Showing posts with label Windows Phone 7. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows Phone 7. Show all posts
The consumer push from Microsoft continued this week, with the retail launch of Kinect on November 4 and the opening of the newest Microsoft store in Oak Brook, Ill, the same day.
There’s more consumer news coming next week, as well as some goodies for business users as well.
On November 6 (Saturday), Microsoft will be opening another new Microsoft Store. This one will be in Bloomington, Minn., at the Mall of America. The Bellevue, Wash., store is slated to open on November 18.
On November 8, Microsoft and partners will make its first Windows Phone 7 phones available in the U.S. on AT&T. The Samsung Focus and HTC Surround will be available in stores that day (no pre-orders allowed). The HTC HD7 will be available from T-Mobile the same day, as well.
It will be interesting to see if the U.S. launch is as plagued by phone shortages as the earlier launches in other countries have been. Microsoft has more than 1,400 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace now, the vast majority of which are games at this point.
On November 8, Microsoft will kick off its TechEd Europe conference, which is targeted at IT professionals. From the docket, it looks like there will be lots of focus on the cloud, virtualization, its Lync PBX-competitor technology and more.
Microsoft is on tap to show off a new Windows 7 migration tool — “P2V Migration for Software Assurance” — at the conference. The P2V tool is a combination of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and the company’s Sysinternals Disk2 VHD product, and is currently in beta.
The Silverlight vs. HTML 5 panel at the show should yield a few fireworks, as well.
Other Microsoft tidbits from this past week about which I didn’t blog already:
Microsoft has released F# 2.0 under the Apache 2.0 license: The Microsoft F# team made a new drop of the F# 2.0 compiler and core library available this week as part of the F# PowerPack Codeplex project — all of which is now under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. Previously, F# was available under a Microsoft Shared Source license. Microsoft moved IronRuby and IronPython under the Apache 2.0 license just before the company offloaded those development efforts to the community. It doesn’t sound as if that’s the company’s intention with F#, however, as Microsoft recently integrated F# support directly into Visual Studio 2010.
Microsoft is moving the Seadragon Ajax project to the Expression team: Seadragon Ajax is the JavaScript implementation of the Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon project. SeaDragon is a library for DeepZoom viewing. Microsoft is in the process of disbanding Live Labs, and is sending most of the remaining Live Labs projects and employees to work on the Bing team. It looks like Seadragon Ajax will have a different home.
Microsoft may have another Azure prize-cut plan up its sleeve: On the heels of introducing the new “Extra Small Instance” pricing for entry-level Windows Azure developers, Microsoft may be readying another low-end pricing option, as cloud blogger Roger Jennings noted this week. Microsoft is surveying Azure users regarding their interest in a pay-per-use/consumption pricing model – something that would give Microsoft more leverage against Google with its Google App Engine platform-as-a-service offering. Extra Small instance offer doesn’t start until January 7, 2011 and requires participants to be Microsoft partners, Jennings said. But so far, there’s no start date, or even guarantee, that Microsoft will end up fielding pay-per-use Azure pricing.
One critical catalyst of platform adoption is related to the ecosystem of applications available for an OS, and the Redmond company knows this perhaps better than anyone.
In this context, it should come as no surprise that the software giant is offering a range of tools and resources as free download just to get developers to start building apps for Widows Phone 7.
With a developers community already estimated to be 12,000 members strong (and over 1,000 apps already on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace), Microsoft is offering the Programming Windows Phone 7 ebook for download completely free of charge.
The Programming Windows Phone 7 ebook was announced at the end of October 2010, but it went live on the Microsoft Download Center where it is up for grabs on November 2nd.
“This book is a gift from the Windows Phone 7 team at Microsoft to the programming community, and I am proud to have been a part of it,” reveals author Charles Petzold.
“Within the pages that follow, I show you the basics of writing applications for Windows Phone 7 using the C# programming language with the Silverlight and XNA 2D frameworks.”
The book can be leveraged by all devs, from beginners to those that have already put together apps for other mobile platforms.
According to Petzold, developers are only required to know basic principles of .NET programming as well as having a working familiarity with the C# programming language, and they can get right to work.
At the same time, devs will need the right tools to help them get the job done. As such they have to download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools, including Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0.
If they don’t have an actual Windows Phone 7 device they can take advantage of an on-screen Windows Phone Emulator for testing scenarios.
“This book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses basic concepts of Windows Phone 7 programming using example programs that target both Silverlight and the XNA framework.
“It is likely that many Windows Phone 7 developers will choose either one platform or the other, but I think it’s important for all developers who have at least a little knowledge of the alternative to their chosen path.
“The second part of this book focuses entirely on Silverlight, and the third part on XNA 2D. For your convenience, the chapters in each part build upon previous knowledge in a progressive tutorial narrative, and hence are intended to be read sequentially,” Petzold added.
Microsoft CEO Hypes Windows Phone 7: 'We're All In'
(By JESSICA MINTZ, AP/HUFFINGTON POST) REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pumped up unique features in the company's new Web browser and smart phone software at a software developer conference Thursday, the company's annual pep rally for people who will build programs for the Web, Windows computers and phones.
Ballmer is known for his onstage enthusiasm. This year, he joked with the crowd that he wouldn't repeat the memorable "developer prance" of years past, when he loped around hollering, "Developers! Developers!"
(By JESSICA MINTZ, AP/HUFFINGTON POST) REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pumped up unique features in the company's new Web browser and smart phone software at a software developer conference Thursday, the company's annual pep rally for people who will build programs for the Web, Windows computers and phones.
Ballmer is known for his onstage enthusiasm. This year, he joked with the crowd that he wouldn't repeat the memorable "developer prance" of years past, when he loped around hollering, "Developers! Developers!"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
