Had this thought ever passed you that the OS that’s fuelling all these thousands and millions of servers worldwide would be worth if it’s undertaken as a commercial project? If it’s Open Source does not mean it’s development cost is zero. After all, it’s the fruit of years of community driven development. Two researchers have estimated the cost of replicating Linux kernel from the scratch at about 1.4 billion USD! Who said Open Source is free?
Do you know that you don't need an IDE to deploy a Windows Azure package in the development fabric? There can be a time when you are on a machine that is not equipped with Visual Studio or any other IDE that supports Windows Azure development and you still need to deploy a package on development fabric. Windows Azure SDK comes with CSPack and CSRun that allows you to create an Azure package and deploy it on the development fabric by using command line interface. Even if you have all the tools you can still give it a try to enjoy the classic raw development feeling :).
Josh Holmes has written a very good small tutorial on using the command line tools to create a sample Windows Azure package and then deploy it on development fabric. check it out
Jeremy Jameson, Principal Consultant at Microsoft, has written a blog post that provides high level walkthrough of the build and deployment process according to his experience. Walkthrough contains serious of illustrations explaining key concepts at different phases of software development process including Development and build environments, versioning and source control etc.
When it comes to real world analysis and development (am saying real world because it’s different from what they teach at college) it is nothing less then comedy of errors except for the most experienced. This video by l. Louis so truly describes the blunders we commit in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)
Imagine Cup is world’s biggest IT competition for students of the world that is organized by Microsoft…includes several categories in which students can participate. This year, the Imagine Cup 2009 Worldwide Finals are being held on July 3-7 in Cairo, Egypt.
One of the competition category is Embedded Development. The objective of the Embedded Development competition is to unleash students’ creativity in an effort to change the world into a better place. They will develop their own embedded device whose function it is to better us all. This competition challenges students to go beyond the PC desktop and work in both hardware and software to build an embedded solution using Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and the provided embedded platform. Here are the videos of day 1 & 2 of Windows Embedded Competitions at Imagine Cup:
Since Google https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine currently only support Python (and that too version 2.5.2) therefore it limits the available IDEs to develop applications on https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine. But the Open community wont just sit still and do nothing!
There are now thousands of Cloud projects going on as the word "Cloud computing" became a buzzword for 2009 and is here to stay.
GridGain is the only Native Cloud app development platform which was launched back in August 2007 and is now the fastest growing Java-based cloud development and runtime platform with over tens of thousands of downloads, more than 700 unique projects utilizing it and deployed in dozens of production systems.
This tutorial will look into using the Opacity property on the tiles to create smooth, natural looking transitions between tiles. For example, blending a dirt tile into a grass tile, a grass tile into a rock tile, etc.
Below, on the left, is a screen shot of a grass and dirt tile without the use of an opacity mask. As you can see, the straight line does not make for a very real looking transition! On the right is the result with an opacity mask applied, making for a much more realistic transition.
No Opacity Mask With Opacity Mask
So how does this work? What we do is we put down a grass layer followed by a layer of dirt on the same tile location. We then apply an Opacity mask to the dirt image which tells Silverlight what level of rendering to do on each pixel within the dirt image.