SQL Server team blog posted about Parallel Data Warehouse News and Hadoop Interoperability Plans. In a nutshell, Microsoft announced its intentions to bring Hadoop to SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW).

The connectors provide interoperability between SQL Server/PDW and Hadoop environments, enabling customers to transfer data between Hadoop and SQL Server/PDW. With these connectors, customers can more easily integrate Hadoop with their Microsoft Enterprise Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence solutions to gain deeper business insights from both structured and unstructured data.

You can read the announcement about these connectors from here.

Tags: Big Data, PDW, SQL Server

C9::GoingNative is a monthly show on Channel 9 focused on native development with an emphasis on C++.

Each episode will have a segment including an interview with a native dev in his/her native habitat (office) where we’ll talk about what they do and how they use native code and associated toolchains, as well as get their insights and wisdom—geek out. There will be a small news component or segment, but the show will primarily focus on technical tips and conversations with active C/C++ coders, demonstrations of new core language features, libraries, compilers, toolchains, etc.

You can also follow thjeir Twitter account, @C9GoingNative, and share this good news in your relevant social circles. Please send your feedback and suggestions to their public email account.

Tags: Native

How many times have you wanted to send a project to a friend or upload it to a web site like MSDN Code Gallery only to find that your zip file has lots of stuff that you don’t need to send in it making the file larger than it needs to be.

• bin folder
• obj folder
• TestResults folder
• Resharper folders

And then if you forget about removing Source Control bindings whoever gets your project will be prompted about that.  Ron Jacobs decided to share with us his code for cleaning a project.

Get Clean Project – Cleans Visual Studio Solutions For Uploading or Email from MSDN.

Tags: Tools, Visual Studio 2010

S Somasegar, Developer Division Senior Vice President, announced C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) that helps you target graphics hardware from all the major hardware vendors. The idea is to provide a way you can build out your software on massively parallel to include both GPU and APUs.

Soma also announced Microsoft’s intent to make C++ AMP an open specification.

We expect that it will be part of the next Visual C++ compiler and fully integrated in the next release of Visual Studio experience.

The announcement was made at AMD Fusion Developer Summit. More information is available on his blog post, Targeting Heterogeneity with C++ AMP and PPL.

from Soma’s post:

Previously, I blogged about key trends in software development starting with concurrency/parallelism, and indeed today multi-core systems are everywhere. You can target multi-core systems from many mainstream programming languages, and with Visual Studio 2010 we delivered market leading tooling for parallel development and debugging. You can see my post on our concurrency enhancements to C++ for VS2010 and here for a walkthrough of our parallel debugging tools.

In the last few years, we have been seeing an additional trend of heterogeneous hardware where, for example, developers take advantage of the GPU for computational purposes for their data parallel algorithms. This has been successful in narrow verticals using niche programing models. Microsoft wants to bring to the mainstream the ability to write code that takes advantage of heterogeneous hardware like GPUs. So like we’ve done with multi-core before, we are bringing this ability to the next version of Visual Studio.

I’m excited to announce that we are introducing a new technology that helps C++ developers use the GPU for parallel programming. Today at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, we announced C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP). Additionally, I’m happy to say that we intend to make the C++ AMP specification an open specification.

By building on the Windows DirectX platform, our implementation of C++ AMP allows you to target hardware from all the major hardware vendors. We expect that it will be part of the next Visual C++ compiler and fully integrated in the next release of Visual Studio experience.

In addition, there is more work that we are doing on parallel computing. We also announced new enhancements to the next version of Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) and the C++ Concurrency Runtime. You can find easy-to-use C++ templates and runtime support to express algorithms for your domain expertise which scale on any provided hardware with PPL, Agent and the C++ Concurrency Runtime. With C++ AMP and PPL, we aim to make the next version of Visual Studio the most productive environment for targeting heterogeneous hardware available.

We will be making the session recording from Herb Sutter’s keynote session and Daniel Moth’s break-out session from the AMD Fusion conference available shortly. Please check the Visual C++ Team Blog or Channel 9 for those videos.

Tags: Visual Studio 2010

Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) from Microsoft Research has been released today!

The Kinect for Windows SDK can be downloaded today at no cost for development of noncommercial applications at http://research.microsoft.com/kinectsdk.

The SDK is a programming toolkit for application developers that enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

This SDK includes the following features:

• Raw sensor streams
  Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.

• Skeletal tracking
  The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.

• Advanced audio capabilities
  Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

• Sample code and documentation
  The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

• Easy installation
  The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

This SDK is designed for non-commercial purposes only; a commercial version is expected to be available at a later date.

The SDK is documented and code walkthroughs are provided here. Enjoy!

Tags: Kincect

Debugger Canvas is a new user experience for stepping through code in the debugger in Visual Studio Ultimate. It displays the code of each of the methods you step into on a canvas with call lines between them, helping you keep track of the bigger picture as well as the details.

Debugger Canvas is a Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 that pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture.

This is what you can do in this version of Debugger Canvas:

• Step into methods on a canvas using the debugger
• Use the normal debugger features in the canvas
• Share a canvas as an XPS image
• Take snapshots of local variables so you can make comparisons as you step through code multiple times
• Add related methods to the canvas using Go to Definition and Find All References

Tags: Debugger Canvas

A new toolkit helps you join Windows Phone applications with Windows Azure.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 helps ease the building Windows Phone 7 applications that use services running on Windows Azure.

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation.

The toolkit provides you with:

• Binaries for your Windows Phone 7 applications
• Project templates to optimize new phone application creation
• Sample applications in both C# and VB.NET
• A dependency checker that checks the prerequisites required by the toolkit
• Setup and configuration documentation, toolkit content review, a getting started walkthrough, and troubleshooting tips

For more information, see NOW AVAILABLE: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.

Tags: Windows Azure, Windows Phone 7

It’s here! VS 2010 SP1 and TFS 2010 SP1 have shipped and that the Team Foundation Server Project Server Integration Feature Pack is now available for MSDN subscribers. New features improve several areas, including IntelliTrace, unit testing, and Silverlight profiling.

The announcements were made by S Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division, in his blog post Visual Studio 2010 enhancements.

The new service pack to Visual Studio is available to MSDN subscribers from their subscriber downloads.  If you’re not an MSDN subscriber, click on the following link to get the update.

TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack

Also available for Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN subscribers via Download Center today is the TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack.  Integration between Project Server and Team Foundation Server enables teams to work more effectively together using Visual Studio, Project, and SharePoint and coordinates development between teams using disparate methodologies, such as waterfall and agile, via common data and metrics.

Visual Studio Load Test Feature Pack

Also introduced today Visual Studio 2010 Load Test Feature Pack is available to all Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscribers. With this feature pack, you can simulate as many virtual users as you need without having to purchase additional Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 licenses.

Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2

Visual Studio LightSwitch offers a simple way to develop line of business applications for the desktop and cloud. LightSwitch reaches Beta 2.

Tags: Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Microsoft has released Attack Surface Analyzer. It is a Software Development Lifecycle verification tool for developers and IT professionals to identify whether newly developed or installed applications inadvertently change the attack surface of a Microsoft operating system.

Attack Surface Analyzer is developed by the Security Engineering group, building on the work of our Security Science team. It is the same tool used by Microsoft’s internal product groups to catalogue changes made to operating system attack surface by the installation of new software.
Attack Surface Analyzer takes a snapshot of your system state before and after the installation of product(s) and displays the changes to a number of key elements of the Windows attack surface.
This allows:

• Developers to view changes in the attack surface resulting from the introduction of their code on to the Windows platform
• IT Professionals to assess the aggregate Attack Surface change by the installation of an organization’s line of business applications
• IT Security Auditors evaluate the risk of a particular piece of software installed on the Windows platform during threat risk reviews
• IT Security Incident Responders to gain a better understanding of the state of a systems security during investigations (if a baseline scan was taken of the system during the deployment phase)

The free tool is downloadable from Attack Surface Analyzer – Beta Download.

Tags: Security, Tools

.NET Framework 4 will be supported as a Server Core installation option on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

Like in .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5, with .NET Framework 4, you will be able to build and run managed applications that use ASP.NET, WCF, WF, Windows Services and Console Applications.

Read more at .NET Framework 4 availability on Server Core.

Tags: .NET 4, Windows Server 2008 R2