Microsoft Tuesday - Top News - #03

It’s Tuesday again and I am back with the top news floating in Microsoft platform. Above the fold you will find the announcement of Universal Apps for One Windows Platform, Microsoft’s new web rendering engine, new apps announcement from Microsoft garage, Microsoft Band SDK for developers.

Don’t forget to share your opinions on these posts. Thanks to Microsoft for helping me to compose the “Microsoft Tuesday – Top News” post.

Earlier today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I provided developers a first look at the Windows 10 developer platform strategy and universal app platform. I encourage you to tune in to our Build conference in April for the full story.

Windows 10 represents the culmination of our platform convergence journey with Windows now running on a single, unified Windows core. This convergence enables one app to run on every Windows device – on the phone in your pocket, the tablet or laptop in your bag, the PC on your desk, and the Xbox console in your living room. And that’s not even mentioning all the new devices being added to the Windows family, including the HoloLens, Surface Hub, and IoT devices like the Raspberry Pi 2. All these Windows devices will now access one Store for app acquisition, distribution and update.

As we announced last month, Project Spartan will be the new browser across all Windows 10 devices, from phones to tablets, PCs and beyond. You’ll hear about the new browser’s features in the coming months but in this post, we want to tell you more about what motivated us to build a new rendering engine focused on interoperability with other modern browsers ― all in the name of making the Web “just work” for our customers. This new rendering engine was designed with Project Spartan in mind, but will also be available in Internet Explorer on Windows 10 for enterprises and other customers who require legacy extensibility support.

Today it was announced that Chef and Microsoft Azure have joined forces to provide global enterprises with the automation platform and DevOps practices that increase business velocity to meet customer demand in the digital age. This agreement builds on 12 months of engineering work to integrate Chef’s IT automation platform with the Microsoft stack, helping customers rapidly move Windows and Linux workloads to Azure.

According to research firm IDC, DevOps will be adopted (in either practice or discipline) by 80 percent of Global 1000 organizations by 2019 (IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: DevOps in the United States, Dec. 2014).

A wave – of cross-platform apps – has arrived from the Microsoft Garage, and they bring a bounty of benefits, from easy access to Visual Studio Online projects to air quality reports in China to a way to connect to conference calls using voice commands. Building upon the initial wave of incubation apps launched from the Garage in October, DevSpace, Your Weather, and Join Conference are three of nine projects that continue the momentum from the fall. As eclectic as they are in function and design, the philosophy of the Garage ties them together.

Keeping with the quick cadence of releases, I’m happy to share Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6. Additionally, we are also announcing the release of Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP. You can download both these releases from the download center or from MSDN subscriber downloads. Don’t want to wait? Save time and try out this latest CTP on one of the public VMs hosted on Azure. Before you head off to try out the bits, I’d like to go over a few highlights from both of these releases, and to remind you to also check out Brian Harry’s blog post, Team Foundation Server 2015 CTP Release Notes, and Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 Release Notes for more details.

The Microsoft Band SDK Preview gives developers access to the sensors available on the Band, the ability to create tiles on the Band and send notifications to these tiles for their applications. Microsoft released it’s first SDK preview for developers.

Using the SDK you will now be able to build app for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone integrating Microsoft Band features. To know more about the SDK preview and downloadable links, read more.

Last week, we released a new version of the Azure Portal (v5.0). There is a lot of improvements in the portal, but I would like to focus on particular one: the keyboard shortcuts. Check it out! This is one of the first steps to make portal usable only with keyboard. Currently we are working on focus management (to have focus placed/restored on expected/useful items). We are planning to add more shortcuts, and keyboard shortcuts legend.

Did you miss last week’s Microsoft Tuesday newsletter? Find it here: Microsoft Tuesday – Top News – #02. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to get the updates I share. Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed and email newsletter to receive the immediate mail notifications of new post. Have a wonderful day ahead.