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  • AWS Marketplace Gets SharePoint Enterprise

    AWS Marketplace Gets SharePoint Enterprise

    Amazon announced that SharePoint Enterprise is now available to purchase and deploy in AWS Marketplace.

    Amazon’s Jeff Barr says, “Designed to suit the needs of many different types and sizes of organizations up to and including multinational enterprises, SharePoint Enterprise supports custom applications, mobile applications, social media integration, business intelligence, and advanced content management (none of which is available in the entry-level SharePoint Foundation product).”

    “This new offering helps customers to migrate their SharePoint and Windows Server workload and is made possible by the folks at Data Resolution,” he adds. “As a long-time SharePoint provider and Microsoft Hosting Provider, they have the background and experience needed to design and support a scalable implementation of SharePoint Enterprise in the AWS Cloud. They are already migrating one of their on-premises SharePoint customers to AWS, and are planning to work with us to produce a customer success story later this year. Data Resolution will also be offering consulting and migration services in order to make your transition to the cloud as smooth as possible.”

    The implementation utilizes Amazon’s AWS Marketplace Support for Clusters and AWS Resources.

    You can choose from Sharepoint Enterprise 2013 Basic, SharePoint Enterprise 2013 Business, or SHarePoint Enterprise 2013 Advanced. You can start with a free trial, and pay by the hour, by the month, or annually. You can also choose between 10, 25, and 100 user options.

    Sharepoint Enterprise can be run in the following AWS regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), or US West (Northern California).

    More info here.

    Image via Amazon

  • Microsoft Buys Xamarin To Help Developers Build Apps On Any Device

    Microsoft Buys Xamarin To Help Developers Build Apps On Any Device

    Microsoft announced that it will acquire Xamarin to “empower more developers to build apps on any device.”

    Xamarin is a mobile app development and creation software provider that is already in use by over 15,000 companies including Microsoft, Foursquare, Kellogg’s, Johnson Controls, Dow Jones, and jetBlue to name a few.

    Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie wrote a blog post about the acquisition, saying:

    In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

    Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Image via Xamarin

  • Twitter Launches Fabric Mobile App

    Twitter Launches Fabric Mobile App

    Twitter launched its developer platform Fabric in 2014, and today gave developers a dedicated Fabric mobile app for both iOS and Android.

    With the app, developers can keep an eye on what’s happening with their own apps and get notifications when something important happens.

    “We sift through millions of events every day to intelligently give you the most important information,” says product manager Meekal Bajaj. “And starting today, our real-time alerting system will send you a push notification when something critical is affecting your app.”

    “When you get a push notification from us, we’ll give you everything you need to know: full stacktraces, number of affected users, and breakdown of devices and platforms – all in real time,” Bajaj explains. “That way, even before you pull up your laptop, you know where to look for a bug, who on your team to reach out to and how it could affect your metrics.”

    You can grab the app now from the App Store or Google Play.

    Images via Twitter

  • Microsoft Now Lets You Deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Instances From Azure Marketplace

    Microsoft Now Lets You Deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Instances From Azure Marketplace

    Microsoft announced some new options for Azure, including that starting now, you can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from the Azure Marketplace.

    Microsoft announced a partnership with Red Hat back in November, and this is Microsoft delivering on that announcement.

    “Using these instances, customers of Red Hat and Microsoft will now be able to rapidly and seamlessly deploy instances for on-demand workloads, dev-test, and cloud bursting – all with the simplicity, scalability, agility and unique per-minute billing flexibility of Azure,” says Azure director of program management Corey Sanders. “The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions, except China and US Government, and can be deployed directly from the Azure Marketplace.”

    “Since we announced our partnership in November, we’ve seen strong interest and momentum from our customers looking to bring their Red Hat investments to Azure,” he adds. “We offer the best enterprise-grade support of the public cloud, by offering a fully integrated support experience with co-located Red Hat and Microsoft support engineers sitting side-by-side to help you when you need it!”

    Microsoft and Red Hat worked together to see that Red Hat subscriptions purchased through the Azure Marketplace provide integrated support through direct access to the Red Hat customer portal.

    Other announcements are that the Azure Container Service preview is now available for everyone and that Microsoft is certifying for the Azure Marketplace a group of Linux images created by Bitnami. They’re also enabling OneOps on Azure. More info on all of this here.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Adobe Launches ColdFusion 2016

    Adobe Launches ColdFusion 2016

    Adobe just launched ColdFusion 2016, the latest version of the solution for developing and deploying web and mobile apps.

    In an email, a representative for Adobe told WebProNews, “ColdFusion 2016 contains an all-new API management tool that allows ColdFusion Enterprise users to quickly move APIs from concept to production.”

    “There is also a new security code analyzer that automatically detects and mitigates potential code vulnerabilities in real-time,” they added. “Additionally, web developers now have more control when generating PDFs from within ColdFusion applications, including new features like native sanitation and redaction. Bottom line: the overall performance enhancements now allow existing web and mobile applications built with ColdFusion to run 30 percent faster.”

    You can get a broader description of what’s new here and peruse the product page here.

    Full license prices are $1,499 for ColdFusion Standard Edition and $8,499 for Enterprise Edition. The cost for upgrading to ColdFusion Enterprise Edition is $4,249. ColdFusion Builder is $299.

  • This Mac App Developer Platform is Now Free

    This Mac App Developer Platform is Now Free

    OS X app development and distribution platform DevMate is now free, makers MacPaw announced. The suite gives indie developers and Mac software vendors tools to sell apps outside the Mac App store.

    The suite includes tools for licensing, crash reporting, update delivery, and feedback collection.

    MacPaw CEO says, “Lots of developers understand that there is a huge market opportunity outside the Mac App Store. A developer faces a tough road ahead when developing an app. It takes money and time to code from scratch the separate frameworks for licensing, updates, crash reports and user feedback. DevMate offers a developer everything one needs to prepare an app for release, including hosting and a CDN to provide app availability, version management, and an e-commerce solution for selling. Here at MacPaw we’d like to help other Mac app developers and give them what they need —for free. Moreover, that’s what we use ourselves as a backbone for our products.”

    “With over 8 years of experience in app development and a heavy focus on OS X utilities, MacPaw has achieved significant results in delivering the best experience to Mac users,” the company says. “Initially driven by the Mac App Store restrictions, DevMate was developed for the in-house needs of MacPaw (to develop and distribute CleanMyMac outside the Mac App Store) and in 4 years it evolved into a reliable and advanced tool. Well-established companies like Realmac Software, DigiDNA, Smile, Readdle are already on board.”

    The free pricing comes without limitations on the number of customers.

    H/T: TheNextWeb

    Image via DevMate

  • Google Integrates Places API with Google Maps Search

    Google announced that it has integrated the Places API with Google Maps search in an effort to offer more consistent search results across Google Maps and the API and provide better search quality for API responses.

    The company said it is modifying how it supports place type restrictions in the Places API web service and JavaScript library. As of February 8, they have replaced the types restriction parameter with a new type search parameter.

    This impacts developers who have been using the types parameter for Nearby Search, Text Search, or Radar Search.

    “Type search works similarly to types restriction, but it only supports one type per request,” said Google’s Marcelo Camelo. “Requests using the types parameter and those specifying multiple types (for example, types=hospital|pharmacy|doctor) will continue to return results until Feb 8, 2017, but we do not recommend using multiple types in a search request. After that date, requests with multiple types will no longer be supported. To ensure the best possible search results for your users, we recommend using a single type in search requests.”

    Google is also changing the list of supported types, dropping the types establishment, food, health, general_contractor, finance, and place_of_worship. These will no longer be available as searchable types as of February 8, 2017. The types will still be returned in search and details results.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Linux Foundation Launches FD.io Open Source IO Services Framework

    Linux Foundation Launches FD.io Open Source IO Services Framework

    The Linux Foundation announced Fido (FD.io), which is an open source product aimed at providing an IO services framework for network and storage software. It’s initial software is now available as is a validation testing lab.

    6WIND, Brocade, Cavium, Cisco, Comcast, Ericsson, Huawei, Inocybe Technologies, Intel, Mesosphere, Metaswitch Networks (Project Calico), PLUMgrid and Red Hat are among those supporting FD.io.

    “Architected as a collection of sub-projects, FD.io provides a modular, extensible user space IO services framework that supports rapid development of high-throughput, low-latency and resource-efficient IO services,” the Foundation says. “The design of FD.io is hardware, kernel, and deployment (bare metal, VM, container) agnostic.”

    “The adoption of open source software has transformed the networking industry by reducing technology fragmentation and increasing user adoption,” said executive director Jim Zemlin. “The FD.io project addresses a critical area needed for flexible and scalable IO services to meet the growing demands of today’s cloud computing environments.”

    Early contributions include Vector Packet Processing from Cisco, a vSwitch/vRouter utilizing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), a full build, tooling, debug, and development environment, an OpenDaylight management agent, and a Honeycomb agent.

    You can check out FD.io for yourself here.

  • Facebook Enables Parse Server Push Notifications

    Facebook Enables Parse Server Push Notifications

    Late last month, Facebook announced that it is shutting down Parse. They’ve since talked about hosting it on AWS and Heroku.

    Facebook announced this week that the Parse Server (the open source Parse backend) now allows iOS and Android push notifications, which have been one of the most requested features by developers.

    “After setup, you’ll be able to send transactional push notifications based on the properties in the Installation class, just like with the Parse.com hosted backend,” says Parse’s Mengyan Wang . “We’ve designed the API to conform as closely as possible to the original, including the ability to send to channels and also specific installations based on a query. If you’re migrating an existing Parse app with push, Parse Server will get you up and running quickly.”

    Follow the link above to see an example for targeting a push to all people who are using iOS devices and are fans of the San Francisco Giants.

    Parse also announced PushAdapter, which lets Parse Server send push notifications using any push provider of your choosing.

    Facebook says that as developers begin the migration from Parse to another service, there will be a series of posts on the Parse blog over the next couple of weeks to help with the transition.

    Image via Parse

  • Google Gives Developers Users’ Private Addresses, Phone Numbers, Etc. With New People API

    Google Gives Developers Users’ Private Addresses, Phone Numbers, Etc. With New People API

    Google announced the new People API, which lets developers retrieve data about authenticated users’ connections from their Contacts.

    Whereas in the past, developers had to make multiple calls to the Google+ API for user profiles and the Contacts API for contacts, they can now get the best of both worlds with a single API.

    Google says the People API utilizes the newest protocols and technologies and will eventually replace the Contacts API (which uses the GData protocol). The company says in a post on its developer blog:

    For example, if your user has contacts in her private contact list, a call to the API (if she provides consent to do so) will retrieve a list containing the contacts merged with any linked profiles. If the user grants the relevant scopes, the results are returned as a people.connections.list object. Each person object in this list will have a resourceName property, which can be used to get additional data about that person with a call to people.get.

    The API is built on HTTP and JSON, so any standard HTTP client can send requests to it and parse the response. However, applications need to be authorized to access the APIs so you will need to create a project on the Google Developers Console in order to get the credentials you need to access the service. All the steps to do so are here. If you’re new to the Google APIs and/or the Developers Console, check out this first in a series of videos to help you get up-to-speed.

    Not only does the new API combine the purposes of two others, it includes additional data that wasn’t available before, including private addresses, phone numbers, emails, and birthdays. This of course is only for users who have given permission.

    You can find the People API documentation here. Additional details are available here.

    Image via Google

  • Yahoo Reveals Agenda For Mobile Developer Conference

    Yahoo Reveals Agenda For Mobile Developer Conference

    About a year ago, Yahoo held its first ever developer conference in San Francisco. In December, the company announced the next one.

    The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference will be held on February 18 at The Masonic in San Francisco. Today, they announced the agenda.

    There will be an opening keynote from CEO Marissa Mayer as well as a presentation on the State of Mobile by SVP of Publisher Products Simon Khalaf. There will also be a a variety of “deep dive” presentations on advancements to the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite.

    “Attendees will also have the opportunity to learn from industry executives on a variety of topics to help them grow, retain and monetize users on mobile,” a spokesperson for Yahoo said in an email.

    These include the state of native ads and why the format is important for developers, hacks for “time-strapped” developers looking to leverage Tumblr for content marketing, and findings from Yahoo’s recent app lifecycle study.

    “In 2015, Yahoo supported hundreds of thousands of mobile developers in creating, growing and monetizing apps through our mobile developer suite,” said Khalaf. “This year, we’re excited to gather together once again with our developer community, where we’ll deliver fresh content and new tools to help them succeed even more.”

    You can check out the official Tumblr for the event here. You can apply for an invite from there.

    Image via Yahoo

  • Facebook: Host Parse on AWS, Heroku

    Facebook: Host Parse on AWS, Heroku

    Facebook recently announced that it is shutting down Parse. The cloud-based platform for cross-platform apps was acquired by the company back in 2013. It helped developers create social apps integrated with Facebook across iOS, Android, HTML5, etc.

    Last month, the company announced the beginning of the wind-down process, and it’s expected to be fully retired on January 28, 2017.

    They released a database migration tool to let developers migrate data from their Parse apps to any MongoDB database. Late last week, they highlighted some options for hosting Parse Server on AWS and Heroku.

    “Using Amazon Web Services directly is a great choice for hosting and scaling your Parse Server,” said Parse co-founder James Yu. “In the past few years, AWS has become the infrastructure of choice for both large enterprises and startups alike. In fact, Parse itself was built on AWS.”

    “AWS is a secure cloud services platform providing a broad set of infrastructure products, ranging from bare metal instances to fully managed solutions,” Yu added. “We recommend using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to host your Parse Server, which not only handles deployment, but also automatically manages scaling and monitoring your application. For the Parse Server database, you can go with MongoLab, which is a MongoDB as a service that frees you from managing the underlying infrastructure for your MongoDB instances.”

    Parse has a guide for deploying to AWS Elastic Beanstalk here.

    “If you are new to managing a backend stack, Heroku provides an easy-to-use platform to deploy and scale your Parse Server app. They were one of the first PaaS providers which let developers focus their time on building apps instead of maintaining infrastructures,” Yu says. “For the Parse Server database, we also suggest using MongoLab through the Heroku add-on.”

    There’s a guide for deploying Heroku and MongoLab here.

    Image via Parse

  • Twitter On How To Monetize Your Mobile App

    Twitter On How To Monetize Your Mobile App

    Last month, Twitter announced the launch of a new “playbook” for app developers. It includes what Twitter describes as a series of how-to guides that walk developers through the process of building an app.

    A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews, “We know firsthand that it’s hard to build successful iOS and Android apps. We’ve built quite a few and we’ve learned a lot about how our partners build apps and tackle problems. At this year’s Flight conference, we showed off the power of some of the new features from Fabric with two apps that we created and open-sourced on GitHub: Cannonball, a magnetic poetry game, and Furni, a mobile-first furniture store. “Based on our experience building Cannonball and Furni, we’ve organized what we’ve learned into a playbook.”

    The first part, published last month, covered prototyping, design and stability. Other parts talked about account systems and social login, creating a backend to manage services, data, and identities, and adding data from third-party APIs.

    There’s a new part available now and it’s about making money from your mobile app.

    “You can begin planning how you’ll earn money from your app even if you’re not ready to implement anything yet,” writes Twitter developer advocate Bear Douglas . “Lots of successful apps have wildly different strategies — from freemium models to ad support, to direct sales of goods and services. To decide on the right strategy, you need to answer a few questions about your app.”

    Such questions include:

    “Can you just charge people for it outright?”

    “Are you selling anything, be it physical goods, in-app purchases, or subscriptions?”

    “Do you have a good place to put ads in your app?”

    As Douglas points out, you’ll also want to make sure you’re in the clear to monetize. In other words, you’re not prohibited fromusing certain APIs in paid apps or in conjunction with ads.

    See what Twitter has to say about each of these scenarios in the new piece.

  • Microsoft: ASP.NET 5 is Now ASP.NET Core 1.0

    Microsoft recently declared ASP.NET 5 dead. In name at least.

    They decided that naming the new “completely written from scratch” ASP.NET framework ASP.NET 5 was a bad idea because it makes it seem like it’s bigger, better, and replaces ASP.NET 4.6, which is not the case.

    With this in mind, they’ve renamed ASP.NET 5 “ASP.NET Core 1.0”. .NET Core 5 is now .NET Core 1.0, and Entity Framework 7 is now Entity Framework Core1.0.

    “Why 1.0? Because these are new,” Microsoft’s Jeffrey T. Fritz recently explained in a blog post. “The whole .NET Core concept is new. The .NET CLI is very new. Not only that, but .NET Core isn’t as complete as the full .NET Framework 4.6. We’re still exploring server-side graphics libraries. We’re still exploring gaps between ASP.NET 4.6 and ASP.NET Core 1.0.”

    “To be clear, ASP.NET 4.6 is the more mature platform. It’s battle-tested and released and available today,” he added. “ASP.NET Core 1.0 is a 1.0 release that includes Web API and MVC but doesn’t yet have SignalR or Web Pages. It doesn’t yet support VB or F#. It will have these subsystems some day but not today.”

    Microsoft basically wants to reiterate that ASP.NET 4.6 will continue to live on, fully supported.

    Image via Microsoft

  • Facebook F8 2016 Conference Is Open For Registration

    Facebook F8 2016 Conference Is Open For Registration

    Facebook just announced that registration is now open for F8 2016. IT takes place in San Francisco on April 12 & 13.

    F8 2016 – Registration is Now Open!

    Come meet with other developers and innovators who are excited about connecting the world! We're hosting F8, our global developer conference on April 12 + 13, in San Francisco, California.

    Posted by Facebook for Developers on Friday, January 29, 2016

    Here’s what you can expect from the event, according to a post on the Facebook Developers blog:

    – Keynote: Hear from Mark about how Facebook is helping developers build, grow and monetize success, and where we’re headed in the future.

    – 40+ Sessions: Attend talks from Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus, Instagram, advertising, engineering and more — there’s content for everyone across Facebook’s family of apps and services.

    – Interactive Demos: Experience our immersive products for yourself with hands-on demos featuring Oculus Rift and Touch, 360 video and more.

    – Innovation Lab: Learn how we plan to improve connectivity, enhance infrastructure and scale artificial intelligence and virtual reality around the world.

    – Meet the Facebook Team: Connect with our engineers and product experts for 1:1 personalized support to learn how you can grow and optimize your app business.

    – After Party: Join us for a fun after party at the end of the first conference day, and enjoy music, food and drinks while getting to know other developers.

    You can apply for the event here. Space is limited, but they will be streaming the whole thing online as usual.

    Image via Facebook

  • Linux Foundation Partners With Linux Academy on Training

    The Linux Foundation recently announced a new partnership with Linux Academy on discounted Linux training for SysAdmins.

    The Foundation says it negotiated a special rate for Sysadmins around the world ($75 for 3 months).

    “Subscription-based training opportunities offer SysAdmins another way to access Linux and open source training materials,” the Foundation said. “A quarterly subscription allows SysAdmins to spread out the cost of Linux and open source training, making it more feasible for more people to take advantage of material that can lead to the most lucrative careers in technology. This aligns with The Linux Foundation’s mission to increase access to quality Linux and open source education to as many individuals as possible.”

    The training consists of thousands of videos, labs, access to full-time instructors, downloadable study guides, graded exercises (carried out on real servers), and performance-based practice exams. The material covers a “wide range” of topics on Linux, Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, and DevOps.

    Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said, “Our partnership with Linux Academy allows us to expand the number of individuals able to take quality Linux training, whether they are new to the community or trying to improve their skills. It’s fantastic to be able to provide subscription-based training as another offering, to complement The Linux Foundation’s existing online, in-person and onsite training options.”

    “The Linux Foundation is an ideal partner for spreading the word about how subscription-based Linux training can provide individuals with a huge variety of educational content and materials for ongoing learning opportunities,” said Linux Academy founder Anthony James. “We are pleased that Linux Academy’s expertise and materials will be available even more widely through this partnership, helping bring even more people into the Linux and open source community.”

    You can check out the Academy’s offerings here.

  • Amazon Has A New Training Course For AWS Developers

    Amazon Has A New Training Course For AWS Developers

    Amazon announced that a new, improved training course is now available for Amazon Web Services developers.

    New to the Developing on AWS course are: additional programming language support, a balance of concepts and code, AWS SDK labs, relevant to more developers, and expanded coverage of developer-oriented AWS services.

    “Whether you’re moving applications to AWS or developing specifically for the cloud, this course can show you how to use the AWS SDK to create secure, scalable cloud applications that tap the full power of the platform,” says Amazon’s Jeff Barr.

    As far as the new programming language support, the practice labs now support Java, .Net, Python, JavaScript (for Node.js and browser) as well as Windows and Linux.

    Barr notes that the additional support makes the course more useful to startup and enterprise developers alike.

    “The updated course expands coverage of key concepts, best practices, and troubleshooting tips for AWS services to help students build a mental model before diving into code,” says Barr. “Students then use an AWS SDK to develop apps that apply these concepts in hands-on labs. Practice labs are designed to emphasize the AWS SDK, reflecting how developers actually work and create solutions. Lab environments now include EC2 instances preloaded with all required programming language SDKs, developer tools, and IDEs.”

    The course also now puts more focus on AWS services like Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon ElastiCache, AWS CloudFormation, etc.

    To enroll, you can look over the syllabus, and find a class.

    Image via Amazon

  • Facebook Is Shutting Down Parse

    Facebook Is Shutting Down Parse

    Back in 2013, Facebook acquired Parse, a cloud-based platform for cross-platform apps, which let developers create rich social apps integrated with Facebook across platforms like iOS, Android, HTML5, etc.

    The company announced late on Thursday that it is shutting Parse down. They’re beginning the wind-down process and expect to have it fully retired on January 28, 2017.

    “We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere,” says Parse co-founder Kevin Lacker. “We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.”

    They released a database migration tool to let developers migrate data from their Parse apps to any MongoDB database.

    “During this migration, the Parse API will continue to operate as usual based on your new database, so this can happen without downtime,” says Lacker. “Second, we’re releasing the open source Parse Server, which lets you run most of the Parse API from your own Node.js server. Once you have your data in your own database, Parse Server lets you keep your application running without major changes in the client-side code.”

    You can find a migration guide here.

    Image via Parse