July 24th 2012 Links: Software development, Windows Azure, Office
Here’s our new entry in our link-listing series:
Software Development
Ahaha, we’re not quite there yet, but we sure are getting there 
Entity Framework now Open Source
Big news: The Entity Framework source code is today being released under an open source license (Apache 2.0), and the code repository is now hosted on CodePlex (using Git).
MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. Its goal is to allow XNA developers on Xbox 360, Windows & Windows Phone to port their games to the iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 8 Metro. (PlayStation Mobile development is currently in progress.)
Windows Azure
SOSP Paper – Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency
Wow, that’s interesting: the paper describes how Microsoft provisions and scales out capacity within and across data centers via storage stamps, and how the storage location service is used to manage their stamps and storage accounts. Then it focuses on the details for the three different layers of the architecture within a stamp, why these layers, what their functionality is, how they work, and the two replication engines.
A must read!
Office
Microsoft’s new Office: The cloud finally takes center stage
A sneak peek of Office 2013 (a.k.a. Office 15)
Microsoft released new Office (Customer Preview)
The new Office is available online (preview).
Introducing “Napa” – Office 365 Development Tools
The Visual Studio team released a preview of a new toolset called “Napa”, which is, as they say, “the easiest way to start building apps for the new Cloud App Model”.
Hope this helps,
Carl Anderson
