beta for anyone to try out.

Available in 38 countries and in 17 languages, the new beta follows several months of limited testing among a couple thousand businesses that were able to kick the tires on the service. After the public beta, Office 365 will officially launch later this year.

Unveiled last October, Office 365 is Microsoft's attempt to offer businesses a cloud-based alternative to some of its traditional desktop and server products. The service combines Office Web Apps with hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint as well as Microsoft's Lync product, which provides the online communication and collaboration piece.

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08
April
2011

Office 2010 Service Pack 1 is Almost Here
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Summer is just around the corner, and as promised, we are on track for delivering Office 2010 SP1 and SharePoint 2010 SP1 in mid-summer 2011. During the coming weeks, you will see various teams updating their blogs with specific information about changes to appear in Service Pack 1. These posts should provide customers and administrators with great information about the upcoming release.

Keep an eye on this blog and the two blog families below for updates on Office 2010 SP1 and SharePoint 2010 SP1:

http://blogs.office.com (and related product team blogs) 
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/
http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/

TechEd North America as a key venue where we will discuss SP1 at length, including the tentative release schedule. If you’re planning to attend, please be sure to stop into the session for details. We’ll also have more to share on this blog around that time as well.

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18
March
2011

Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 Release
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We are excited to announce that Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 Release Candidate (EF 4.1 RC) is now available. This is a fully supported, go-live release. In approximately one month we plan to release the final Release to Web (RTW). We are not planning any changes to the API surface or behavior between RC and RTW, the release is purely to allow any new bugs found in the RC build to be evaluated and potentially fixed.

 

What’s in EF 4.1 RC?

ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 RC introduces two new features:

  • The DbContext API is a simplified abstraction over ObjectContext and a number of other types that were included in previous releases of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The DbContext API surface is optimized for common tasks and coding patterns. DbContext can be used with Database First, Model First and Code First development.
  • Code First is a new development pattern for the ADO.NET Entity Framework and provides an alternative to the existing Database First and Model First patterns. Code First is focused around defining your model using C#/VB.NET classes, these classes can then be mapped to an existing database or be used to generate a database schema. Additional configuration can be supplied using Data Annotations or via a fluent API.

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17
March
2011

Microsoft's LightSwitch tool hits second beta
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large-custom-business-applications

Templates in LightSwitch, one of the things that users will be able to build and customize in beta 2.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The latest member of Microsoft's Visual Studio family is one step closer to a final release.

Microsoft today is releasing the second beta of LightSwitch, a software tool aimed at developers who want to build business applications that run as both native and Web applications.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The new version, which becomes available MSDN subscribers today, and everyone else on Thursday, adds a handful of new features from the previous beta, all aimed at increasing what can be done with the software.

The first is support for publishing applications to directly to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud services platform. This is joined by a tool for Visual Studio Professional (or higher) that lets users make LightSwitch application extensions. Examples of these include things like data sources, screen templates, and themes, all of which can be thrown in to speed up application development.

Besides the new features, Microsoft has also announced language support for German, which joins English. When the final version of the software hits later this year, Microsoft says, it will be available in an additional eight languages, matching the 10 that are supported in Visual Studio.

Since the release of the first LightSwitch beta back in August, the software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, according to Microsoft. LightSwitch continues to play a larger part in the company's initiative to let businesses and developers get a taste of the full Visual Studio experience, offering them a chance to bring projects to the more feature-fulled development platform if they outgrow the original intent. A full breakdown of the differences between LightSwitch and Visual Studio Pro can be found here.

 

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12
March
2011

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Now Available
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As of this week, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is now available for download!  The service pack was released to MSDN subscribers on March 8 and became generally available on March 10.  SP1 includes fixes that improve reliability and address the most commonly-reported customer bugs.  It also adds some of the most requested feature improvements, including a new local help viewer, IntelliTrace support in more scenarios, and built-in Silverlight 4 tooling.

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

Enjoy!

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