November 2012 - Page 2 of 2 - Applied Information Sciences

@JimMullennix

This week, many AIS team members are attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. We’ll be posting blog posts from each of them as they learn what’s new and what’s exciting during sessions, demonstrations and other conference highlights.

During the Microsoft SharePoint Conference keynote yesterday morning, there weren’t a lot of surprises (if you’ve been paying attention for the last few months, that is). However, you can always learn something from the emphasis that Microsoft puts on certain topics. The biggest “announcement” was that the enterprise features of Yammer are now included with Office 365 E Plans and SharePoint Online. SharePoint 2013 also went up for sale (at least for some customers) yesterday. The rest is all about the cloud and apps.

Kevin Aenmey

Video has become an integral part of our web experience. This, coupled with the pervasiveness of connected and video capable devices, calls for an easy-to-use, flexible, reliable and scalable platform for hosting, processing and distributing media to anyone, anywhere, on any device. The availability of Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS) Preview lets us explore a promising new platform which aims to bring us closer to that goal.

Since WAMS is still in the preview release stage there are a few wrinkles in the platform that early adopters need to be aware of. These issues should be corrected in upcoming releases but until then, there are a few alternate approaches that will help you get your media solution up and running with as little frustration as possible. In this post I will show you how to get video content hosted, encoded and delivered using the WAMS SDK and how to work around some of the quirks with the June 2012 Preview version.

Vishwas Lele

@vlele

Last month, a group of us from the Washington CTO council visited Nova Labs in Reston.

Nova Labs is part of the maker movement that has mushroomed around the country. This movement is a confluence of things coming together including 1) open source hardware that promotes advancement in hardware design though common standards and crowds sourcing, much like the open source software, 2) the availability of some highly-advanced machines such as 3-D printing, high-precision laser cutters at a price point within the reach of hobbyists, and 3) the do-it-yourself (DIY) mindset that encourages participants to make stuff (hence the term “makers”). There are over 1,000 such makerspaces in the country.

Ryan Cromwell

@cromwellryan

You’ve had a sip of the NuGet Kool-Aid, picked your jaw up off the ground after seamlessly installing your favorite Open Source project, and now you’re diving head first into NuGet as your team’s dependency management tool of choice. Private NuGet repository is in place, Package Restore is enabled and new packages are being published automagically from your builds.

DLL-hell is behind you right? Not so fast. This never-ending saga has reemerged as NuGet-hell.

Managing your dependencies requires discipline and conscious decision making regardless of the tools you choose. Don’t leave the building blocks of your applications to chance.

But how do you get the information necessary to make these decisions?

tom mckearney

@tommckearney

When it comes to Microsoft, people don’t generally think “Open Source” or “Linux Support”. But in recent years, Microsoft has come a long way. They’ve released many of their most commonly used frameworks under open source licenses, including ASP.NET MVC/Web API/Web Pages and Entity Framework!

Additionally, they’ve given first-class support for many non-Microsoft offerings, especially in Azure. Currently, this includes support in Azure for open source gems like Node.js, PHP, and, yes, even Linux. Heck, they even have an Openness logo:

In this post, I’ll walk you through setting up the Ubuntu Desktop on an Azure Virtual Machine and configure it so you can connect to it through Windows Remote Desktop. It’s a lot easier than you think!

AISblog

@aisteam

Some end-of-the-week reads from AIS employees’ personal blogs:

Windows Azure Planning: A Post-Decision Guide to Integrate Windows Azure in Your Environment: AIS’ CTO Vishwas Lele posted a complete planning guide on how to best adopt and integrate Windows Azure into your organization. (Fleeting Thoughts)

SharePoint Saturday Cincinnati Session: Clint Richardson (who wrote the excellent three-part series on The Best New Features of SQL Server 2012) presented a Voluntold admin session at last week’s SharePoint Saturday Cincinnati. His presentation, relevant links and PowerShell code are all available at his blog. (pointblankadmin)

Understanding and Using System.Transactions: Ash Tewari has compiled an excellent library of resources to help you understand and effectively use System.Transactions functionality in your .NET projects. (tewari.info)

Adaptive Problems Require Responding to Change Over Following a Plan: More deep thoughts on the Scrum framework and Agile values from Ryan Cromwell. (cromwellhaus)

Aliasing Multiple Properties in Knockout JS Bindings: David Benson figured out another handy use for Knockout JS’s “with” statement: you can emulate c# style “using” directives. (dben codes)

Teach Your Kid to Code: Steve Michelotti (and his 5th grade son!) will be co-presenting a great, fun session called Teach Your Kid to Code at the CMAP meeting next Tuesday evening in Columbia, MD. (Don’t forget to get out and vote early, too.) (Steve Michelotti)

BlogMonthly Archives: November 2012 - Page 2