Monday, October 04, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch: coming to a city near you!

If you are a Microsoft developer, or are involved in any mobile phone development, you probably already heard about the new Windows Phone 7 and the developer platform.

728x90_Banner_WP7DevLaunch

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s reset of their mobile phone platform, from the ground up re-written and redesigned in order to compete and stay relevant in the fast paced world of mobile phone technologies.  We all know that the aging [dying] Windows Mobile platform (now in its v6.5 incarnation) was way past its expiration date, and if you are like me, suffering through the last few version of WinMo, then you know exactly what I am talking about.image

The new WP7 Dev Tools (SDK) was released in mid September 2010, and there’s already a lot of development going on since the early betas of the SDK were announced at PDC 2009.  The dev tools support only .NET development and gives developers two options for providing phone apps:  Silverlight or XNA.

In the upcoming months, the dev community will have the opportunity to attend FREE launch events either in person (at major cities) or virtually via wecasts.

You can register for these events by clicking the banner at the top of this post (GO, CLICK IT NOW…what are you waiting for???).

Related Links

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

SQL Server 2008 R2 Released Today

SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM’d today (technically a week ago, but publicly announced today), and wSQLServerR2_Bannerill be available on MSDN Subscribers downloads on May 3.  You can get the Express or trial edition today, though (if you can’t wait two more weeks for the developer edition).

It includes features such as, but not limited to:

  • PowerPivot – data visualize Excel add-in for high-performance “self-service BI”.
  • Reporting Services improvements, mapping/geospatial capabilities, Report Builder 3.0.
  • Master Data Services – an MDM application and service components for any-domain data hubs.
  • StreamInsight – event processing platform for monitoring and analytics of data in motion (think real-time business decisions).
  • Support for more processors (Datacenter edition).
  • Parallel Data Warehouse (formerly “Madison”) – highly scalable data warehouse appliance (based on DATAllegro)

If you like whitepapers and official docs, go here for marketing material: www.sqlserverlaunch.com

Here is the Microsoft Data Platform Insider blog about it: http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/

A ZDNet blog post about the release news: blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=5973&tag=col1;post-5973

Here is the official product website: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx

Here is a post from a team member on the SSRS group regarding Reporting Services in this release:
http://blogs.msdn.com/robertbruckner/archive/2010/04/21/sql-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx