Tag: .NET

Miguel de Icaza, Xamarin Founder, Leaving Microsoft

Miguel de Icaza, founder of Xamarin and a developer behind the Mono framework, is leaving Microsoft.

Miguel de Icaza was one of the original developers that helped create the Mono framework, in an effort to bring .Net to Linux. He went on to co-found Xamarin, a company dedicated to supporting Mono and using such frameworks to make cross-platform mobile development much faster and easier. Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016, and de Icaza stayed with the company.

According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, de Icaza is now leaving, and will likely pursue various startup opportunities…eventually.

“I am going to rest while the kids are in school,” he told Foley, saying he plans on enjoying vacation time with them. Ultimately, however, de Icaza believes he’ll be lured back to the startup life.

“Living in this industry is like the kid at the candy store – too many things are happening and there are too many choices. So I want to spend some time sampling some of the candy, and then deciding which one I want to buy a pound of,” de Icaza said.

“If I wanted to work for a big company, I would have stayed here (at Microsoft). It is awesome here,” he added. “I learned a lot, it was good, but I do miss the startup world, and building and running a team – which I have not been doing here in this role.”

Given his track record of innovative development, it’s a safe bet de Icaza will have no shortage of opportunities available to him.

March 3, 2022
All Good Things…The End of Visual Basic Nears

One of the most widely used programming languages is nearing the end of its life, as Microsoft starts winding down Visual Basic.

In a developer blog, the .Net team says that Visual Basic support is planned for .Net 5.0. The group is working “to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want to migrate their applications to .NET Core. This allows Visual Basic customers to take advantage of new platform features like side-by-side deployment, cross platform support, performance and new API improvements.”

In spite of that however, the post makes it clear that Visual Basic’s future does not include growing beyond its current abilities and status.

“Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language. This supports language stability and maintains compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic. Future features of .NET Core that require language changes may not be supported in Visual Basic. Due to differences in the platform, there will be some differences between Visual Basic on .NET Framework and .NET Core.”

While Visual Basic has been a pivotal part of Microsoft’s development history, the writing is on the wall: the language seems destined to fade into the background, replaced by newer, more robust options.

March 14, 2020
Amazon: AWS SDK for Unity Now Part of SDK for .NET

Amazon announced that AWS SDK for Unity is now part of AWS SDK for .NET.

Last year, the company announced the general availability of AWS SDK for Unity, but has since added support for other AWS services including Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

“The AWS SDK for Unity was created from a fork of the AWS SDK for .NET and supported only a subset of its features,” says Amazon’s Karthik Saligrama. “As the AWS SDK for Unity added support for more features, we realized that forking did not allow us to simultaneously release patches or new features on the AWS SDK for .NET and the AWS SDK for Unity. It was also difficult to accept pull requests from the open source community without diverging from the AWS SDK for .NET.”

“Starting today, we are releasing to our github branch a preview version of the AWS SDK for .NET with Unity components,” Saligrama says. “Currently, the SDK can be built on Windows machines only. The branch contains test cases for all services supported on Unity, which can be run on Android, iOS, or on the Unity IDE.”

Saligrama discusses changes made to ake the SDK easier to configure and use here. This includes AWSPrefab, releasing assemblies in the Unity package, releasing the source code under Apache license, and the SDK version being in sync with the AWS SDK for .NET version.

Image via Amazon

January 12, 2016
Microsoft Open Sources, Expands .NET To Linux, Mac

Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack, and expanding .NET to run on Linux and Mac OS. The company also released Visual Studio Community 2013, which is a free edition of Visual Studio that provides access to the core toolset.

“With billions of devices in the market today, developers need tools that target many different form factors and platforms,” said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. “Through Visual Studio and .NET we are committed to delivering a comprehensive end-to-end solution for developers to build and manage applications across multiple devices and platforms.”

Included in the .NET server stack open sourcing are: ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries.

The company says it will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET, and will work through the .NET Foundation.

Non-enterprise application developers who wish to get started with VIsual Studio Community can do so here. Microsoft is also previewing Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015.

Finally, the company announced the preview of ASP.NET 5.0, which it describes as a “streamlined framework and runtime optimized for cloud and server workloads.”

Image via .NET Foundation

November 12, 2014
Microsoft Releases Windows Azure SDK 2.0 For .NET

In its latest earnings report, Microsoft said Windows Azure and related products hit $1 billion in sales. It shows that Microsoft’s cloud platform is starting to really take off. In its efforts to get more developers to use Azure, Microsoft has released some new tools for its Azure SDK.

Microsoft announced in early May that version 2.0 of its Windows Azure SDK for .NET was finally available to all. The SDK brings with it a number of new features that are sure to delight those who host .NET Web sites on the Azure platform.
Web Sites: Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics
Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Visual Studio Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data
Storage: Storage Client 2.0 is now included in new projects & Visual Studio Server Explorer now supports working with Storage Tables
Service Bus: Updated client library with message pump programming model support, support for browsing messages, and auto-deleting idle messaging entities
PowerShell Automation: Updated support for PowerShell 3.0, and lots of new PowerShell commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more.

You should check out the full blog post for more details as Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie explains all of the new features in full detail.

As for availability, you can grab the Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET over at the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center. It’s also open source so you can poke and prod your way through the code over at GitHub.

May 10, 2013

OrcsWeb Now Offers Complete ASP.NET 4.5 Support

OrcsWeb is one of the leading providers of Microsoft Windows-based cloud and dedicated server hosting solutions. To remain at the top, the company must remain up-to-date on all the latest technologies. Their quick adoption of the latest version of ASP.NET only cements their dedication.

OrcsWeb announced that ASP.NET 4.5 is now available across all platforms – cloud and dedicated. They worked closely with Microsoft throughout the beta stage to make sure their .NET 4.5 support was perfect. Users can expect new features, increased performance and control, and other benefits with the latest release of .NET.

“ASP.NET 4.5 is the most exciting release of the .NET framework yet. Microsoft has made significant performance improvements in both application startup and memory utilization that customers will recognize immediately,” according to Jeff Graves, Director of Technology. “Security improvements help web developers easily protect their application from malicious users with unobtrusive validation and the baked-in AntiXSS library. Asynchronous HTTP calls are much easier to manage with the new await command. The best part is that OrcsWeb clients can take full advantage of these features today, across all of our platforms.”

Here are the key improvements that users will find built into .NET 4.5:

Google: Here’s How To Write Your First Drive App in .NET

Google has posted a nearly thirty-minute video about how to write your frist Google Drive app in .NET. Google discusses how to build a complete .NET app using the Google Drive API to upload a file into the user’s drive account.

A full transcript is available on the video page on YouTube, if you’d rather skim through that.