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At the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco today, Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft’s Open Solutions Group, along with Alan Clark, Director of New Initiatives and Emerging Standards for Open Source at SUSE, announced the release of a beta version of the SUSE Manager Management Pack for System Center.
In a blog post, Gupta said the announcement, which was made in collaboration with SUSE, lets this management pack connect the Linux server management capabilities provided by SUSE Manager to System Center, Microsoft’s management platform.
“As a result, customers will be able to administer both Windows and Linux environments from a single management console,” he said.
Gupta positioned the management pack as one example of the work Microsoft is doing to advance interoperability for private clouds. You can try the Linux management capabilities this management pack provides for System Center here.
“On the public cloud front, there’s extensive work going on across the company to facilitate interoperability between Microsoft and open source cloud tools and services. One of the most exciting examples of this comes from the SQL Server Team -- the Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure, for which Microsoft released a second preview last month,” he said.
This solution for managing “big data,” connecting it and turning it into business insight, is a prime example of the type of value customers want to realize as a result of leveraging open source and Microsoft software together, he noted.
You can read his full blog post here.
Today, at BSDCan 2012, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix announced upcoming native support for FreeBSD support on Windows Server Hyper-V.
This move continues our commitment to extend support across platforms to the Windows Server Hyper-V solution, making it easier for more customers to realize the benefits of server virtualization and more easily adopt cloud computing.
This will allow FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. The drivers and associated source code will be released early this summer under the BSD license, and will initially work with FreeBSD 8.2 and 8.3 on Windows Server 2008 R2.
You can read more about this on the Openness blog.
Joe CaraDonna, the Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, says in an interview that he was thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft and Citrix to deliver Windows Server Hyper-V support to FreeBSD.
“I think the combination of these virtualization technologies helps round-out the FreeBSD virtualization story, and makes the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”
He also notes how committed Microsoft is to open source initiatives: “we decided from the very beginning that we were going to open source the code under the BSD license. No strings attached. They were as eager as us to support the project, and then give the code away. How cool is that?”
You can read the full interview here.
The past few weeks have been very busy in our offices as we announced the creation of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. Now that the dust has settled it’s time for us to resume our regular cadence in releasing code, and we are happy to share with you the very first deliverable from our new company: a new and significant iteration of our work on Redis on Windows, the open-source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store.
The major improvements in this latest version involve the process of saving data on disk. Redis on Linux uses an OS feature called Fork/Copy On Write. This feature is not available on Windows, so we had to find a way to be able to mimic the same behavior without changing completely the save on disk process so as to avoid any future integration issues with the Redis code.
The version we released today implements the Copy On Write process at the application level: instead of relying on the OS we added code to Redis so that some data structures are duplicated in such a way that Redis can still serve requests from clients while saving data on disk (thus achieving the same effect of Fork/Copy On Write does automatically on Linux).
You can find the code for this new version on the new MS Open Tech repository in GitHub, which is currently the place to work on the Windows version of Redis as per guidance from Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original author of the project. We will also continue working with the community to create a solid Windows port.
We consider this not to be production ready code, but a solid code base to be shared with the community to solicit feedback: as such, while we pursue stabilization, we are keeping the older version as default/stable on the GitHub repository. To try out the new code, please go to the bksavecow branch.
In the next few weeks we plan to extensively test the code so that developers can use it for more serious testing. In the meantime, we will keep looking at the ‘save on disk’ process to find out if there are other opportunities to make the code perform even better. We will promote the bksavecow branch to master as soon as we (and you!) are confident the code is stable.
Please send your feedback, file suggestions and issues to our GitHub repository. We look forward to further iterations and to working with the Redis community at large to make the Windows experience even better.
Claudio Caldato
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
Starting today, the Metro style theme for JQuery Mobile, the popular open source mobile user interface framework, is available for download on GitHub and can be used as a NuGet package in Visual Studio.
The theme enables HTML5 pages to adapt automatically to the Metro design style when rendered on Windows Phone 7.5. The Metro style theme is open source and available for download here. This new Metro style theme’s development was sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. working closely with Sergei Grebnov, an Apache Cordova committer and jQuery Mobile developer.
The theme looks just gorgeous, doesn’t it?
The CSS and Javascript theme adapts to the current theme used in Windows Phone and applies the right styling to the jQuery Mobile controls.This allows mobile HTML5 web sites and hybrid applications to naturally integrate into the Windows Phone Metro style experience. This offers developers the choice of rapidly integrating the theme into their existing application but also to contribute to this open source project through GitHub.
You can see an extensive demo of the theme on this page and you can learn more on this site where we are publishing new articles, references and source code sample for developing with Apache Cordova and the Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile.
This is another milestone in our continuous engagement with the community. Our team has been working closely with the Windows Phone division to support the mobile HTML5 and JavaScript open source communities over the last year to bring popular open source projects to Windows Phone:
We believe it is important for developers to have choices when targeting Windows Phone, and we also want them to be able to deliver a good experience to the users of their applications, especially when making the choice of using Web standards (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) to target multiple mobile platforms by picking solutions such as Apache Cordova.
To do so, developers already enjoy a selection of Apache Cordova Plugins that give their application a Windows Phone touch such as Social Share, Bing Map launcher and Live Tile. Now developers can use the new open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile to give their mobile apps and websites the Metro style look and feel, and offer the final users an experience similar to the one they get with native applications.
As usual we are very interested in hearing from developers and gathering feedback about the experience of developing HTML5-based applications and websites on Windows Phone. Let us know what other features, tools and frameworks you’d like to see.
Abu Obeida Bakhach Program Manager Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
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
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.”
Great news for our CodePlex community: CodePlex now supports Git!
Git has been one of the top rated requests from the CodePlex community for some time, and giving CodePlex users what they ask for and supporting their open source efforts has always been important to us.
And the goodness continues, as the CodePlex team has a long list of improvements planned.
So, why Git? CodePlex already has Mercurial for distributed version control and TFS (which also supports subversion clients) for centralized version control. The short answer is that the CodePlex community voted, loud and clear, that Git support was critical.
With the addition of Git, CodePlex now has three options when it comes to Open Source project hosting. Projects can now select between TFS, Mercurial, and Git.
Each developer has their own preferences, and for some, centralized version control makes more sense to them. For others, DVCS is the only way to go. We’re equally committed to supporting both these technologies for users.
You can get started today by creating a new project or contribute to an existing project by creating a fork.
For help on getting started with Git on CodePlex, see the help documentation here. If you would like to switch your project to use Git, please contact CodePlex Support with your project information.
For more information on this news, read the CodePlex blog.
I am excited to share some great news about how we are opening up the SQL Server data platform even further with expanded interoperability support through new tools that allow customers to modernize their infrastructure while maximizing existing investments and extending virtually any data anywhere.
The SQL Server team today introduced several tools that enable interoperability with SQL Server 2012.
These tools help developers to build secure, highly available and high performance applications for SQL Server in .NET, C/C++, Java and PHP, on-premises and in the cloud.
These new tools include a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client, a SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, backward compatibility with ADO.Net and the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 and PHP Driver 3.0.
You can find more information on all this goodness on the SQL Server blog here.
I am pleased to announce another open source milestone as we continue to deliver on our commitment to Interoperability: today, the Facebook C# SDK was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery.
This project is a set of libraries that enables developers of all Microsoft platforms, as well as Mono, to build applications that integrate with Facebook. The project contains core libraries for authentication and calling Facebook APIs. Additionally, the project contains platform specific helpers such as extension methods for ASP.NET MVC.
The Facebook C# libraries give app developers a stable, small-footprint SDK that enables quick app integration into Facebook. This has allowed mobile and web app developers to quickly create Facebook apps that meet the needs of their customers.
The Facebook C# SDK has had 10 major releases, and has been downloaded more than 115,000 times, proving to be one of the most popular community-driven open source projects in the .Net ecosystem.
The project, which already has a significant user base, was hosted on CodePlex.com but has moved to github, with developer discussions supported on Stack Overflow.
Nathan Totten, Jim Zimmerman and Prabir Shrestha developed the Facebook C# SDK and contributed the project to the Outercurve Foundation, which currently has three galleries and 21 projects, each of which was contributed with funding and resources to support the project and/or gallery for a period of three years.
Of the 225 developers who currently contribute to Outercurve projects, fewer than 45% are employed by Microsoft.
I’m really excited to be able to give you an update on our strategy and product roadmap for Big Data, especially around our embrace of Apache Hadoop as part of our data platform.
As you may remember, at the PASS Summit last October we laid out our roadmap for Big Data, with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ted Kummert announcing plans to deliver enterprise class Apache Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.
Even more importantly, he announced that Microsoft will be working with the community to offer contributions for inclusion into the Apache Hadoop project and its ecosystem of tools and technologies.
Now, this week at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, Dave Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, will give a keynote address on Wednesday morning where he will talk about how we are demonstrating our progress on this front as we strive to help organizations derive new insights from Big Data.
In a blog post today, Campbell notes that Microsoft has been working hard to bring the simplicity and manageability of Windows to Hadoop based solutions, and we are expanding the reach with a Hadoop based service on Windows Azure.
“Hadoop is a great tool but, to fully realize the vision of the modern data platform, we also need a marketplace to search, share and use 1st and 3rd party data and services. And, to bring the power to everyone in the business, we need to connect the new big data ecosystem to business intelligence tools like PowerPivot and Power View,” he says.
Microsoft is working closely with the community and ecosystem – including partners such as Karmasphere, Datameer and HStreaming – to deliver an open and flexible platform that is compatible with Hadoop and works well with leading 3rd party tools and technologies.
“We have recently reached a significant milestone in this journey, with our first series of contributions to the Apache Hadoop projects. Working with Hortonworks, we have submitted a proposal to the Apache Software Foundation for enhancements to Hadoop to run on Windows Server and are also in the process of submitting further proposals for a JavaScript framework and a Hive ODBC Driver,” Campbell says.
As Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft’s Senior Director for Open Source Communities said last October, these moves 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,” he said at that time.
You can read Campbell’s blog here and learn more about what we are doing for Big Data here.
The success of the recent Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards ceremony was buoyed by the move of its Drupal-based website hosted on internal Linux servers to one hosted on Windows Azure.
The SAG Awards site is a highly visible, high-traffic website running on Drupal. Hosting it on Azure provides a scalable, public cloud environment for SAG team. They can tune up or down the compute and storage requirements according to expected website loads, thereby getting a more scalable, manageable and cost-effective solution for running their site.
SAG also gets the benefits of PaaS – no need to manage the operating system patches, virtual machine images, network topology etc. This is particularly useful for SAG as the site has stable traffic for nine months, but which spikes for the three months from when award nominations open to the night of the event itself.
The SAG Awards site was previously hosted on internal Linux boxes. In previous years, performance was negatively impacted by site outages and slow performance during peak-usage days, with SAG having to consistently upgrade their hardware to meet demand for those days. That upgraded hardware was then not optimally used during the rest of the year.
The usage pattern for the SAG Awards site fluctuates, but spikes between November and February when the site is used for SAG award nominations in early November to the actual announcement of nominations in in mid-December. Peak usage is on the night of the awards ceremony where multiple uploads of pictures, news articles, and site visits happen.
What is even more impressive is that both visits and page views almost doubled on the night of the event. In 2011, some 222,816 people visited the site and 434,743 pages were viewed, while this year there were some 325,303 site visits and 789,310 page views, reflecting the stability and performance of the site on Windows Azure.
Microsoft started working with the SAG Awards team in May 2011, when their CIO Erin Griffin joined the Interoperability Executive Council (IEC) - founded by Microsoft in 2006 with a goal of identifying the industry’s greatest areas of need and to work together to create solutions - and attended a council meeting.
In September Mike Story, SAG’s chief architect, attended an IEC work stream meeting and asked for Microsoft’s support in porting the site to Azure. The Business Platform Division’s Customer Experience (CAT) team, the Interoperability group and Windows Azure all started working with SAG in early October and, on December 20, 2011, the site went live on Windows Azure.
“We moved to Windows Azure after looking at the services it offered,” said Erin Griffin, CIO at SAG. “Understanding the best usage scenario for us took time and effort, but with help from Microsoft, we successfully moved our site to Windows Azure and the biggest traffic day for us went off with flying colors.”
This is just one real world outcome from the IEC, which has counseled Microsoft on many interoperability topics and introduced a number of real world scenarios for discussion. The IEC, working together with Microsoft, has developed a number of solutions for these scenarios, with this one for the SAG Awards being the latest.
Curt Peterson, Microsoft’s Principal Group Program Manager, BPD Customer Experience, notes that the success of Sunday’s SAG Awards ceremony underscores how Windows Azure is a scalable, open Cloud platform ready for production use. “We are committed to making it easier for all our customers to use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure,” he says.
My colleague Grigori Melnik has a great blog post about the CQRS Journey project, which aims to deliver the source code for a complete, working reference implementation (an end-to-end sample app) that illustrates the key concepts, patterns, and approaches related to Command Query Responsibility Segregation and Event Sourcing (CQRS & ES), and a written guide to accompany the code, provide explanations, context, and references to other relevant material.
CQRS is an architectural pattern in which you separate your read model from the write model. The benefits include almost infinite scalability, adaptability to changing business requirements, resolution of concurrency conflicts, and overall simplification of the design.
As Grigori notes in his blog, they have positioned the CQRS guidance project as a learning journey. An advisory board has been established and some public consultation has taken place that helped scope the project initially.
"Unfortunately, there’s no solid guidance around implementing it and so we are embarking on a development project where we will implement a real world, non-trivial system using variety of CQRS approaches and share those learnings with the community," he told me. "The good news now is that we can have members of the community to participate in this journey together with us."
He goes on to say that while this is good news, "we recognize that for this project to be successful, we need to be not only open and transparent, but we also need to collaborate with the community (in its way a global village) more closely. That’s why I am extremely happy and proud to announce that for the first time in the history of the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team, the following: In the true spirit of open source, we will be taking community contributions on the CQRS Journey project,” he said.
This means:
The project will be hosted on GitHub and the contribution guidelines will be published soon. You can read his full blog here and find the project site here.
As you know, educational institutions across the globe face the challenge of trying to meet accelerating technology demands with limited budgets. That is why I am really pleased to report that, today, Moodlerooms has released an open source plug-in that integrates Microsoft Live@edu with Moodle, the world's leading open source Learning Management System with 55 million users.
With this integration, Moodlerooms will make the rich functionality of Live@edu directly accessible within the Moodle 2.0 and 1.9 environments via single sign-on, further enabling teachers and students to access the quality, enterprise-level tools they need to effectively teach and learn online.
Microsoft Live@edu makes hosted email, communications and collaboration services freely available to educational institutions and currently benefits more than 22 million people worldwide.
Moodlerooms’ Microsoft Live@edu services plug-in for Moodle will bring Microsoft’s Live@edu email, calendar, instant messaging and Bing services right into the Moodle classroom environment.
The plug-in is freely available to download from the moodle.org plug-in directory here.
You can read more about this on the Moodlerooms release here, as well as on the Microsoft in Education blog and the Microsoft Openness blog.
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.
Good news for all you Java developers out there: I am happy to share with you the availability of Windows Azure libraries for Java that provide Java-based access to the functionality exposed via the REST API in Windows Azure Service Bus.
You can download the Windows Azure libraries for Java from GitHub.
This is an early step as we continue to make Windows Azure a great cloud platform for many languages, including .NET and Java. If you’re using Windows Azure Service Bus from Java, please let us know your feedback on how these libraries are working for you and how we can improve them. Your feedback is very important to us!
You may refer to Windows Azure Java Developer Center for related information.
Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers and we believe these libraries will enable Java applications to more easily connect to Windows Azure, in particular the Service Bus, making it easier for applications written on any platform to interoperate with each another through Windows Azure.
Ram Jeyaraman
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft’s Interoperability Group