commerceserver.net Releases Commerce Server 10

commerceserver.net, an ISV based in Seattle and Ottawa, today announced the release of the latest version of its enterprise eCommerce software, Commerce Server 10. This marks the first independent release of the software previously sold and marketed as Microsoft Commerce Server.

Commerce Server 10 is the first release on the newly published roadmap for the product and lays the foundations for a rapid evolution of the product which will see it grow from a purely on-premise solution, to one which embraces the Cloud and hybrid scenarios over the next few years. It also adds support for the latest Microsoft server platforms Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5.

In addition to the new platform support, this release introduces a new site building framework with a set of open source starter sites for ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC and of course, SharePoint – all released via CodePlex. This new framework vastly simplifies the building of the presentation tier of eCommerce solutions.

“We are incredibly excited by the release of Commerce Server 10. Not only is it the fastest time-to-market of any Commerce Server release in history, we feel it is by far the most customer-focused and best performing iteration in the product's history. It represents a significant next step on our plans to rapidly evolve Commerce Server into the commerce platform of choice for the .NET ecosystem,” said Ryan Donovan, President and CTO of commerceserver.net.

As part of this announcement, commerceserver.net is proud to introduce a roster of worldwide implementation partners, with more being added each month. “We’re excited that many existing Commerce Server partners are supporting this release but encouraged at the approach from many new partners and customers wanting to work with the platform – it validates both our roadmap and our thinking that there is a vibrant market for a .NET based eCommerce Solution,” said Wayne Smith, Vice President of Product Management.

Source: BusinessWire 

Visual Studio 2012 met Visual COBOL integreet by MicroFocus

Integration achieves quality platform for modernizing business-critical COBOL applications

 Micro Focus , a specialist in the field of modernization, testing and management of enterprise applications, today announced that Micro Focus Visual COBOL integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. Developers can now use Visual COBOL within the development environment Visual Studio 2012. This allows existing COBOL applications are used, improved and deployed alongside other Microsoft platforms and programming languages ​​such as C #, Visual Basic and ASP.NET.

Organizations around the world depend on which enterprise COBOL applications run. These form the basis of many IT systems and business-critical processes. By integrating Visual COBOL and Visual Studio 2012, developers of both the current generation and those of tomorrow, use of leading development tools. Moreover, the productivity of the developer, in providing new and updated software, increased. Different development teams, which were previously spread across multiple technical disciplines, are now united and can therefore effectively together. Furthermore, organizations that make the transition to new platforms do not suffer from the lack of COBOL professionals.

"We are honored to partner with Micro Focus to work on the optimization of Visual Studio 2012," said Tom Lindeman, Director Visual Studio Industry Partner Program at Microsoft. "Visual Studio 2012 improves the development process and helps teams of any size needing to collaborate more efficiently. By adding Visual COBOL development teams have all the means to quickly provide quality and modern applications to build. "

Kevin Brearley, senior director of product management at Micro Focus: "Both Microsoft and Micro Focus walk at the forefront of technical innovation in the development and modernization market. We are constantly innovating and are proud that we are the new generation of COBOL development products can make to the current Visual Studio user. The integration is an important step that ensures that Visual COBOL not only now but in the future will continue to achieve business innovation. "

The main advantages of Micro Focus Visual COBOL are:

The ability to critical business applications ready for the future. The applications can be migrated to Windows platforms and retain as their value.
The productivity and performance of the developers improved. This causes the expanded resources and the software can be quickly developed and delivered.
The ability to modernize COBOL systems and access to mobile and web channels.
More information about Visual COBOL is available at www.microfocus.com/vs2012 .

Borland DevPartner Studio 11
In addition to the integration with Visual COBOL, Micro Focus has also Borland DevPartner 11 with Microsoft Visual Studio integrated. This integration improves application development, reduces costs and speeds delivery of applications. Application developers can now solve problems from within Visual Studio 2012, locate instability and potential defects detection.

Microsoft Release New REST API Framework as Part of .NET 4.5

As part of the recent Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 launch, Microsoft formally unveiled its new web services framework called the ASP.NET Web API. Included as part of the ASP.NET MVC 4 offering, the open-source ASP.NET Web API is designed to simplify the development and consumption of RESTful services.

In a post called “Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?”, Rick Strahl of West Wind Technologies explains the purpose and benefits of the ASP.NET Web API.

ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers.

Strahl points out the core capabilities that make the ASP.NET Web API a natural fit for both existing users of the the ASP.NET MVC framework, and developers who need to build HTTP endpoints.

Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics
Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization
Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM
Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional
Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types
Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage
classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations
Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services
Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters
Self-hostable in non-Web applications
Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC
Microsoft already has an existing a web services framework called Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) which lets developers build contract-first services that leverage transport protocols such as TCP, HTTP and MSMQ. Originally built for SOAP-based services that want WS-* capabilities, WCF eventually added a handful of REST-friendly capabilities. While the ASP.NET Web APIs were initially aligned to the WCF framework, they were eventually shuffled over to the ASP.NET team as described in a Code Project article by Web developer Ido Flatow.

As time passed, the WCF Web APIs had a lot of trouble adapting WCF to the “native” HTTP world. As WCF was primarily designed for SOAP-based XML messages, and the “open-heart” surgery that was required to make the Web API work as part of WCF was a bit too much (or so I understand from people who were involved in creating the Web APIs). On the other hand, the ASP.NET MVC infrastructure with its elegant handling of HTTP requests and responses, and its support of easy-to-create controllers seemed like the proper way to go for creating this new type of services.

WCF remains alive and well in the latest .NET 4.5 release and Flatow identifies some of the decision criteria for choosing between WCF and the ASP.NET Web API.

If your intention is to create services that support special scenarios – one way messaging, message queues, duplex communication etc, then you’re better of picking WCF
If you want to create services that can use fast transport channels when available, such as TCP, Named Pipes, or maybe even UDP (in WCF 4.5), and you also want to support HTTP when all other transports are unavailable, then you’re better off with WCF and using both SOAP-based bindings and the WebHttp binding.
If you want to create resource-oriented services over HTTP that can use the full features of HTTP – define cache control for browsers, versioning and concurrency using ETags, pass various content types such as images, documents, HTML pages etc., use URI templates to include Task URIs in your responses, then the new Web APIs are the best choice for you.
If you want to create a multi-target service that can be used as both resource-oriented service over HTTP and as RPC-style SOAP service over TCP – talk to me first, so I’ll give you some pointers.
The ASP.NET Web API is included in Visual Studio 2012 and is also available as a download for Visual Studio 2010 users. Developers looking to get started with the framework will find many example projects available on the team’s Codeplex site.

Microsoft announces Visual Studio 2012 RC

The Release Candidates are available for download with "Go Live" licenses, in time for the Windows 8 Release Preview.

Microsoft is one step closer to delivering the final versions of its Visual Studio integrated development environment and the .NET Framework 4.5. The Release Candidates are available today for download with "Go Live" licenses, in time for the Windows 8 Release Preview, which was also released on Thursday.

The Release Candidates of Visual Studio 11, now officially named Visual Studio 2012, are available to all developers (including MSDN subscribers). In addition to a new name, and a new purple logo, Microsoft is reintroducing a customizable setup process that allows developers to bypass installation of select Visual Studio components.

With or without a streamlined setup, users of the Release Candidates should see improved installations, which are about 20 percent faster than the beta releases, according to Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jason Zander, who heads the Visual Studio team.

Zander provided an overview of what's new in the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate in his blog and offered a demonstration of some of those features in a Channel 9 Visual Studio Toolbox video, hosted by Robert Green. In addition to the updated user interface, which reintroduces some color in the icons and elsewhere in response to developer feedback on the beta; the RC offers performance enhancements in areas such as typing, the toolbox and large C++ projects, according to Zander.

With the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate, Microsoft is introducing more Web publishing features, for example, additional support for Entity Framework Code First Migrations. The Release Candidate also supports Web site optimization through bundling and minification (removing unnecessary characters from source code) in JavaScript, and ASP.NET MVC 4 projects.

In addition, the Release Candidates introduce significant updates to the Visual Studio XAML designer and Microsoft Expression Blend tooling, according to Zander. For XAML projects, Microsoft is introducing theme animations from an Animations library, as well as a devices panel, which enables you, for example, to see the FullScreenLandscape, FullScreenPortrait, Filled, and Snapped states of Metro-style apps. Expression Blend for HTML supports the display and editing of multiple images, background gradients and components. It also adds the ability to cut and paste styles (CSS properties) between rules.

The company announced the official Visual Studio 2012 product lineup and specifications on May 18, when the next generation of products was still codenamed "Visual Studio 11." The Visual Studio 2012 editions and hardware requirements remain largely unchanged from Visual Studio 2010 outside of the free, lightweight Visual Studio 2012 Express tools, which are now platform-centric.

Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate is the company's all-in-one Application Lifecycle Management platform. It integrates all of the tools (including the higher end testing functionality and design tools) with Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server for team collaboration. Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry, the product unit manager for Team Foundation Server (TFS), details the changes in the Visual Studio 2012 TFS Release Candidate in his blog. Visual Studio 2012 Premium offers most of the diagnostic and testing tools without the high level architecture and modeling support. Visual Studio 2012 Professional is the entry-level developer product. Visual Studio LightSwitch, which was introduced out of band last summer and formerly a standalone product, is now available in all three editions. Visual Studio 2012 features LightSwitch version 2, which adds Metro-style templates and support for the OData protocol.

Changes to Express Tooling
With the unveiling of the Visual Studio product lineup earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the free Express tools are now platform-centric with multiple language support. So far the company has previewed Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 (Metro-style apps), Visual Studio 2012 Express for the Web and Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server Express. All three Release Candidates are available for download.

The earlier previews of Visual Studio 2012 did not support Windows Phone development or the out of band Windows Azure upgrades. Microsoft has announced that it is planning to introduce Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone with the next release of Windows Phone, and Windows Azure tooling in conjunction with an upcoming upgrade to its cloud platform.

You can still download and use the language editions of Visual Studio 2010 Express (Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++) free of charge.Visual Studio Express 2010 tools and apps will run on Windows 8, according to a Microsoft.

Visual Studio 2012 targets Windows Vista and higher. Some existing apps may not be compatible with .NET 4.5, which is an in-place upgrade. Developers can use Visual Studio's multi-targeting support to run managed applications on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 with .NET 4 and earlier versions of the framework, according to Microsoft. However, multi-targeting for C++ requires a side-by-side installation of Visual Studio 2010.