Microsoft Tuesday - Interesting Links - #10

It’s time to compose today’s post with interesting links for you to read and stay up-to-date on latest and greatest happening in Microsoft platform. In today’s post, you will find links on Skype, Outlook, Azure, Visual Studio, Power Shell and more.

Stay tuned for more updates. Don’t forget to share your feedback in this channel. Will be very happy to read your feedback.

Visual Studio for Game Development: New Partnerships

Game developers build the apps that hundreds of millions of users play every day across a wide variety of devices, from Xbox and Windows to iOS, Android, and the Web. For many years now, it’s been great to see Visual Studio be one of the industry’s most popular tools for game development, used by big game studios and indie developers alike. Today, we are taking support for game development in Visual Studio forward in a big way through collaborations with three of the premier independent gaming engine providers: Unity Technologies, Epic Games, and Chukong Technologies. (read more...)

PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio - Now Available

A few days ago Jason Helmick asked Jeffery Snover on the MCP Insider Series when we’d see PowerShell in Visual Studio.  That actually wasn’t the first time the question had been asked.  Well, here’s the answer…  Today at the PowerShell Summit North America 2015, Andre Sayre gave a demo of PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio, an extension for Visual Studio that provides edit, run and debug capabilities for PowerShell scripts and modules in the Visual Studio IDE. Over the past few months we (at Microsoft) have been working with Adam Driscoll, a Microsoft MVP who started this extension back in 2013.  Adam released it as open source on GitHub and a few months ago Microsoft created a fork to join community and contribute to the project. (read more...)

Introducing the Skype Web SDK

The upcoming Skype Web SDK is a client-side SDK uniquely suited to developing web applications using the features of Skype for Business. The Skype Developer Platform for Web (“Skype Web SDK”) is a new set of JavaScript components and HTML controls that enable developers to build new web experiences that seamlessly integrate a wide variety of real-time collaboration models leveraging Skype for Business services and the larger Skype network. (read more...)

Outlook for Android comes out of preview

In January, we released Outlook for iOS and a preview of Outlook for Android. At the time, the iOS version of Outlook was ahead of the Android version in terms of features and performance. We set a high bar for where we wanted Outlook for Android to be before we removed the preview label. Since our preview release we’ve updated Outlook for Android 17 times—that’s more than one update per week—to meet this bar. A big part of that work has been improving the performance and stability of the app along with work on localization, accessibility and other fit and finish pieces. The other part of this work was about delivering features to add new value, match the iOS version and respond to your feedback. (read more...)

Boost App Performance with Server-Side JavaScript in Azure DocumentDB

Did you know Azure DocumentDB supports the transactional execution of JavaScript logic natively inside the database engine? The approach of using JavaScript as a modern day T-SQL provides developers a rich and familiar interface to implement business logic. This is expressed in the form of stored procedures, triggers, and user-defined functions (UDFs). In this post, we will take a closer look at DocumentDB’s interpretation of stored procedures. (read more...)

Announcing Azure Service Fabric: Reducing Complexity in Hyper-scale World

Cloud computing continues to change the way that businesses reach their customers. In today’s hyper-competitive environment, ISVs and startups are on the leading edge of this change. They are constantly challenged to find better ways to build scalable cloud services in order to get to market quickly. For developers, growing their businesses while designing for reliability and scale are equally challenging. Last month we released Azure App Service, a high productivity solution for developers who need to create enterprise-grade web and mobile app experiences. App Service provides a complete platform as a service solution that enables you to deploy and elastically scale applications in the cloud, and seamlessly integrate them with on-premises resources and SaaS based applications. (read more...)

Enabling greater transparency and control

Over the past few years, we have seen the security environment change and evolve. Cyber threats are reaching new levels, involving destruction of property, and governments now act both as protectors and exploiters of technology. In this changing environment, two themes have emerged when I talk with our customers – 1) they want more transparency from their providers and more control of their data, 2) they are looking for companies to protect data through leading edge security features. (read more...)

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In case you missed the last week’s post, here it is for you: Microsoft Tuesday - Interesting Links - #09. Thanks to Microsoft India for their support in building this Microsoft Tuesday channel in my blog.