1. UML: Now draw UML diagram right from your Visual Studio. No need to buy another tool or go to Visio to do that.
2. Application Architecture Re-engineering: You have a ready made code-solution, now you have to explain it to some one but have documents. VS2010 will help you to draw an application architecture using you application code. This way you get a big picture of your application and also all linkages between different classes. Good for new joiners in an existing team.
3. Stuff for Manual Testers: Manual tester can breathe a lot better with VS2010 tools, log in all your test cases and select the test case to run and click record and then execute your test case as usual and see what you get. If test case passes, you get evidence (most clients in service based companies want that) as videos or if the test case fails, you get the steps to reproduce as videos. Cool, isn’t it?
4. Besides these a lot more in Unit Testing side.
5. A lot more features and integration with SharePoint.
6. Above all brings in .NET 4.0
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Showing posts with label microsoft updates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label microsoft updates. Show all posts
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Microsoft launched Robotics Studio 2008
Microsoft launched Robotics Studio 2008 in mid-November. New version of Robotics Studio is a whole set of tools designed to help developers write code that controls robots. The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation. It is aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handles a wide variety of robot hardware. Robotics Studio 2008 offers a suite of tools that makes it easy to write code that controls robots, from simple robots to advanced robots. Application developers can choose from the Visual Programming Language within the Microsoft suite or C# to create code.
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Cloud Computing with Microsoft , Google and Amazon
Cloud computing is Internet-based (“cloud”) development and use of computer technology (”computing“). The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet (based on how it is depicted in computer network diagrams) and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.[1] It is a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”,[2] allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet (”in the cloud”)[3] without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing “Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc.”
Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.
Microsoft , Google and Amazon has already launch their platform which worked base on the Cloud Computing Architecture. Microsoft Azure Platform , Google Apps Engine and Amazon Web Service are most reasonable example of Cloud Computing .
There are similarities. However, Azure supports any .NET 3.5 language (C#, VB.NET, F# and a number of others), whereas App Engine only supports Python. In addition Microsoft has already announced that eventually you will be able to run native code on Azure opening the door to almost any Language/Framework that runs in Windows (e.g. Java, PERL, PHP).
Google App Engine doesn’t provide local storage. Azure does (although it’s not shared across instances, you have to use the Azure Storage Service for that). I’m not sure what ancillary offerings Google has beside app engine, but Azure provides a number of services above and beyond the hosting service including
* SQL Data (and soon to be Reporting and Analysis) services,
* .NET Services (WF, WCF and Identity services in the cloud),
* Live Framework (too much there for words)
I’m pretty sure I’m missing something there, but it’s 2 in the morning. Basically the big deal here is that Azure has a lot to offer that GAE is lacking currently, and will have more to offer in the upcoming months. So yes it is equal to GAE…and then some.
Read More..
Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.
Microsoft , Google and Amazon has already launch their platform which worked base on the Cloud Computing Architecture. Microsoft Azure Platform , Google Apps Engine and Amazon Web Service are most reasonable example of Cloud Computing .
There are similarities. However, Azure supports any .NET 3.5 language (C#, VB.NET, F# and a number of others), whereas App Engine only supports Python. In addition Microsoft has already announced that eventually you will be able to run native code on Azure opening the door to almost any Language/Framework that runs in Windows (e.g. Java, PERL, PHP).
Google App Engine doesn’t provide local storage. Azure does (although it’s not shared across instances, you have to use the Azure Storage Service for that). I’m not sure what ancillary offerings Google has beside app engine, but Azure provides a number of services above and beyond the hosting service including
* SQL Data (and soon to be Reporting and Analysis) services,
* .NET Services (WF, WCF and Identity services in the cloud),
* Live Framework (too much there for words)
I’m pretty sure I’m missing something there, but it’s 2 in the morning. Basically the big deal here is that Azure has a lot to offer that GAE is lacking currently, and will have more to offer in the upcoming months. So yes it is equal to GAE…and then some.
Read More..
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Web 2.0 Marketing is Simpler than You Think
Experts say that a down economy is the best time to invest in marketing. At the same time you may be looking at your budget and wondering where the additional money will come to increase your marketing spend and what investments will drive the most revenue and profit for your company. Good news, all you need to know is a little about Web 2.0.
Marketing has grown beyond television, billboards and print. New Web applications are introduced almost daily. Each application allows your customers to interface with you and your business in a less-expensive, more productive manner.
Here are some quick ways to work Web 2.0 into your marketing plan:
Review your Web site
Look to increase ways for your customers to talk with you. Offer live chat options increasing your technical support or support desk offerings. ZaZa Chat and Volusion both offer easy to use interfaces for your customers and your business. Allowing your customers to talk with your representative in both the consideration and purchasing stages can extend the reach of your staff and offer the availability your customer is seeking. If you are ready to expand your service offerings, this is a great option for technical or help desk support, allowing you to offer more with less investment.
Measure Marketing Success
If you have a Web site, you must measure your site’s effectiveness and how your customers interact with you. If not, you’re missing out on importance of Web marketing. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft offer business solutions to increase your SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). Online marketing allows for greater measurability of your campaigns and promotions. Investing in a company that focuses on SEO and SEM can increase your marketing campaigns and drive both customer retention and incremental new business.
Start Talking More
There’s no end to the number of communication applications. Social networks like Facebook are adding more than 100,000 new users a week. Your customers are already there. Not sure how to use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Consult with a social media marketing specialist. A good writer can assist you with your profiles, blogs and community interactions. It’s worth the expense to have a dedicated resource to keeping your information updated as the online marketing can go stale in a week.
Invest in Databases
I love Excel spreadsheets, but they cannot do what today’s customer relation management (CRM) systems can do. You can track everything about your customer from conversations to purchases to campaign responses. It’s a fact worth repeating: it costs five times more to get a new customer than it does to grow business with your existing customers. Keeping your customer information up to date will improve your customer satisfaction rates and prevent costly sales errors. Are you growing your services business? CRM databases are a must. Allowing your staff from marketing, sales and operations to view the activities, purchasing habits and renewal dates is crucial to growing revenues and profits.
Read More..
Marketing has grown beyond television, billboards and print. New Web applications are introduced almost daily. Each application allows your customers to interface with you and your business in a less-expensive, more productive manner.
Here are some quick ways to work Web 2.0 into your marketing plan:
Review your Web site
Look to increase ways for your customers to talk with you. Offer live chat options increasing your technical support or support desk offerings. ZaZa Chat and Volusion both offer easy to use interfaces for your customers and your business. Allowing your customers to talk with your representative in both the consideration and purchasing stages can extend the reach of your staff and offer the availability your customer is seeking. If you are ready to expand your service offerings, this is a great option for technical or help desk support, allowing you to offer more with less investment.
Measure Marketing Success
If you have a Web site, you must measure your site’s effectiveness and how your customers interact with you. If not, you’re missing out on importance of Web marketing. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft offer business solutions to increase your SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). Online marketing allows for greater measurability of your campaigns and promotions. Investing in a company that focuses on SEO and SEM can increase your marketing campaigns and drive both customer retention and incremental new business.
Start Talking More
There’s no end to the number of communication applications. Social networks like Facebook are adding more than 100,000 new users a week. Your customers are already there. Not sure how to use Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Consult with a social media marketing specialist. A good writer can assist you with your profiles, blogs and community interactions. It’s worth the expense to have a dedicated resource to keeping your information updated as the online marketing can go stale in a week.
Invest in Databases
I love Excel spreadsheets, but they cannot do what today’s customer relation management (CRM) systems can do. You can track everything about your customer from conversations to purchases to campaign responses. It’s a fact worth repeating: it costs five times more to get a new customer than it does to grow business with your existing customers. Keeping your customer information up to date will improve your customer satisfaction rates and prevent costly sales errors. Are you growing your services business? CRM databases are a must. Allowing your staff from marketing, sales and operations to view the activities, purchasing habits and renewal dates is crucial to growing revenues and profits.
Read More..
Web3.0 - Cloud Wars: Will Google and Microsoft Meet in the Cloud?
In the last few weeks we have seen some interesting developments coming from both the Google and Microsoft camps, which could indicate a shift for both companies in their direction, and therefore the future of the internet.
Google has released its first operating system, Android. There are rumours that Google is creating a desktop operating system to rival Microsoft Windows and Linux. If these rumours turn out to be true, then Google is moving into new territory, and will be competing directly with Windows. These rumours have been further stoked with the emergence of Google’s browser, Chrome. There are suggestions that Chrome is intended to be much more than a simple browser, it will allow Google to improve functionality of web applications. And it is here that we see Microsoft moving in Google’s direction.
Google’s emphasis to date has been for free software provided on its own servers - Google documents, GMail, Blogger, Google Sites and Google Pages, Calendar etc. etc. Even though the performance of its Blogger software could be enhanced if there was a desktop version (Blogger has poor FTP support for those hosting Google blogs on their own domains) they refuse to move in that direction, as their emphasis is on hosted applications. Microsoft, on the other hand, has always provided its software on disk, with a licence. However, last week we heard that Microsoft will soon be offering an online version of its Office bundle, albeit with advertisements.
So, is Microsoft moving into Google’s hosted applications territory? Will Google attempt to move into Microsoft’s desktop operating system territory? What will this mean for the internet, and for these companies? Diversification can be a dangerous strategy for a company. Google’s strength lie in search and advertising. Although criticised for an over reliance on its search engine, Google does now dominate the search engine market. By moving into Microsoft territory it risks diluting its brand. Unless of course it chooses to use the Android brand for its desktop operating system, and keep Google separate for Search. And will Microsoft Office online erode Google’s own online documents? And what of Microsoft’s other internet venture, its new CMS (website content management system) which seems to be taking on both Google’s Blogger and other offline CMS’s such as Wordpress, in one hit? And it is open-source, which looks like a seismic shift in company policy. The new CMS from Microsoft is called Oxite. It is built using the new ASP.NET MVC framework and is highly extensible, with features such as Microformats and source control integration. Will this revolutionise the way people build web pages? Is Microsoft planning a range of free software options, all served on the “cloud”. If so, it will be finding Google waiting, and hopefully ready for battle. Can they actually collaborate on projects, or will it be all out War in the Clouds?
Read More...
Google has released its first operating system, Android. There are rumours that Google is creating a desktop operating system to rival Microsoft Windows and Linux. If these rumours turn out to be true, then Google is moving into new territory, and will be competing directly with Windows. These rumours have been further stoked with the emergence of Google’s browser, Chrome. There are suggestions that Chrome is intended to be much more than a simple browser, it will allow Google to improve functionality of web applications. And it is here that we see Microsoft moving in Google’s direction.
Google’s emphasis to date has been for free software provided on its own servers - Google documents, GMail, Blogger, Google Sites and Google Pages, Calendar etc. etc. Even though the performance of its Blogger software could be enhanced if there was a desktop version (Blogger has poor FTP support for those hosting Google blogs on their own domains) they refuse to move in that direction, as their emphasis is on hosted applications. Microsoft, on the other hand, has always provided its software on disk, with a licence. However, last week we heard that Microsoft will soon be offering an online version of its Office bundle, albeit with advertisements.
So, is Microsoft moving into Google’s hosted applications territory? Will Google attempt to move into Microsoft’s desktop operating system territory? What will this mean for the internet, and for these companies? Diversification can be a dangerous strategy for a company. Google’s strength lie in search and advertising. Although criticised for an over reliance on its search engine, Google does now dominate the search engine market. By moving into Microsoft territory it risks diluting its brand. Unless of course it chooses to use the Android brand for its desktop operating system, and keep Google separate for Search. And will Microsoft Office online erode Google’s own online documents? And what of Microsoft’s other internet venture, its new CMS (website content management system) which seems to be taking on both Google’s Blogger and other offline CMS’s such as Wordpress, in one hit? And it is open-source, which looks like a seismic shift in company policy. The new CMS from Microsoft is called Oxite. It is built using the new ASP.NET MVC framework and is highly extensible, with features such as Microformats and source control integration. Will this revolutionise the way people build web pages? Is Microsoft planning a range of free software options, all served on the “cloud”. If so, it will be finding Google waiting, and hopefully ready for battle. Can they actually collaborate on projects, or will it be all out War in the Clouds?
Read More...
Monday, December 15, 2008
Microsoft Azure Services Platform
What is it?
It’s a platform where you can deploy and manage new services or even complete web applications into the “cloud”, in addition to make use of existing services already provided by the platform. This is often referred to as cloud computing. Today the Azure platform contains the following services: Windows Azure (the platform), Microsoft .Net Services, Microsoft SQL Services and Live Services. Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services are also mentioned in relation to the platform. All of these services make up the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. By reading these names you may see the potential naming confusion? When you say Azure, do you mean Windows Azure or Azure Services Platform?
Now you may ask, what is it really? From a simplified developers perspective it’s a platform on the internet (the cloud). Instead of hosting your web application/service on your local server, you publish it into the cloud. In addition it gives you access to the services you need to build a multi-tier architecture. From another perspective it’s big monster of a datacenter providing you with a lot of data power (virtual Win 2008 servers) to do your stuff, giving you the option to scale up and down at will or dynamically.
How committed are Microsoft to this platform?
As committed as they’ve never ever been before with anything as far as I can remember! They invest heavily in the technology and infrastructure needed to support this platform. By heavily I mean they’ve told the marked that this is such a huge investment that it will highly impact Microsoft’s money bin. As an example of this, here’s a short description of what they’re doing with their datacenters needed to host this beast:
Every datacenter is set up of a grid of physical and virtual computers. These computers are delivered by HP and Dell and some in preconfigured shipping containers ready to be plugged in. I don’t mean the computers are ready to be plugged in, but the containers! What Microsoft then does is put a bunch of these containers close to a power plant (for obvious reasons), plug all the containers in and they’re up and running. At least that’s how it was described to me The applications, services, data etc you have put into this cloud is distributed across many VM’s, meaning if a VM or server (hosting VM’s) goes down, it’s not a problem. There is always some VM on some server holding your data. Actually the shipping containers I mentioned are remotely managed and MS never enters any of these containers for maintenance. If a computer goes down and does not come up again, it just stays down. If this happens to a certain number of servers within one container, the whole container is disconnected from the grid and sent back to HP or Dell to be fixed, without affecting any of the applications or services! This little story told by Clemens Vasters really says a lot of the scale on this monster!
read MOre..
It’s a platform where you can deploy and manage new services or even complete web applications into the “cloud”, in addition to make use of existing services already provided by the platform. This is often referred to as cloud computing. Today the Azure platform contains the following services: Windows Azure (the platform), Microsoft .Net Services, Microsoft SQL Services and Live Services. Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services are also mentioned in relation to the platform. All of these services make up the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. By reading these names you may see the potential naming confusion? When you say Azure, do you mean Windows Azure or Azure Services Platform?
Now you may ask, what is it really? From a simplified developers perspective it’s a platform on the internet (the cloud). Instead of hosting your web application/service on your local server, you publish it into the cloud. In addition it gives you access to the services you need to build a multi-tier architecture. From another perspective it’s big monster of a datacenter providing you with a lot of data power (virtual Win 2008 servers) to do your stuff, giving you the option to scale up and down at will or dynamically.
How committed are Microsoft to this platform?
As committed as they’ve never ever been before with anything as far as I can remember! They invest heavily in the technology and infrastructure needed to support this platform. By heavily I mean they’ve told the marked that this is such a huge investment that it will highly impact Microsoft’s money bin. As an example of this, here’s a short description of what they’re doing with their datacenters needed to host this beast:
Every datacenter is set up of a grid of physical and virtual computers. These computers are delivered by HP and Dell and some in preconfigured shipping containers ready to be plugged in. I don’t mean the computers are ready to be plugged in, but the containers! What Microsoft then does is put a bunch of these containers close to a power plant (for obvious reasons), plug all the containers in and they’re up and running. At least that’s how it was described to me The applications, services, data etc you have put into this cloud is distributed across many VM’s, meaning if a VM or server (hosting VM’s) goes down, it’s not a problem. There is always some VM on some server holding your data. Actually the shipping containers I mentioned are remotely managed and MS never enters any of these containers for maintenance. If a computer goes down and does not come up again, it just stays down. If this happens to a certain number of servers within one container, the whole container is disconnected from the grid and sent back to HP or Dell to be fixed, without affecting any of the applications or services! This little story told by Clemens Vasters really says a lot of the scale on this monster!
read MOre..
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