Microsoft Tuesday - Interesting Links - #08

Tuesday again and here I composed few interesting links for you to start reading. Above the fold you will find news about Visual Studio Product Line, Project Spartan – new browser built for Windows 10, Big Data to predict traffic jams and many more.

Hope, you will like this week’s collection on Microsoft Tuesday post. Share your feedback and let us know your views.

Day by day, Microsoft is making the developers life easier. Under one umbrella of Visual Studio 2015, you will be now able to develop applications for various platforms and devices. Also, on 12th November 2014, they introduced the Visual Studio Community 2013 edition which is Free for individual developers, students, open source contributors and small teams. As per the new product line offer, Microsoft is bringing the value of Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate under one offering named Visual Studio Enterprise, when they release the product in this Summer (May 2015). The other packages will remain same i.e. Visual Studio Community edition will remain as it is and will be still free for individual developers, students, open source contributors and small teams. Visual Studio Professional will also remain as it is.

In Visual Studio 2012, we introduced Visual Studio Graphics Diagnostics for Direct3D. Since then, with every update and release of Visual Studio and every monthly preview release we have continued our commitment to improve and deliver great new features in these Direct3D graphics tools. I recently had the opportunity to demonstrate the graphics tools in Visual Studio 2015 and Windows 10 at Game Developers Conference 2015. I was floored by the great response from developers. The conference seemed to go by in a blinding flash, I was so busy talking to developer after developer. The interest was so great, I thought it would be good to also blog about what is new, and how things are changing for graphics tools, Visual Studio and Windows 10.

Today I’m excited to share more details about “Project Spartan,” the new browser we are introducing in Windows 10. Project Spartan will be available across the Windows 10 device family. It is fast, compatible, and built for the modern Web. Project Spartan is designed to work the way you do, with features enabling you to do cool things like write or type on a webpage. It’s a browser that is made for easy sharing, reading, discovery and getting things done online.

We first shared details about Project Spartan on January 21, and it’s been really gratifying to see so much interest and excitement for our new browser. Today, we’re excited to announce that Project Spartan is available for the first time for Windows Insiders to try out as part of the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview build for PCs. You can read more about the new Windows 10 Technical Preview build here, or check it out by joining the Windows Insider Program.

Microsoft has partnered with the Federal University of Minas Gerais, one of Brazil’s largest universities, to undertake research that could help predict traffic jams up to an hour in advance. The Traffic Prediction Project is setting out to crunch all traffic data, including historical numbers where available, from transport departments, road cameras, Microsoft’s Bing traffic maps, and even drivers’ social networks, to see if established patterns can help foresee traffic jams from 15-60 minutes before they happen.

This blog post summarizes some of the recent additions for using Chef on Azure, as part of the ongoing partnership between Microsoft and Chef. Chef, one of the leading open source configuration management systems has been supported on Azure for a while and is being used broadly.These new changes combined with the already existing capabilities to automatically configure Chef on Azure Virtual Machines, provide an end to end experience for managing Chef on Azure.

Recently, we announced the Azure App Service which is a one-of-a kind cloud service that enables developers to build intelligent web and mobile apps for any platform and any device. App Service is an integrated solution that streamlines development, enables easy integration with on-premises and SaaS systems and provides the ability to quickly automate business processes. Azure App Service also introduces a new Premium Tier bringing increased scaling, deployment and service capabilities to app developers. In this post, I’d like to spend some time drilling into the benefits that come with the Premium Tier of App Service.

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In case you missed the last week’s post, here it is for you: Microsoft Tuesday - Top News - #07. Thanks to Microsoft India for their support in building this Microsoft Tuesday channel.