Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft has open sourced large parts of its .NET development framework, and launched the open source web programming language TypeScript. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow and Azure CTO, told the ChefConf event last week that opening up .NET helps to “get people started on other Microsoft solutions”, adding, “it lifts them up and makes them available for our other offerings, where otherwise they might not be.”

Technology giant Microsoft said it will line up more 4G-compatible devices in India once the infrastructure for the high-speed Internet service is ready in the country. “There are a number of 4G-compatible devices in our portfolio, we are ready with the handsets. Once infrastructure is ready (in India), we will bring more 4G devices in,” Microsoft Mobile Devices Director Marketing Raghuvesh Sarup said.

It will be business as usual for Revolution Analytics, but expect great new R-language-based advanced analytics capabilities from Microsoft SQL Server and the Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning cloud services. “We will build R and Revolution’s technology into our data platform products so companies, developers, and data scientists can use it across on-premises, hybrid cloud and Azure public cloud environments,” said Joseph Sirosh, Corporate VP of Information Management and Machine learning at Microsoft.

Windows 7 powers nearly two-thirds of all personal computers running a version of Microsoft’s OS, according to a survey by an analytics company. Net Applications’ monthly user share tracking – an estimate of the percentage of all systems that rely on a specific operating system – pegged Windows 7 at 63.7% of all Windows PCs in March. That was a 2.6 percentage point jump from February.

Office Lens is a free app that works like scanning apps you may have used already – to capture a document or a whiteboard, and they’re stored in the cloud and made searchable thanks to OCR. The difference with Office Lens is that you don’t just get flat images of your documents. Office Lens converts the image to editable Word, PowerPoint, and PDF files, in native Office formats, saved to OneDrive so they’re accessible from any other device.

Microsoft is making more accommodations for developers in both the JavaScript and Visual Studio realms, including promoting the development of “universal experiences”. With a preview of WinJS 4.0 (Windows Library for JavaScript 4.0), Microsoft wants to enable universal experiences, which can run on a range of form factors, including phones, tablets, PCs, or even TVs. Microsoft also has referred to this strategy as universal applications, part of the company’s Windows 10 battle plan.

According to Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, a future that includes an open-source Windows could happen. “It’s definitely possible,” Russinovich reportedly told an audience at the ChefCon conference in Santa Clara this week. “It’s a new Microsoft. Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software – open versus not-open versus services – has happened.”

Microsoft updated its Outlook email apps for the Android and iOS platforms with a list of new features like Unified Address Book and Search Directory, apart from Calendar improvements and more. The updated Microsoft Outlook apps for Android (version 1.1.5) and iOS (version 1.1.3) are available for download via their respective app stores.