Microsoft Rolls Out Tools, Windows 8 Server, Cloud Services at BUILD

ANAHEIM, Calif. Microsoft announced a series of moves meant to advance developer opportunities and productivity, including a developer preview of Visual Studio 2011, a preview of Windows Server 8 and the company s Team Foundation Server (TFS) delivered as a service on the Windows Azure cloud.

In a Sept. 14 keynote at the Microsoft BUILD conference here, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft s Server and Tools Business (STB), discussed how new application patterns across connected devices and continuous services boost opportunities for developers to build the next generation of continuous services that are dynamic, scalable and optimized to connect with the multidevice world.

In today s world of connected devices and continuous services, we are focused on helping developers build the next generation of client applications that are tethered to a back-end cloud, Nadella said.

Microsoft officials said Windows Server 8 applies the company s background in building and operating the Windows Azure public cloud to provide a cloud-optimized operating system focused on delivery of applications, interoperability within today s diverse IT environments, high-performance virtualization and strong links to public clouds.

Moreover, Windows Server 8 provides multitenant infrastructure for cloud services with significant enhancements to help reduce the costs of high availability and to automate service management, Microsoft said. As an open application and Web platform that shares common management, identity and development tools with Windows Azure, Windows Server 8 empowers developers and IT professionals to deliver services across their choice of private and public cloud environments, or a combination of both, the company said.

Meanwhile, Nadella noted Microsoft s history with developers. Developers have long been the cornerstone of Microsoft s success, and that relationship is now more important than ever, he said.

With that in mind, Microsoft delivered a Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. The product provides an integrated development experience spanning architecture, code, test and deployment. This release adds support for Windows 8 Metro-style applications built with HTML5, JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic and C++, as well as numerous productivity enhancements for project compatibility, extension management, game development, code analysis, code review and agile testing, said Jason Zander, Microsoft s corporate vice president for Visual Studio, in a meeting with eWEEK. The Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is available as of Sept. 14 for Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers and available to the public on Sept. 15.

During Nadella s keynote, Microsoft showed off its newly announced preview of TFS running on the Windows Azure platform, which provides a collaborative application lifecycle management (ALM) environment delivered as a Microsoft-hosted Windows Azure cloud service, making it easier to deploy, scale, operate and access collaborative development projects, the company said.

Microsoft also highlighted its new .NET 4.5 Developer Preview, which has focused on key developer requests across key technologies and includes new features for asynchronous programming in C# and Visual Basic, support for state machines in Windows Workflow, and increased investments in HTML5 and CSS3 in ASP.NET.

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