Information excerpt-2014.5.16

Over half a year in 2014, Microsoft released a number of product and technology updates over the past few months, including the Windows 8.1 update package, Windows Phone 8.1 developer preview, and SQL Server 2014, visual Studio 2013 update 2, Office for iPad, etc. Of course, you cannot forget Azure and Office 365 released in China. If you are interested to see what new things will be available in 2014, you can view The 2014 Microsoft Product Roadmap.

For developers, the newly released Visual Studio 2013 update 2 includes some interesting new things:

• Universal Apps: as the name suggests, General Apps, that is, you can write a set of code programs, which can run simultaneously in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1.
• TypeScript: The Javascript superset programming language. It is compatible with Javascript and can be compiled into pure Javascript. It supports cross-browser running.
• Web tool: New tool features are added to better support Web development.
• Azure tool: Of course, it is essential to have support for the most popular Microsoft Azure development tools.
• . NET vNext: The Next Generation. NET update package, so that. NET can better support cloud-first and mobile-first development. Next Generation. NET has made great efforts in kernel innovation and cross-device applications, including. NET Native, Next generation JIT and SIMD. These new technologies will give full play to the hardware advantages, improve the performance of apps, and allow you to create apps (Unity and Xamarin) across devices ).

In addition, Microsoft has recently made encouraging decisions on Open source. ASP. net mvc, WebAPI, and Razor are all Open source. Open source is http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com, of course there is the next generation of ASP.NET--ASP.NET vNext. If you are interested in viewing all the open-source project directories officially owned by Microsoft, you can check them here.

Azure and Office 365 continue to heat up. Recently, Azure has a new feature supporting Azure RemoteApp preview. This is actually the Azure version of App-V. Here is a demo to taste fresh. For developers, they must be very concerned about how to design and implement an excellent Azure cloud service. You may have to check out the latest officially released sample project for Azure cloud services. This is a simple multi-tier application built using Azure SQL and Azure queues/blobs. You can learn the basic knowledge of building, testing, and deploying Azure cloud services, it lays the foundation for building more complex and powerful Azure cloud services. If you are a newcomer to Azure, take a look at a tutorial series of articles:

• Azure Cloud Service Tutorial: ASP. net mvc Web Role, Worker Role, and Azure Storage Tables, Queues, and Blobs-1 of 5
• Logging ing and Deploying the Azure Email Service application-2 of 5
• Building the web role for the Azure Email Service application-3 of 5
• Building worker role A (email scheduler) for the Azure Email Service application-4 of 5
• Building worker role B (email sender) for the Azure Email Service application-5 of 5

For Office 365, TechEd also mentioned a new preview version of Office 365 API tools for Visual Studio, which allows developers to use it to call Office 365 APIs. How to use the Office 8.1 API in your MVC and Windows 365 apps is as follows:

• Announcing Office 365 API Tools for Visual Studio-Preview (Part I)
• Using Office 365 APIs in your MVC and Windows 8.1 Applications-Part II