The Windows Team has decided to help celebrate the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate, by releasing a preview edition of Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, by Kraig Brockschmidt. Download a PDF of the ebook here (4.34 MB). Download the ebook’s sample code here (27.5 MB). (We’ll release EPUB and MOBI versions of the final ebook.) This book is about writing Metro style apps for Windows 8 using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The primary focus will be on applying these web technologies within the Windows 8 platform, where there are unique considerations, and not on exploring the details of those web technologies themselves. For the most part, then, the author assumes that you’re already at least somewhat conversant with these standards. We will cover some of the more salient areas like the CSS grid, which is central to app layout, but otherwise I trust that you’re capable of finding appropriate references for everything else. This version covers the first 4 chapters of the final e-book. Chapter 1 The Life Story of a Metro Style App: Platform Characteristics of Windows 8 Chapter 2 Quickstart Chapter 3 App Anatomy and Page Navigation Chapter 4 Controls, Control Styling, and Basic Data Binding Chapter 5 Collections and Collection Controls Chapter 6 Layout Chapter 7 Metro Style Commanding UI Chapter 8 State, Settings, Files, and Documents Chapter 9 Input and Sensors Chapter 10 Media Chapter 11 Purposeful Animations Chapter 12 Contracts Chapter 13 Tiles, Notifications, the Lock Screen, and Background Tasks Chapter 14 Networking Chapter 15 Devices and Printing Chapter 16 Extensions Chapter 17 Apps for Everyone: Localization, Accessibility, and the Windows Store Chapter 18 Services Have fun!

Be part of the Windows 8 Hackathon in Singapore, a one-day event focused on hardcore hacking of your Windows 8 Metro Style apps! Join us for a low-key, informal day of coding. Don’t worry, plenty of coffee will be available. We will start off with introductions and then quickly go into hack-mode so that you can work on your app. At the end of the day, you can show off your app in its current state (no worries, we are all friends here!) and then find out how to get your app into the Windows Store. Please note that attendees of the Windows 8 Hackathon will be given priority for registration to the Windows 8 Application Excellence Lab. You will need to attend an Application Excellence Lab in order for your Windows 8 Metro Style app to be one of the first from Canada in the Windows Store! The theme for this Hackathon is I <3 SG. We want to have more apps for our sunny island in the Singapore Windows 8 App Store. :) We’ve lined up a number of great prizes for you, so don’t miss out! REGISTER HERE: http://bit.ly/LRvSjN Event details Start Date/Time: 16 June 2012 (Sat), 9am End Date/Time: 17 June 2012 (Sun), 11am Venue: Microsoft Singapore 1 Marina Boulevard, Level 21 Auditorium Singapore 018989 16 June (Sat) 9:00am - 9:30am Registration 9:30am - 9:45am Welcome and Introduction 9:45am onwards Commencement of Hacking 9:45am - 10:45am Metro Design Step-by-step (Optional) 10:45am - 12:15pm Javascript + HTML5 Workshop (Optional) C# Workshop (Optional) 12:15pm - 1:15pm Lunch 5:30pm-6:30pm Dinner 9:30pm – 11:00pm Supper 17 June (Sun) 9:00am – 10:00am Breakfast 11am Submission of Apps ...

After giving you the first taste of Windows 8 two months ago, we are back with the Release Preview. The Release Preview is the final test version of Windows 8 before we go ahead with RTM, Release to Manufacturing. Between that time, we will still be making changes to Windows 8, which you can follow at the Windows Team blog. Here are 5 new changes in the Release Preview: · Local Windows Store: Singapore is one of them! Featuring apps like Channel News Asia, Straits TImes, Razor TV and many more new Metro style apps like Wikipedia, other News and Sports apps and Bing Travel · Improvements to the Mail, Photos, and People apps that initially debuted with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview · Improved multi-monitor support · A touch-friendly, secure and power-optimized Adobe Flash Player is now fully integrated into IE10 · First browser to feature Do Not Track “on” by default, giving you more choice and control over their privacy Here’s a quick video that showcases the interface for Windows 8 RP at work and play: The Windows Store now also supports app submission for local markets and Singapore is one of the countries. We’ve gotten great response from developers here who are planning to build Metro style apps and will be holding events such as hackathons, hands-on-labs for you to get started building them! Updates for Developers: Improved Visual Studio templates Another area where we have made a lot of improvements is templates in Visual Studio. We’ve made lots of updates to our templates and even added a new one so that it is easier for you to start a new project and get a great app up and running in no time. ...

Recent news that Singaporean telcos are lowering the generous data cap of their mobile price plans have sent most local smartphone users into a frenzy. No more will you have the convenience of tethering your laptop to your mobile without considering if watching that Youtube clip will cost you an additional SGD30 (Or if you’re with Singtel, SGD88) extra in your phone bill that month. Here’s the issue in a nutshell. According to media reports, SingTel will remove its current 12 GB cap and replace it with a lower 2 GB limit for its entry-level plan. The higher data plans are capped at 3 GB, 4 GB and 12 GB. Starhub followed suit with plans to cap their plans at 1 GB, 2 GB and 5 GB. And all this is likely to be implemented by July of this year. M1, what say you? Cue the shock and horror. So what does this all actually mean for the average smartphone user? Firstly, I doubt most people actually finish using their allotted 12 GB per month. Mobile apps don’t consume a lot of data due to the inherently compact nature of mobile surfing. I know I don’t even come close, unless I am actively out and about using my phone as a portable modem. Secondly, many industry insiders have also pointed out that this move has been a long time coming. Singaporean telcos have been extremely generous with mobile data caps when you compare them to telcos overseas - a mobile plan on AT&T in the United States only has a measly 200 MB cap per month. But of course, Singapore is a lot smaller geographically, you say. Do note that our price plans for data per month are also significantly lower than the average price plans overseas. On the bright side, this may also mean faster surfing speeds on the go as this cap discourages excessive data usage, freeing up those clearly overstrained base stations. To help you out more, here are some data usage monitoring apps for your Windows phones (built-in!), iPhones and Android phones so you don’t get a heart attack the next time your bill comes in the mail.

I know everyone knows Windows 8 went Release Preview. You probably are downloading it or already downloaded. As a infrastructure person, you might want to check out Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate too! It is released together with Windows 8 RP. There are some huge changes that I see. There is a feature comparison document release on Comparison between Windows Server 2008R2 Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. There are some very interesting figures there. Make sure you take a look. It also describes what are the features not supported or partially supported in 2008 R2 Hyper-V that becomes fully supported in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. It is a pretty exciting list. Below is a high level comparison, and some are quite different from previous beta release. Not only Hyper-V is improved, there are a lot more new features coming with Windows Server 2012 RC. You can download the White Paper for the RC release and have a detail view on what are the new features.

We’ve heard a lot of startup ideas from running Microsoft BizSpark and hosting four cycles of Founders’ Institute Singapore. More often than not, founders tend to build their full product, even before testing it out on their audiences, which might not be the wisest thing to do. Here’s a quick and interesting infographic to let you test out your idea quickly before committing all your resources. by annavital. Browse more Technology infographics. My favourite has got to be “Buy a Cool Costume” and pass out your fliers outside a really large tech event. Guess what! There’s one coming really soon by e27 Singapore and we’ll be there! ...

In Windows Server 2012, there is a new capability to leverage SMB File Server for Virtualization and Private Cloud. There three main mode the deployment: Single-node File Server - Standalone file server is not highly available, it provides the most inexpensive file server solution Dual-node File Server - This is probably most common file server configuration, providing continuous availability (via SMB transparent failover) at a low cost. Using shared Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage (just-a-bunch-of-disks [JBOD] s or a SAS-based Storage Array), this solution can scale to a few hundred disks Multi-node File Server - This file server cluster is highly scalable. This cluster can leverage features like SMB Scale-Out and SMB Direct to create a shared storage infrastructure to serve dozens and even to hundreds of Hyper-V nodes. Using a 10GbE or InfiniBand to connect the Hyper-V computer nodes to the file servers has huge cost saving potential compare to Fibber Channel. Below diagram illustrates the these three modes. To understand in details how SMB file server really works Jeffrey Snover’s Blog Post One of the questions that I get a lot is how about performance? One of the key capabilities that enable great performance is SMB Direct. SMB2 Direct (SMB over RDMA) is a new storage protocol in Windows Server 2012. It enables direct memory-to-memory data transfers between server and storage, with minimal CPU utilization, while using standard RDMA capable NICs. SMB2 Direct is supported on all three available RDMA technologies (iWARP, InfiniBand and RoCE.) Minimizing the CPU overhead for storage I/O means that servers can handle larger compute workloads. Microsoft also published Preliminary performance results . (Check out Jose Barreto’s blog for detail information) Windows Server 2012 Beta results – SMB Direct IOPs, bandwidth and latency These results come from a couple of servers that play the role of SMB Server and SMB client. The client in this case was a typical server-class computers using an Intel Westmere motherboard with two Intel Xeon L5630 processors (2 sockets, 4 cores each, 2.10 GHz). For networking, it was equipped with a single RDMA-capable Mellanox ConnectX-2 QDR InfiniBand card sitting on a PCIe Gen2 x8 slot. For these tests, the IOs went all the way to persistent storage (using 14 SSDs). We tested three IO sizes: 512KB, 8KB and 1KB, all reads. ...

Ever since the Kinect for Windows sensor and SDK has been released, the team has been adding more cool features to the product to enable more creative uses for this sound/motion detection device. With that, we’re very pleased to announce that Version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows runtime and SDK is finally here! The 1.5 SDK brings a number of exciting, new capabilities. Some highlights include: •Kinect Studio. A new tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development. •Face Tracking SDK. Which provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc. •Seated Skeletal Tracking is now available. •New capabilities to enable avatar animation scenarios. The Kinect Accelerator teams are building with Kinect for Windows, which makes me even more excited to see what the new groups of developers who have access are going to build! Have fun developing on the Kinect!

Much has been said about the touchscreen interface being a natural, almost instinctive way of interacting with personal computing devices. It’s so easy that even a kitten can use it - and they do. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltJzAndNyLo[/youtube] Because the internet was created for cat videos. From marketing pet food to scientific research, scientists and their programming counterparts have begun using tablets and touch-sensitive screens to entertain and educate ourselves about our furry friends. Here are some interesting ways technology is changing how we work with animals: Animals using tablets [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPynuuTMKTo[/youtube] From the tons of animal-related tablet or smartphone videos on Youtube, you can probably tell that our pets are drawn to touchscreen technologies. Maybe it’s the lights or the bright colours, but find me any cat that walks by and ignores an open laptop. Though, I’m not sure why anyone would let an elephant play with a Samsung Galaxy Note… [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBrmaE82uY4[/youtube] Marketing pet food ...

The advent of touch devices and motion sensing devices such as the Kinect has allowed us to start thinking more about how to design technology that is comes more natural to human interactions. In this interesting video, Steve Clayton talks about the drive at Microsoft to embrace what he calls ’natural user interface’. Clayton, who says his job is to find out what amazing projects the tech firm is working on and share it with the world, takes us through a future-forward vision where gesture, sound and artificial-intuition creates a world that extends the possibilities of our creativity. Enjoy!