Microsoft install Festival organized by the .NET club at the USTHB

The USTHB .NET club has organized a Microsoft install festival since yesterday, up to Wednesday, 26th, 2008, but what’s this festival about anyway?? Well, the USTHB students can bring their PCs to the .NET club, and they can benefit from genuine licenses of some Microsoft products, here is the list of the available products in English:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (x86 and x64)
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Standard
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (x86 and x64)
• Visio Professional 2007
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Project Professional 2007
• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise
• Expression Studio
• Windows XP Professional with SP2
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
• Microsoft MSDN Community Distribution Program CD

Two days have gone by since the beginning of this event, and as a .NET club member I can say that Microsoft is moving closer to the USTHB students and showing a great interest on IT students, it’s a positive thing as there’s been a lack of such initiatives in our universities.
So, come and bring your machines !

My notes from the presentation «operating systems evolution» held at the USTHB

I attended the presentation given by Nicolas Gardet at the USTHB today, the overall discussion was about the evolution of Windows operating systems up to Vista, there has been a little talk about Windows Seven, but it focused a great deal on Vista, as many of people have a mistaken perception of the Vista operating system, Nicolas worked on presenting the Vista continuous improvements and enhancements that makes it really stable and supports older platforms, here are the main points of this presentation:

1. Windows history:

Nicolas presented Windows  old versions and their evolution over time, by the way, Microsoft has just stopped selling Windows 3.x versions.
Different features that differentiated the Windows versions.

2. Motivations that pushed Microsoft to develop Widows Vista:

There’s been a talk about Windows XP limitations, mainly, security vulnerabilities, and the need of developing a Windows that enables richer platform development, these factors encouraged the release of Vista.

3. Presentation of Internet Explorer 8:

This presentation was a video that showed the new features introduced by IE8, these are:

• Smart search.
• Safer web browsing.
• Web slice and accelerators.
• Standard-compliance.

You can visit IE8 website for more information. (Heyyy I’m not promoting IE8!)

I can say that the only thing I hated about Vista is that its first versions weren’t compatible with older platforms, I couldn’t run some of my programs that were working like a charm on my XP, I told that to Nicolas, and he claimed that today’s Vista SP1 is really more developed than the older versions, and actually this is one of the challenges Vista is facing, he confirmed that Microsoft is really active on this, and with the upcoming release of Vista SP2 the full older platforms support will be enabled. Here are some statistics showing the compatibility of programs built for older platforms with Vista:

• Devices 98% are supported.
• Most popular user applications 50% are supported.
• Enterprise applications 99% are supported.

4. Windows Seven:

As I mentioned earlier, there hasn’t been a big talk about Windows seven, though, Nicolas pointed out that this OS has a uniform user experience environment; this will decrease the number of problems in a short time. According to Nicolas, the Windows 7 has the same kernel model with previous windows versions, though, there has been some kernel optimization.

I enjoyed attending this presentation. I hope you enjoyed reading this little coverage.

Microsoft Windows Azure: The future is on a cloud !

Microsoft innovation takes one step further, with the announcement of Windows Azure by Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professionnal Developper Conference in Los Angeles on October 27th, this upcoming operating system is based on cloud-computing, that means that the data processing is made by lots of machines in a collaborative and coherent way, that forms what is called a cloud, this latter then can be used to perform huge resource-consuming computations or to store data of big and growing size,  this operating system hosts the Azure Service Platform that offers developers with a variety of tools and services like Microsoft Live, Microsoft .NET services.., that enable them to develop rich distributed applications that use the cloud services.

Azure services

For now Windows Azure has a great support of Visual Studio, other development environment and non-Microsoft languages are coming soon such as: Eclipse, PHP, Ruby, Python, all you have to do is to write your cloud application and host it in the Microsoft data centers that form the Widnows Azure cloud, these data centers are highly scalable, and offer lots of facilities such as infrastructure management, storage models…Developers should no longer worry about the growth of their applications, or the way their applications are accessed, everything is covered by the cloud! Life is beautiful, isn’t it? Now let’s see the announcement video, it’s a must-see!

Ray Ozzie announces Microsoft Windows Azure at the PDC.

The Azure’s official site:

http://www.microsoft.com/azure

I can’t wait to give it a shot. 😉