Posted by Anandeep Pannu
Senior Program Manager – Open Source Technical Center

Today, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V.  This collaboration, announced at BSDCAN 2012, will help more customers adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing.  Microsoft is committed to supporting multiple platforms with its server virtualization solution so that more organizations can take advantage of server consolidation cost-savings and build foundations for private, public and hybrid cloud computing. 

It was invaluable to partner with NetApp and Citrix, who both have impressive expertise in how to enable FreeBSD to run on Hyper-V with high performance.  This release includes 8,500 lines of code submitted under the BSD license, supporting FreeBSD 8.2 on Windows Server 2008 R2.  We will continue to work with the community to support other releases of FreeBSD as well.  Analysis is currently underway to assess customer demand and partner capacity to extend support to FreeBSD 9.0 on Windows Server 2012.

The source code can be found on Github here, as well as instructions for building from source and running the drivers can be found here.  On behalf of the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team, we welcome your feedback through the mailing list to continue improving the code for future submission to the FreeBSD core. 

Check back on the blog tomorrow when we’ll have an interview with Citrix’s Thomas Goodwin, who led his team’s development efforts.  Tom will share his thoughts on how the project came together, as well as how it will support FreeBSD and Microsoft customers and partners.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its first arcade games – classics like Pong, Asteroids, and Missile Command – Atari partnered with Internet Explorer and Grant Skinner to create the new Atari Arcade that features eight classic games with more titles to come.

As a leading pioneer of this entertainment platform, Atari sold 30 million Atari 2600 consoles, quickly became the definitive gaming platform of its era, and inspired multiple video game franchises.

Guaranteed to spark nostalgia for enduring fans, the Atari Arcade is also intended to reach a new and broader audience of gamers and game developers via the web. The games were all built with HTML5 and multi-player capabilities that come to life with a new Windows 8 touch device and Internet Explorer 10. They also work great in IE9 on a Windows 7 PC, or any other modern browser.

Hear from Atari’s Founder Nolan Bushnell and the team on how the project came together in this video: 

For developers, the team has also created a software development kit available in the developer behind the scenes section of the site, along with new and updated versions of JavaScript libraries and new tutorials for building HTML5 games. All code is available on the Internet Explorer GitHub repository here.

For more on this collaboration, see the Exploring IE blog or start gaming at Atari Arcade.

Posted by Anandeep Pannu
Senior Program Manager, Open Source Technical Center

Yesterday on the blog, we announced that FreeBSD support is now ready and available for Windows Server Hyper-V users. Thanks to the diligent work by our partners Citrix and NetApp, who together helped us contribute some 8,500 lines of code for the release, FreeBSD 8.2 can now run on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V as a first-class guest. We are excited by how ties to the FreeBSD community have strengthened by working with Citrix and NetApp to offer our customers more options as they implement server virtualization and move toward cloud computing.

We connected with Citrix’s Tom Goodwin, Software Architect for the FreeBSD Integration Services project, to learn more about Citrix’s efforts to deliver FreeBSD support for Hyper-V.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Love using apps on your smart phone? Wish you could use them on your PC or tablet? The Microsoft Office team has granted your wish. With the recent launch of their Customer Preview, the Office team announced that developers can now build a new class of apps for the new Office and SharePoint. This means that, for the first time, developers can easily customize Office and SharePoint using familiar languages and open Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET and PHP.

Developers can also share the apps they build with the 1 billion Office users worldwide, and sell them in the Office Store opened last week. Developers keep 80% of the proceeds from the sale of an app, while Office keeps 20% themselves. Richard Riley, Director of Product Management for SharePoint, says these updates represent “some of the most significant changes on the developer side of Office in the last 15 years."

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xLeF3YgXpQ&feature=youtu.be]

We’re already seeing developers take advantage of this new cloud application model, with the Office Store filling up with apps for Excel, Word, Outlook and SharePoint. What apps would you like to see in the store? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations

To keep up with increasingly dynamic market demands, enterprises want data from their line-of-business applications to be accessible at any time from any device without sacrificing quality, agility and time-to-market.  Microsoft LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 was created with these needs in mind.  LightSwitch is a simplified, self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and the cloud.  Microsoft recently announced broader LightSwitch support for open standards that will address the increasing need to build applications that run well across multiple platforms and devices.  

                             

LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 now supports applications across more platforms by using the Open Data (OData) Protocol.  A growing list of websites and applications are exposing their data via OData, and LightSwitch now includes first-class support for connecting your business applications to OData feeds and producing OData services quickly and easily. This coincides with a cross-industry effort underway to buoy broader adoption of the OData Protocol.  Microsoft recently teamed up with several partners, including Citrix, IBM and SAP, to propose an OData Technical Committee within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), an international open standards consortium.  Check back on the blog in the coming weeks as we report on results from the first OASIS OData Technical Committee meeting, held at Microsoft last week.