Using the 4 easy steps provided in this article, you’ll be able to activate a Windows Azure 30-day free trial subscription , suitable for building your Lab in the Cloud for Windows Server 2012 R2 or Linux without the need for local on-premises lab hardware...(read more ) ... (more)

AJAX and RIA Market Is Heating Up: Sun CEO

"The economy might be cooling down, but the RIA market is definitely heating up," declared Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently in his widely-read industry blog. Schwartz was writing as Sun shipped its 100,000,000th JavaFX runtime - a download rate that makes it the fastest growing RIA platform on the market and demonstrating the fastest adoption of any product Sun has ever shipped. "What you can do with Flash is comparable to Silverlight, and again comparable to JavaFX," Schwartz noted, adding: "That said, must you use JavaFX or Flash or Silverlight to be a part of the rich internet future? Well, no - Apple used Objective-C for the iPhone, after all, completely discrediting the purist notion that if the app isn't written with a web scripting language, it isn't fashion forward." Schwartz underlined the happy fact that the 100,000,000 milestone was reached just in tim... (more)

Cloud Expo, Inc. Announces Cloud Expo 2011 New York Venue

Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo - International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held in New York, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. Over 900 corporate sponsors and more than 65,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, tenfold more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, Chairman and Founder of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘soft... (more)

Microsoft Piggybacks on Eclipse

A release candidate of Eclipse4SL has arrived. That’s the open source plug-in Microsoft commissioned from Eclipse Foundation member Soyatec, a French-based “open solutions” company, so cross-platform Silverlight-based rich Internet applications can be built with the famed open source Eclipse IDE and make use of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Microsoft (whose Silverlight supremo, Scott Guthrie, is pictured below) says it will make for better interoperability between Silverlight and Java investments in web sites and web services. Soyatec is releasing Eclipse4SL under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 on SourceForge and has submitted the thing to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project. With Eclipse4SL, Microsoft says developers can use pure Eclipse project & resource management or Visual Studio. A project explorer is also available to manage the project re... (more)

Book Review: The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook

This book is much more than just a cookbook with a bunch of recipes in it. I have used plenty of cookbooks and they are never readable from cover to cover. I usually just familiarize myself with the recipes that are available, read the ones interesting to me at the time, and throw them on the shelf until I need them. This one I have not been able to put down. The author does a great job of mixing a traditional book with a recipe book. Most chapters contain both background information and recipes. Some chapters are mostly made up of recipes, and the first three chapters contain none to a very few. The first three chapters are dedicated to introducing the iOS SDk, Objective-C, and Xcode. I have listed the chapters below to give you a high level view of the topics covered. Introducing the iOS SDK Objective-C Boot Camp Building Your First Project Designing Interfaces Workin... (more)

Microsoft JV Buys Start-Up’s AzureOps Widgetry

Avanade, the global enterprise IT services company started by Accenture and Microsoft in 2000 to focus on Microsoft widgetry, has acquired the software written by a young 15-month-old SaaS operations start-up by the name of Opstera that helps manage cloud solutions, the underlying platform and dependent cloud services. The price it paid is unknown. The pair has reportedly been working together on a public cloud management service for Azure. The technology provides application monitoring and management of Windows Azure apps. The start-up said in a FAQ that "There is a strong need in the enterprise for comprehensive managed services that can guarantee a high level of availability and operational efficiency of the infrastructure similar to what they are used for on-premises solutions. Opstera software will be an addition to an already strong portfolio focused on clou... (more)

Why Windows Server 2012 R2: Step-by-Step Workplace Join

In Kevin Remde's post this week he talked about many new features for Windows Server 2012 R2 Active directory.  You can find his great post here: What’s New for Active Directory in Server 2012 R2.  One of the new functionalities he mentioned was Workplace Join.  Workplace join allows you to deal with the explosion of devices (Windows and Non-Windows (like iOS) connecting to your organization.  This has you constantly trying to maintain your organizations compliance and security.  Especially with users located all around the world across multiple platforms and devices this is a challenge. If this sounds like you currently or is soon going to be you then you will want to check out Workplace join.  Workplace join allows users to register devices (including IOS) for single sign-on and access to corporate data.  In today’s article I am going to take a look at how to set t... (more)

Gizmox Visual WebGui To Sponsor AJAX World Conference & Expo

Visual WebGui is an open source rapid application development framework for graphic user interfaces of IT web applications. Visual WebGui lets you cut down development time and risk factors to the minimum, throughout the life cycle of the application, without compromising on performance, security or complexity. Visual WebGui is the only framework that provides seamless integration to Visual Studio and the .NET framework which extends the paradigms of ASP.NET in both design-time and run-time to support WinForms development for web. Visual WebGui offering is unique and not more of the same (150 AJAX frameworks)! Visual WebGui replaces all of the ASP.NET methodologies which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications. To demonstrate one of the differences, Visual WebGui is the only framework that is p... (more)

AJAX and RIA Technology Will Be Free for All: Sun CEO

'Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one,' claimed Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently, as he reflected on the reinvention of the Java platform as represented by JavaFX. 'What's a rich internet application?' Schwartz wrote. 'It depends on your perspective,' he continued, adding 'From mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.' Writing in his popular industry blog, Schwartz gave a little of the background to Java's origins:"Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently JavaScript, would suffice. But browser based applications are hitting complexity and performance limits, and content owners are striving for hig... (more)

Spice Up User Experience with Silverlight

Microsoft introduced Silverlight as cross-platform, cross-browser next generation RIA solution. This session will use real world implementations to show you how to build a Silverlight application from start to finish, as well overall strategy why we should or shouldn't use Silverlight. No matter whether you have LAMP, ASP.NET or Java Web application, you can take advantage of Silverlight to impress your user with the "Wow" effects. Register for AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo Submit Your Paper to Present a Session Sponsor AJAXWorld Conference & Expo Speaker Bio: Sue Googe is a UI Architect with Edream Solutions. She has had a great passion for Web development since 1998 and specializes in creating visually appealing, highly usable yet extensible and maintainable Web applications using the latest Microsoft technologies. Googe balances business requirements, user experi... (more)

Ten Cloud Computing Predictions for 2009 - From Appirio

As the year draws to a close, many companies are left wondering what next year will bring for this year's hottest technology trend - cloud computing. To answer these questions, Appirio today released its top 10 predictions for how cloud computing will evolve in 2009 and the impact those trends will have on IT and business. Appirio's predictions reveal that in spite of our current economy, cloud computing will continue to see strong growth and investment over the next year - a prediction that industry analysts agree with as well. As more and more companies like Flextronics, Genentech and Harrah's publicly discuss their experience with cloud computing, it will pave the way for even more adoption over the coming year. "This year cloud computing made the leap from an interesting proposition to a viable option for even the largest of enterprises. In 2009 it becomes man... (more)