Posted by Frédéric Aatz
Director of Interoperability, Microsoft France

Alfonso Castro
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Microsoft Open Solutions Group

Last week we were fortunate to participate in Open World Forum, a leading global summit focused on how we’re collectively building our digital future in an open and transparent manner. We’ve gathered together our recap of the Forum’s three days of sharing, thinking and coding with some of the top contributors to open technology initiatives from around the world.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

In addition to supporting industry-standard languages like C++, Python, and JavaScript, Microsoft has always been at the forefront of creating great programming languages – Visual Basic, C#, and F# being the recent examples. We create these languages to better support a broad ecosystem of developers, increase productivity, and solve interoperability problems.

Earlier this month, we introduced a new programming language called TypeScript that solves a very specific problem – getting JavaScript development to scale across the current world of devices and platforms.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager – Worldwide Marketing and Operations

In the past, developers using HTML5, CSS and other open web technologies have consulted multiple sites for guidance on how to effectively use these technologies across the world of browsers, operating systems, and devices – a time consuming chore that drove increased development costs.

Today the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in collaboration with Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others, announced a solution to this developer dilemma with the alpha release of Web Platform Docs.

Web Platform Docs is a new wiki-style community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. Web professionals can save time and resources by consulting the trustworthy repository for current, cross-browser and cross-device coding best practices, including informative tutorials for existing and new technologies.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager – Worldwide Marketing and Operations

The absent-minded professor is an exaggerated movie cliché. But like most clichés, it does have a kernel of truth within it – namely that people who are absolutely brilliant in one area are often less disciplined in others. In certain scientific communities, an area of inattention has been data management, sharing and archiving.

The University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library (CDL) is aiming to address that problem with DataUp, an add-in (a kind of extension) for Microsoft Excel that is available via http://dataup.cdlib.org staring today. DataUp was created with support from Microsoft Research Connections and with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

We spoke with Carly Strasser, project manager for DataUp, and John Kunze, associate director of UC3.

Please give our readers some background on DataUp
Strasser: This project came about because researchers are being challenged in new ways with digital data and are generally not educated as to how best to manage and document their data. The folks at CDL thought, “What can we do as a library to help these researchers who don’t have the skill set to take care of their data?” Microsoft Excel is a big part of most researchers’ workflows, so we created a tool that would integrate well into those workflows and make it seamless to manage data.

Posted by Kerry Godes
Senior Manager – Worldwide Marketing and Operations

WebMatrix V2 was released to web earlier this month, including support for popular open source apps and the ability to publish your site to the Cloud using Windows Azure Web Sites.

WebMatrix is a free and open web development tool optimized for the Cloud. It allows you to create and maintain websites quickly, and to install and publish popular open source applications or built-in templates. It also has a community component that lets you write your own plug-ins or use community-built ones.

Notable features added in this release include fast install of open source apps Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, DotNetNuke and Umbraco, and new built-in templates for PHP, Node.js and HTML5. Mobile support was also added for all templates.

For a great overview of the new features in WebMatrix V2, check out Web Camps TV's interview with Vishal Joshi from the WebMatrix team.