Category: Microsoft Products

The look into the future: Windows 8 Server with Hyper-V Replica

Microsoft’s Windows 8 server shows big Hyper-V improvements for scalability and replication. Windows 8 Server edition has about 100 new features, but the main focus was on Hyper-V and a new feature called Hyper-V Replica that provides “asynchronous, application-consistent virtual machine replication.”

At the moment the main information about the Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server comes from official Building Windows 8 blog. SoftElegance keeps follow the blog to stay in touch about the new features comes with new MS’s OS.

building windows 8 blog

At Windows 8’s recent partial unveiling, Microsoft demonstrated a mission-critical SQL VM being replicated from a private cloud to the offsite data center with a few clicks. Also it was showen Hyper-V supporting 16 virtual processors per VM, up from the 4 supported today.

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Project Daytona — a set of tools for working with Big Data, from Microsoft Research

Microsoft has developed an iterative MapReduce runtime for Windows Azure, code-named “Daytona”. Project Daytona is designed to support a wide class of data analytics and machine learning algorithms. It can scale out to hundreds of server cores for analysis of distributed data.

SoftElegance has started to explore this new data analysis and processing framework under the SoftElegance Research Lab initiative which officially will be started next month.

Project Daytona was developed as part of the eXtreme Computing Group’s Cloud Research Engagement Initiative. The project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure was developed for the organizations who have large and growing data collections and need tools to find signals in data and uncover insights.

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Internet Explorer Platform Preview. IE10 HTML5 Test and Screenchots

Yesterday, April 12, 2011 at Microsoft MIX, a developers conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft has announced Internet Explorer platform preview. It’s first preview of IE10.

internet explorer platform preview

In this post we will show the screenshots how new IE10 will render HTML5. There are some examples from websites supporting HTML5 technology and how they could work (look) in future Internet Explorer 10.

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Microsoft Webcast: Best Practices for Building Cross-Browser Web Applications

The “Best Practices for Building Cross-Browser Web Applications” webcast was recorded on Monday, December 13, 2010.
The webcast was represented by Pete LePage, Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft Corp.

msdn logo

Pete LePage discuss what to do and what don’t to build a real cross-browser application. Also there were discussed challenges that could be faced during web development.

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XEN Success Story: Windows Server 2008 R2 on XEN 4.0

SoftElegance has successfully lanced XEN 4.0.0 on OpenSUSE 11.3 on Intel® Server System SR2600URBRP Server. The Server configuration is Intel Quad Xeon E5630, 12Gb of RAM, and MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i.

The main goal was to create virtual machines on this server to run MS SQL Server 2008 and TFS 2010. So we’ve created following OS:

  • Windows Server 2008 RC2 with both MS SQL Server 2008 and MS SQL Server 2008 R2 to run different database instances for specific project’s requirements;
  • Windows Server 2008 RC2 to run TFS 2010;
  • FreeBSD 8.1 for other needs.

Problem:

The General issues that could be a bottleneck for virtualizing are:
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Announcing DevConnections 2010. The biggest Microsoft .NET event of the year.

Next week will start the greatest .NET conference and exhibition of the year 2010. Today we would like to introduce you with this upcoming event.

This year DevConnection back in Las Vegas, Nevada at November 1-4, 2010.
devconnections logo
DevConnections provides comprehensive information how to develop applications with the Microsoft stack – .NET framework, Visual Studio, Azure, Windows Server, Office, SharePoint, SQL Sever, Mobile, and beyond.

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Microsoft has moved Office to the Cloud. Now it’s Office 365 beta.

Chris Capossela, Microsoft senior vice president, has demonstrated Office 365 at a press event in San Francisco.

Office 365 is online version of the Microsoft Office Professional Plus desktop suite plus it include Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online.

office 365

Office 365 it a next Microsoft’s step moving it services to a cloud.

Providing Office as an online service will mean that Outlook exchange and document programs that have been fixtures on business networks will be accessible not only from desktops and laptops, it could be accessible through smartphones, tablets, and other gadgets used by an increasingly mobile workforce.

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Internet Explorer 9 beta screenshots

Microsoft has official released Internet Explorer 9 beta September 15, 2010 in San Francisco.

IE9 will have nearly complete support for HTML5 and CSS 3 selectors, border-radius CSS 3 property, faster JavaScript, hardware-accelerated graphics rendering, text rendering, video rendering and imaging support.

internet explorer 9 beta

Internet Explorer 9 beta available for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows 2008 server. IE 9 does not supported on Windows XP. It available for download from Beauty of the Web.

The screenshots:
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Windows Azure. The new cloud platform from Microsoft

Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform is a cloud computing platform offering that “provides a wide range of Internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the Internet”. That’s what the official Azure’s website says. And we see that Microsoft is moving to cloud computing like Google Apps, Amazon, SalesForce and some other already does. Azure is a PaaS or “Platform as a Service” and it used to be free to use but now (starts from June 28 there is some additional charges for computing time, storage and data transferring).

Some words about cloud computing. Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information, are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid. Cloud computing layers could describe this architecture the best and shows the difference from client-server (client – application server – server) architecture. Cloud computing layers are:

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