Julian's Blogtech

Microsoft unveiled on Wednesday refreshed versions of its Windows Azure software development kit and Azure tools for Visual Studio, which support the planned Windows Azure cloud services platform.

The refreshed releases offer improved integration with Visual Studio, performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios and improvements to the storage client and ASP.Net provider samples. Bug fixes are featured as well. Also included is added support to debug Silverlight in a Web role. Silverlight is Microsoft's browser plugin-based rich Internet application platform; Microsoft released the Silverlight 2 beta last year.

I am happy to present a new thing on CSS Globe: CSSG Collections! Approx. once a months I will design, code and give a way a collection of certain web elements for free. First in the series of CSS(G) collections are web forms. I am giving away 5 uniquely designed and coded web form styles. Hope you'll find them useful!

If you like these forms and want more of these collections, please consider bookmarking this page to your favourite social bookmarking service :)

We Web designers are a fickle lot. We love to experiment with things. We love to observe how people interact with our work. And we love to try out unusual design approaches that might possibly go mainstream and become a classic approach. As result, new design approaches come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them, new trends emerge.

Over the last months, we've analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. In this post, we present Web design trends for 2009: recent developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches. We also discuss situations in which these trends can be used and present some beautiful examples. Did you miss any recent development in this overview? Let us know in the comments!

Apple and Microsoft topped the list of InfoWorld's annual product award winners this year, nabbing three and four Technology of the Year Awards, respectively. Announced today, InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards recognize the best hardware and software products evaluated by InfoWorld reviewers during 2008.

Microsoft's four prizes include two for development tools and two for small-business solutions. Best Integrated Development Environment went to the matchless Visual Studio 2008, while Best Rich Internet Application Platform went to Silverlight 2 -- which shares the award with Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR. We don't like ties, but we're so impressed with the Microsoft and Adobe offerings that we couldn't choose between them.

Tech Analysis: SAAS offers a host of benefits for enterprises, from reduced upfront capital costs to less application management expenses to being able to more quickly roll out applications. However, when searching for a potential SAAS vendor, enterprise IT managers need to ensure that their vendor can meet uptime and performance expectations, and that the SAAS offering can adapt as the enterprise grows and changes. eWEEK Labs offers some suggestions about what enterprise IT administrators must find out when screening SAAS vendors.

ColourLovers.com, a design community site centered around the creation and sharing of inspirational color palettes, has added a special Expression download link to the palettes in three flavors: Design Swatch, WPF Resource Dictionary, and Silverlight XAML Resources.

The Parallels Summit is a three day event that features in-depth technical, business, and product sessions that will focus on Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Automation, and Virtualization.

With registration for the event already topping 1,000, the Parallels Summit 2009 is poised to become the biggest event in the hosting industry, the company announced this week. Taking place Feb 2-4, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, sponsors for the free event will include Intel, Microsoft, Enom, AMD, OpenSRS, Mesh.eu, ZT Systems, R1Soft, Open-Xchange, Webhostingday 2009, Cloudmark, Verisign, ePages, InterNetX, Sarito, Acronis, and Global Relay.

More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. Web application interface design is, at its core, Web design; however, its focus is mainly on function. To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that let their users get things done with less effort and time.

Even as businesses dramatically curb spending on technology, Microsoft's new $150 million advertising campaign aims to convince them that software can save them money in tight times.

The effort is the latest phase of the company's three-year-old "People Ready" ad push, which has tried to inject some pizzazz into Microsoft software products for business. These include everything from the company's Exchange messaging software to SharePoint, a product that lets workers share documents and collaborate on projects electronically.

More than 30 organizations, including Microsoft, Symantec and the National Security Agency worked together to expose the top 25 most dangerous programming errors.

Although a recent survey suggests small to medium-size business owners will focus more on data protection than virus prevention in 2009, a vulnerability report scheduled to be released today by a compendium of more than 30 organizations and funded by the Homeland Security Department's National Cyber Security Division, shows midmarket companies still need to be vigilant on a number of fronts when it comes to protecting their IT infrastructure from hackers.

More than half of all developers worldwide on average are expecting to work on SaaS (software as a service) applications within the next year, according to a new survey by Evans Data Corporation.

The highest percentage of developers actually working on SaaS projects now is in North America, at 30 percent. Evans Data conducted the survey in late 2008, polling more than 1,300 programmers around the world.

The beta release of the update to Windows Server 2008 will be of special interest to those who work with virtualization, as it unveils a key technology long-promised by Microsoft.
A blog on Microsoft's TechNet Website announced earlier this week that the "R2" beta version of Windows 2008 includes significant upgrades to Hyper-V, Microsoft's proprietary hypervisor. The most crucial of these is the introduction of "Live Migration," which allows virtual machines (VMs) to be moved from one physical server to another with no downtime or loss of connectivity.

Lost in the Windows 7 hype, Microsoft also released the beta of Windows Server 2008 R2, which is the companion to the client OS.

The company is aligning Windows Server 2008 R2, which briefly was referred to as Windows Server 7, and the client OS Windows 7 although Microsoft officials have not said if they will ship together.

But users who adopt both will get new security, network and other features although some of those will require network upgrades like implementing IPv6.

Microsoft and DotNetNuke announce that the popular DotNetNuke Web development framework has fully moved to the Microsoft CodePlex community source site, enhancing an existing collaboration between the two entities. Beginning with the DotNetNuke 4.9.1 and 5.0.0 product releases, DotNetNuke is now leveraging CodePlex's infrastructure for its core product distribution. DotNetNuke is an open-source Web application framework written in Visual Basic for the ASP.NET framework.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took center stage at the opening of the International CES Jan. 7 to announce that Microsoft would release a beta version of its new Windows 7 operating system this week. In addition, Ballmer announced new partnerships for its Windows Live Essentials product, including a deal with Dell that will allow Microsoft to pre-install Live Search with Dell’s consumer and small business PCs. Earlier in the day, Microsoft also struck a search deal with Verizon Wireless.

There are exciting new features in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will allow for an explosion of creativity in Web design. These features include CSS styling rules that are being released with the upcoming CSS3 specification. Realistically, you won't be able to use these on your everyday client projects for another few years, but for design blogs and websites aimed at the Web design community, these features can help you push the boundaries of modern Web design today, adding that extra spice to your design and helping the industry move forward.

While software development technologies continue to advance on multiple fronts, the complexity of software and its management remains a complicated, expensive problem. For instance, too many developers can become involved in a project, and those developers may not be around later to maintain the code they wrote. Plus, software requirements can change, and it can be difficult to track what, exactly, the software was supposed to do.

You might think from the title of this article that we might be profiling a solution from a huge New York firm, but it isn't exactly the case. It's actually a story that starts right here in my home state of Michigan. In Royal Oak, Michigan to be exact. For those who don't know Royal Oak is one of the affluent suburbs of Detroit where everyone comes to shop and for it's cool nightlife and the Detroit Zoo.

Microsoft has promoted Bob Muglia, the head of the company's server and tools division, to president, making him one of a handful of senior executives who carry this title.

Muglia's promotion to president of the Server and Tools Business (STB) group was confirmed by Microsoft on Monday. Previously, Muglia was a senior vice president.