Why use downloads as an indicator of OSS success?

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  • Port25

    Windows Media Player Plug-in for Firefox

    • 12 Comments

    by hjanssen on April 16, 2007 04:04pm

    A few weeks ago I wrote a blog called ‘We're Writing Firefox Plug-ins? Interview with Ian Gilman and Thoughts on 10 Months at Microsoft’ (Who came up with that title anyway!)

    In which I chronicled my first 10 months on the job. Also in there I mentioned Microsoft writing plug-ins.

    Well today I am very proud to announce that we have released another official Microsoft plug-in. It shows another level of interoperability and eagerness in working with the Community to get this released.

     

    This plug-in allows you to use Windows Media Player inside of Firefox. It is designed to support the following Windows platforms;

    • Windows XP SP2 (x86)
    • Windows XP SP2 (x64)
    • Windows Vista (x86)
    • Windows Vista (x64)

    Port25 is hosting it, and you can download it from here; Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin - Download

    It was put together by the Windows Media Player team, and special thanks go to Eric Anderson and Thobias Jones. (And all the other people in the Windows Media Player team). I also wanted to thank Mike Schroepfer and the Mozilla Foundation in helping us get this released.

    From now on when you go to the plug-in site at Firefox, you will be automatically routed to Port25 to download and install the plug-in.

    It is backwards compatible with the old 6.4 Windows Media Player. And among other things has the following new features;

    • New robust design that addresses all of the known issues with the old plug-in
    • Windows Media Player will now work with Firefox on Windows Vista
    • Support for the Windows Media Player OCX scripting interfaces

    We will post some links to example code in the next few days to help people use some of the new features.

    Install it, and to test it just go to Port25 and check out any of the videos.

  • Port25

    Microsoft, Hadoop and Big Data

    • 6 Comments

    In a couple of weeks it will be my one year anniversary here at Microsoft  and  I couldn’t  wish for a better anniversary gift:  now that Microsoft has laid out its roadmap for Big Data, I’m really excited about the role that Apache HadoopTM plays in this.

    In case you missed it, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ted Kummert earlier today announced that we are adopting Hadoop by announcing plans to deliver enterprise class Apache Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.

    This news is loaded with goodies for the big data community, broadening the accessibility and usage of Hadoop-based technologies among developers and IT professionals, by making it available on Windows Server and Windows Azure.  

    But there is more. Microsoft will be working with the community to offer contributions for inclusion into the Apache Hadoop project and its ecosystem of tools and technologies.

    I believe that all of this will really benefit not only the broader Open Source community  by enabling them to take their existing skill sets and assets use them on Windows Azure and Windows Server, but also developers, our customers and partners. It is also another example of our ongoing commitment to providing Interoperability, compatibility and flexibility.

    As a proud member of the Apache Software Foundation, I personally could not be happier to see how Microsoft is willing to engage in such an important Open Source project and community.

    Technical Considerations

    On the more technical front, we have been working on a simplified download, installation and configuration experience of several Hadoop related technologies, including HDFS, Hive, and Pig, which will help broaden the adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise.

    The Hadoop based service for Windows Azure will allow any developer or user to submit and run standard Hadoop jobs directly on the Azure cloud with a simple user experience.

    Let me stress this once again: it doesn’t matter what platform you are developing your Hadoop jobs on -you will always be able to take a standard Hadoop job and deploy it on our platform, as we strive towards full interoperability with the official Apache Hadoop distribution.

    This is great news as it lowers the barrier for building Hadoop based applications while encouraging rapid prototyping scenarios in the Windows Azure cloud for Big Data.

    To facilitate all of this, we have also entered into a strategic partnership with Hortonworks that enables us to gain unique experience and expertise to help accelerate the delivery of Microsoft’s Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.

    For developers, we will enable integration with Microsoft developer tools as well as invest in making Javascript a first class language for Big Data. We will do this by making it possible to write high performance Map/Reduce jobs using Javascript. Yes, Javascript Map/Reduce, you read it right.

    For end users, the Hadoop-based applications targeting the Windows Server and Windows Azure platforms will easily work with Microsoft’s existing BI tools like PowerPivot and recently announced Power View, enabling self-service analysis on business information that was not previously accessible. To enable this we will be delivering an ODBC Driver and an Add-in for Excel, each of which will interoperate with Apache Hive. 

    Finally, in line with our commitment to Interoperability and to facilitate the high performance bi-directional movement of enterprise data between Apache Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server, we have released two Hadoop-based connectors for SQL Server to manufacturing.

    The SQL Server connector for Apache Hadoop lets customers move large volumes of data between Hadoop and SQL Server 2008 R2, while the SQL Server PDW connector for Apache Hadoop moves data between Hadoop and SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). These new connectors will enable customers to work effectively with both structured and unstructured data.

    I really look forward to sharing updates on all this as we move forward. For now, check out www.microsoft.com/bigdata and check back on the DPI blog tomorrow.

    Gianugo

  • Port25

    It's an exciting day for me

    • 6 Comments

    RossI've been involved with open source software for just shy of 15 years now. During that time I've seen open source software become a fundamental part of technology innovation.  It is that technology innovation that has fed me and my family for many years. I like to think I've given back and played a small part in the growth of open source software through my code contributions and my open source strategic consultancy services.  But, today I am presented with an opportunity to give back even more. From today onwards I will be joining Microsoft UK, where I’ll be serving a global role supporting the amazing team at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

    MS Open Tech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, was set up to advance Microsoft's investment in openness - including interoperability, open standards and open source. Those of you who know me through my open source work will know just what this means, but for those who don't know me I guess a mini-bio might be in order.

    I've held a variety of roles including software development, academic research, university lecturing and strategic consulting to both academic research community (via the OSS Watch service at the University of Oxford) and to the private sector (via OpenDirective, a small consultancy company). In all these roles open source software has been a fundamental part of my work. Through this work I've been able to contribute back to many projects, particularly within the Apache Software Foundation where I currently have the honour of standing on the Board of Directors.

    More important than my history and my contributions, however, is what the open source experience has taught me. I can honestly say that I have learned far more from my open source engagements than I have in any other of my activities (including amazing experience such as being vice-captain of a national schoolboy sports team and not unsuccessful band manager). This new role is an opportunity to work in this new mixed IT world of devices and services; and play my part in maximizing Microsoft's investments in openness.

    This is the first of many exciting days, I am sure. I look forward to telling you about others in the near future.

    Ross Gardler

    Microsoft UK (Supporting Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.)

  • Port25

    Openness Update for Windows Azure

    • 5 Comments

    As Microsoft’s Senior Director of Open Source Communities, I couldn’t be happier to share with you today an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure.

    As we continue to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities. We’ve spent a lot of time listening, and we have heard you loud and clear.

    We understand that there are many different technologies that developers may want to use to build applications in the cloud. Developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.

    In keeping with that goal, we are extremely happy to be delivering new and improved experiences for Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached on Windows Azure.

    This delivers on our ongoing commitment to provide an experience where developers can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know, enable greater customer flexibility for managing and scaling databases, and making it easier for customers to get started and use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure.

    Here are the highlights of today’s announcements:

    • We are releasing the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source, available immediately on Github. These libraries are the perfect complement to our recently announced contributions to Node.js and provide a better Node.js experience on Windows Azure. Head to the Windows Azure Developer Center for documentation, tutorial, samples and how-to guides to get you started with Node.js on Windows Azure.
    • We will also be delivering the Node package manager for Windows (npm) code to allow use of npm on Windows for simpler and faster Node.js configuration and development. Windows developers can now use NPM to install Node modules and take advantage of its automated handling of module dependencies and other details.
    • To build on our recent announcement about Apache Hadoop, we are making available a limited preview of the Apache Hadoop based distribution service on Windows Azure.  This enables Hadoop apps to be deployed in hours instead of days, and includes Hadoop Javascript libraries and powerful insights on data through the ODBC driver and Excel plugin for Hive. Read more about this on the Windows Azure team blog. If you are interested in trying this preview, please complete the form here with details of your Big Data scenario.  Microsoft will issue an access code to select customers based on usage scenarios.
    • For all of you NoSQL fans, we have been working closely with 10Gen and the MongoDB community in the past few months, and if you were at at MongoSV last week you have already seen MongoDB running on Windows Azure. Head out to the 10Gen website to find downloads, documentation and other document-oriented goodies. If you’re using the popular combination of Node.js and MongoDB, a simple straightforward install process will get you started on Windows Azure. Learn more here.
    • For Java developers, take a look at the updated Java support, including a new and revamped Eclipse plugin. The new features are too many to list for this post, but you can count on a much better experience thanks to new and exciting functionality such as support for sticky sessions and configuration of remote Java debugging. Head over to the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more.
    • Does your application need advanced search capabilities? If so, the chances are you either use or are evaluating Solr, and so the good news for you is that we just released a set of code tools and configuration guidelines to get the most out of Solr running on Windows Azure.
    • We invite developers to try out the tools, configuration and sample code for Solr tuned for searching commercial and publisher sites. The published guidance showcases how to configure and host Solr/Lucene in Windows Azure using multi-instance replication for index-serving and single-instance for index generation with a persistent index mounted in Windows Azure storage.
    • * Another great example of OSS on Windows Azure is the use of Memcached server, the popular open-source caching technology, to improve the performance of dynamic web applications. Maarten Balliauw recently blogged about his MemcacheScaffolder, which simplifies management of Memcached servers on the Windows Azure platform. That blog post is only focused on PHP, but the same approach can be used by other languages supported by Memcached as well.
    • Scaling data in the Cloud is very important. Today, the SQL Azure team made SQL Azure Federation available.  This new feature provides built-in support for data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) to elastically scale-out data in the cloud. I am thrilled to announce that concurrent with the release of this new feature, we have released a new specification called SQL Database Federations, which describes additional SQL capabilities that enable data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) for scalability in the cloud, under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. With those additional SQL capabilities, the database tier can provide built-in support for data sharding to elastically scale-out data in the cloud, as covered in Ram Jeyaraman’s post on this blog.

    In addition to all this great news, the Windows Azure experience has also been significantly improved and streamlined. This includes simplified subscription management and billing, a guaranteed free 90-day trial with quick sign-up process, reduced prices, improved database scale and management, and more. Please see the Windows Azure team blog post for insight on all the great news.

    As we enter the holiday season, I’m happy to see Windows Azure continuing on its roadmap of embracing OSS tools developers know and love, by working collaboratively with the open source community to build together a better cloud that supports all developers and their need for interoperable solutions based on developer choice.

    In conclusion, I just want to stress that we intend to keep listening, so please send us your feedback. Rest assured we’ll take note!

  • Port25

    Full Support for PhoneGap on Windows Phone is Now Complete!

    • 4 Comments

    Congratulations to all the people involved in the PhoneGap community for the recent release of version 1.3 of their HTML5 open source mobile framework!

    This release includes many new features, and you can find more details here. You may remember that we announced back in Sept that Microsoft was helping to bring Windows Phone support in PhoneGap: I am happy to say we can now check
    this box!

    We’re also pleased to note that all features in PhoneGap 1.3 are now supported for Windows Phone, as you can see on their site here.

      
    Also, beyond the core PhoneGap features, developers can enjoy a selection of PhoneGap plugins that support social networks - including Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Twitter - and a solid integration into Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone.

    We have also developed further plugins to give HTML5 developers a feel for Windows Phone’s unique features like Live Tile Update and Bing Maps Search.

    Please check out Jesse MacFadyen’s blog, PhoneGap’s dev lead, on his experiences developing PhoneGap on Windows Phone.

    For more technical details of using the framework, see Glen's and Jesse’s technical walk thru blogs. For a quick a spin of what PhoneGap and Visual Studio allow you to do, see this WP7 and Android camera app created in 3 minutes! Phonegap bits are located here; plugins are here.

    Looking ahead:

    As mentioned in PhoneGap’s announcement blog post, the next PhoneGap 1.4 release will be from the Cordova incubation project at Apache.  We at Microsoft are proud to be members of this project and to offer technical resources.  We welcome the involvement of Adobe, IBM and RIM and look forward to collaboratively growing PhoneGap at its new home in  Apache while helping evolve an open web for any device.

    Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 in IE9 has been instrumental in achieving this level of support. We are also building on our HTML5 investment through initiatives like bringing jQuery Mobile support as we outlined few weeks ago. Partnering with open source communities to bring this level of openness continues to be an important goal here at Microsoft.

    So, stay tuned for more news on our support for popular mobile open source frameworks on WP7.5!

    Abu Obeida Bakhach

    Interoperability Strategy Program Manager 

     

  • Port25

    A Linux Infrastructure Manager's Take on Hyper-V

    • 4 Comments

    by Peter Galli on August 09, 2010 12:15pm

    As Microsoft continues to broaden and extend its virtualization offerings, I'd like to share with you an email that Gordon McDowall, a Linux Infrastructure manager for Fasthosts Internet Limited, shared with us about his experience with Hyper-V:

    Hi, my name is Gordon McDowall, I am a Linux Infrastructure manager for Fasthosts Internet Limited, a large hosting service provider based in the UK offering services such as Windows and Linux based web hosting, database hosting, email hosting, connectivity services and dedicated server hosting.

    Recently Fasthosts has expanded into the Virtual server market, and this expansion has been based on a system built on Microsoft Hyper-V technology. Initially the offering was for Windows 2008 only, but we have recently released some Linux offerings on the Hyper-V infrastructure already put in place for the Windows Virtual Servers.

    This ability to offer Microsoft and Linux VPS servers on the same underlying platform makes administration easier and reduces infrastructure and support costs as our solution runs on a highly redundant Dell blade platform with SAN backends offering up storage to the blades via iSCSI.

    Coming from a Linux background, I had some skepticism of how Microsoft could integrate Linux operating systems into the Hyper-V hypervisor. This initial skepticism was quickly quashed after a few discussions with some Microsoft Linux Developers and Microsoft's head of development.  

    It was very easy to see just how seriously they were taking this project and  how knowledgeable they were about the Linux operating system. Working so closely with a company like Microsoft in a pioneering project like this has been very exciting and they have been incredibly supportive (even though coming from a Linux background it pains me to admit it!)

    Having worked with the Linux Integration Components for a few months now, right from RC1, I have found them easy to work with and very reliable, each time an update has been released the improvement to performance has been very noticeable with our Linux VPS platform running on a par with the Microsoft VPS and on a par with many dedicated servers on dedicated physical hardware.

    The Linux VPS servers with the Linux Hyper-V integration components installed have flown through our QA process with nothing at all being flagged by the QA department.

    Initial customer uptake and feedback on the Linux VPS product has been very positive. So far so good...

  • Port25

    Connecting Office Applications to MySQL and PostgreSQL via ODBC

    • 4 Comments

    by MichaelF on April 10, 2007 04:05pm


    In cases where business applications have been built on open source databases, it may be necessary to connect other Windows applications, such as Microsoft Access or Excel, to these databases for reporting or business intelligence purposes.

    One potential application of this process is to use Excel as a front-end for data analysis.  Data can be pulled from views or tables and then further analyzed, graphed, and the like.  Even pivot tables can be used to create even more powerful reporting solutions.

    This how-to walks through this process using Excel as an example application.  Although in this example, the MySQL and PostgreSQL servers are running on Linux, the steps are no different if the software is running on Windows.  These steps are:

    1.         Setting up authentication
    2.         Installing the ODBC Drivers
    3.         Configuring the data source
    4.         Importing the data.

    Attachment: excerpt_linux_in_a_windows_world.pdf

  • Port25

    Microsoft at Node Summit

    • 3 Comments

    We are excited to be attending and participating at Node Summit in San Francisco this week.

    Among those Microsoft staffers on site are Server & Tools Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie - who participated on a panel about Platform as a Service this morning and also gave a keynote address - and Gianugo Rabellino, the Senior Director for Open Source Communities, who was on a panel discussing the importance of cross-platform.

    You can read more about Scott's keynote on the Windows Azure blog here.

    As this work continues inside of Microsoft as well as with the Node.js community and our partner ecosystem, new and exciting capabilities are coming available allowing Node.js developers to have great experiences on the Windows platform.

    Today, during his keynote, Scott Guthrie demonstrated how easy it is to get up and running with Node.js on Windows and Windows Azure, while our partners at Cloud9 showcased new tooling experiences that provide even greater flexibility to Node.js for developers who want to build for Windows Azure.

    Microsoft has been closely partnering with Joyent for some time now to port Node.js to Windows. We have built an IO abstraction library with them that can be used to make the code run on both Linux and Windows.

    We also recently released the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source, available on Github. These libraries are the perfect complement to our recently announced contributions to Node.js and provide a better Node.js experience on Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Developer Center provides documentation, tutorial, samples and how-to guides to get started with Node.js on Windows Azure.

    The Joyent team also recently updated the Node Package Manager for Windows (NPM) code to allow use of NPM on Windows. NPM is an essential tool for Node.js developers so now having support for it on Windows we have a better development experience on Windows.

    We are also working with the Joyent team on improving the development experience by leveraging the power of Microsoft Development tools and documentation that will make easier for developers to use Node.js APIs.

    And, relatedly, we have also been working closely with 10Gen and the MongoDB community in the past few months, and MongoDB already runs on Windows Azure. If you’re using the popular combination of Node.js and MongoDB, a simple straightforward install process will get you started on Windows Azure. You can learn more here.

    Our interest in, and support for Node.js is just one of the ways in which Windows Azure is continuing on its roadmap of embracing Open Source Software tools developers know and love, by working collaboratively with the open source community to build together a better cloud that supports all developers and their need for interoperable solutions based on developer choice.

    As Microsoft continues to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities.

    We also clearly understand that there are many different technologies that developers may want to use to build applications in the cloud: they want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.

    All of this delivers on our ongoing commitment to provide an experience where developers can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know, enable greater customer flexibility for managing and scaling databases, and making it easier for customers to get started and use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure.

  • Port25

    ASP.NET, Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages Open Sourced

    • 3 Comments

    More Open Source goodness from Microsoft today, with the announcement that we are open sourcing ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET Web Pages v2 (Razor) - all with contributions - under the Apache 2.0 license.

    You can find the source on CodePlex, and all the details on Scott Guthrie's blog.

    “We will also for the first time allow developers outside of Microsoft to submit patches and code contributions that the Microsoft development team will review for potential inclusion in the products,” Guthrie says. “We announced a similar open development approach with the Windows Azure SDK last December, and have found it to be a great way to build an even tighter feedback loop with developers – and ultimately deliver even better products as a result.”

    You can now browse, sync and build the source tree of ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor here.

    In short, as Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman notes in his blog about all this goodness: Open Source = Increased Investment. ASP.NET is a part of .NET, it will still ship with Visual Studio. It's the same ASP.NET, managed by the same developers with the same support.

    It is also very important to note, as Guthrie points out, that ASP.NET MVC, Web API and Razor will continue to be fully supported Microsoft products that ship both standalone as well as part of Visual Studio (the same as they do today).

    “They will also continue to be staffed by the same Microsoft developers that build them today (in fact, we have more Microsoft developers working on the ASP.NET team now than ever before),” he says. “Our goal with today’s announcement is to increase the feedback loop on the products even more, and allow us to deliver even better products. We are really excited about the improvements this will bring.”

  • Port25

    Announcing one more way Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities

    • 2 Comments

    In case you missed it, I just wanted to flag this blog from Jean Paoli:

    I am really excited to be able to share with you today that Microsoft has announced a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., to advance the company’s investment in openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source.

    My existing Interoperability Strategy team will form the nucleus of this new subsidiary, and I will serve as President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

    The team has worked closely with many business groups on numerous standards initiatives across Microsoft, including the W3C’s HTML5, IETF’s HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS, and in many open source environments such as Node.js, MongoDB and Phonegap/Cordova.

    We help provide open source building blocks for interoperable cloud services and collaborate on cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS; support developer choice of programming languages to enable Node.js, PHP and Java in addition to .NET in Windows Azure; and work with the PhoneGap/Cordova and jQuery Mobile and other open source communities to support Windows Phone.

    It is important to note that Microsoft and our business groups will continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a variety of ways, including working with many open source foundations such as Outercurve Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and many standards organizations. Microsoft Open Technologies is further demonstration of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to interoperability, greater openness, and to working with open source communities.

    Today, thousands of open standards are supported by Microsoft and many open source environments including Linux, Hadoop, MongoDB, Drupal, Joomla and others, run on our platform.

    The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined manner. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft’s proprietary development processes and the company’s open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities.

    This structure will make it easier and faster to iterate and release open source software, participate in existing open source efforts, and accept contributions from the community. Over time the community will see greater interaction with the open standards and open source worlds.

    As a result of these efforts, customers will have even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments.

    I look forward to sharing more on all this in the months ahead, as well as to working not only with the existing open source developers and standards bodies we work with now, but with a range of new ones.

    Thanks,

    Jean

  • Port25

    Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) – open-source implementation of DMTF CIM/WBEM standards

    • 2 Comments

    Microsoft and The Open Group have announced the release of Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), an open source project to further the development of a production quality implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards. The Windows Management team has a blog post covering the details of OMI and the goals of the project.

    OMI (formerly known as NanoWBEM) is an implementation of the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) standard, which defines the semantics of management information for networks, applications, and services. Here’s a high-level overview of OMI’s implementation of a CIM server:

    Just as the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) helped open up the x86 hardware ecosystem and enable rapid innovation across the industry, CIM-based tools such as OMI form a Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) that provides a framework for interoperability between management tools across diverse platforms and devices. As noted on the Windows Server blog:

    “… the growth of cloud-based computing is, by definition, driving demand for more automation, which, in turn, will require the existence of a solid foundation built upon management standards. For standards-based management to satisfy today’s cloud management demands, it must be sophisticated enough to support the diverse set of devices that are required and it must be easy to implement by hardware and platform vendors alike. The DMTF CIM and WSMAN standards are up to the task, but implementing them effectively has been a challenge. Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) addresses this problem.”

    Keep an eye on The Open Group’s OMI project site for the latest news about OMI’s evolution. You can download OMI source code and documentation today (available under an Apache 2.0 open source license), and soon you’ll find information about more detailed documentation, contribution facilities, and OMI developer conferences.

    Doug Mahugh
    Senior Technical Evangelist
    Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

  • Port25

    MS Open Tech @ OSCON 2012

    • 2 Comments

    If you’re at OSCON 2012 this week, drop by the Microsoft booth (#601) – we’d love to see you!

    We have many members of the MS Open Tech team here, as well as OSCON attendees from a variety of Microsoft teams and product groups who work with open source software. Our booth features a huge an 82 inch multi-touch PixelSense display (which is just plain fun to play around with), and you can have your picture taken by photographer Julian Cash, who is bringing his unique photographic style to our booth for the week. We’ll also have demos of some of the many OSS technologies that work well with Windows Azure and other Microsoft technologies, with experts on hand to answer all of your questions.

    Last night’s Opening Reception and Camp OSCON attendee party (sponsored by Microsoft and O’Reilly) were a blast, as you can see from the photos above.  Tomorrow morning, be sure to attend the plenary session in the Portland Ballroom from 9-10, where our own Gianugo Rabellino will be one of the participants, and on Friday  at 11:00 in room E147, don’t miss Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman’s session on "Will Microsoft ever get serious about Open Source?"

    Hope to see you at OSCON today!

    UPDATED: time-lapse video of Julian Cash creating amazing photos at the booth today ...

    Doug Mahugh
    Senior Technical Evangelist
    Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

  • Port25

    Meet the team that is collaborating on open source projects at the MS Open Tech Hub

    • 2 Comments

    From Jean Paoli

    Since we launched Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) as a subsidiary, project ideas have poured into our team from inside and outside the company as we shipped many open source projects and participated in many open standards activities.

    After a few months of existence I want to provide you some insights on how we are functioning internally: we are working on many projects and are hiring ten full time employees: we are hiring developers, technical program managers, standards professionals and  technical evangelists! We will be posting the jobs descriptions in a few weeks (and will update this blog with a link to apply).

    We have also been thinking about how to scale in order to be able to work across the many projects that could be interesting to MS Open Tech, Microsoft, and to the industry as a whole.

    I am pleased today to introduce the MS Open Tech Hub (the Hub):

    We created the Hub as new engineering program for MS Open Tech engineers: It is a collaborative place to build open source projects, exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices, and marshal and temporarily assign resources from Microsoft to MS Open Tech (in addition to MS Open Tech full time employees) based on the needs of specific projects.

    Open_Tech_group_High-2

    As the photograph above shows, the entire MS Open Tech team is excited and energized around the announcement of the Hub.

    The number one goal of the Hub is to build, accept contributions or contribute to open source projects. Based on the needs of open source projects, engineering resources from Microsoft teams may be temporarily assigned to MS Open Tech to participate in the Hub, where they will collaborate with the community, work with the MS Open Tech full time employees and contribute to MS Open Tech projects. This collaboration will further help us exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices for open source.

    The goal of the MS Open Tech Hub is to create a pool of talent where developers, testers, architects and others push boundaries, explore the toughest questions, and advance our investment in openness. The Hub brings together some of our best and brightest engineers to join together, work with the open community and toward the ultimate goal – building, accepting and contributing to interoperability, standards and open source projects.

    For example, the Entity Framework team joined the MS Open Tech Hub, and brought today’s open source Entity Framework project to life. This team was able to quickly organize engineering and open development resources to be ready to start collaborating with the open source communities. EF will join the other open source components of Microsoft’s dev tools and frameworks – MVC, Web API, and Web Pages with Razor Syntax – to help increase development transparency for this project.

    Get to know our team and find out what they like about collaborating in the Hub.

    We’ve learned through the years that great ideas happen when smart, passionate and creative people come together in a collaborative environment that enables new ideas to flourish.

    A few photos of a typical day in the MS Open Tech Hub

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    Jean Paoli
    President
    Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
    A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

  • Port25

    Windows Server Hyper-V is now a hypervisor for FreeBSD

    • 2 Comments

    As noted on the Openness@Microsoft blog this morning by Anandeep Pannu, Senior Program Manager for the 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.

    This release, which includes 8,500 lines of code released under the BSD license, is the result of collaboration between Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix to enable FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. My colleague Peter Galli had a blog post this spring about the announcement of this goal, and it’s great to see this work come to fruition so quickly! For further background, check out the interview with Joe CaraDonna, Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, in which he described how this project would “round out the FreeBSD virtualization story and make the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”

    FreeBSD is the latest in a growing list of open-source operating systems and open-source cloud projects that work with Hyper-V, including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, Cs2C, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. This wide range of options makes it easier for customers to take advantage of server virtualization, enabling a variety of cloud computing and hybrid computing scenarios.

    For more information about today’s announcement, see the blog post on Openness@Microsoft as well as the documentation and downloads available from the freebsdonhyper-v project on Github. The FreeBSD drivers are being prepared for inclusion in the FreeBSD core, and there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback).

    Congratulations to all involved in reaching this important milestone! We’re looking forward to more good news from the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team going forward.

    Doug Mahugh
    Senior Technical Evangelist
    Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

  • Port25

    MS Open Tech is hiring - come join the fun!

    • 2 Comments

    I can hardly believe it’s been almost four months since we announced the foundation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Boy, have we been busy: Redis, JQuery Mobile, OData, HTTP 2.0, Doctrine, Symfony, Apache Solr, Windows Azure tools for Mac and Linux, Eclipse, Apache Cordova, MongoDB, CouchDB, EntityFramework, ASP.net MVC 4, Web API, Web Pages, WebRTC, Wordpress… the list goes on, and the road ahead of us is nothing short of amazing. We are heading towards one of the most important years in Microsoft history and everyone in MS Open Tech is excited and busy advancing our journey into openness.

    We have come to a point where we really could use some help, and I believe we have quite a few great opportunities to join our team. We are currently looking for developers, program managers, technical diplomats and evangelists: what those profiles have in common is a strong interest and experience in open technologies (Open Standards and Open Source), interoperability and community engagement. We strongly believe in code doing the talking for us: we are pragmatic, agile, focused on real-life scenarios and deeply engaged in open conversations with the community at large.

    We are having tons of fun pursuing our passion for solving customer and developer issues by creating innovative solutions and technical bridges between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, and we want more of the same. Please visit the Microsoft careers website to learn more about the open positions and by all means do get in touch: we would love to talk to you.

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