Programming

The Microsoft Bing team is doing more than building a search engine that competes head-to-head with Google.

Part of the team, as I've blogged previously, also built some of the first Microsoft-branded consumer apps for Windows 8.

But it turns out there's another team inside the Bing organization that is working on Windows 8 apps, too. There's an Augmented Reality (AR) team inside Bing that is building both an AR framework and AR applications that will ship on Windows 8 tablets and other unspecified devices.

In keeping with Microsoft's new charter as a devices and services company, … Read more

Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses since October 26.

Tami Reller, chief marketing and financial officer for Windows, announced the tally today during her appearance at the Credit Suisse Annual Tech Conference.

Microsoft had not released any sales figures for Windows 8 other than saying the company sold 4 million upgrade licenses of the operating system to those with previous versions of Windows during the first three days it was available. Microsoft launched Windows 8 commercially on October 26.

How does this compare to Windows 7 sales? Microsoft said it had sold 60 million Windows 7 licenses from … Read more

Windows 8 will have sole custody of DirectX 11.1, according to a Microsoft engineer.

Responding to a question on an MSDN forum, Daniel Moth, a Microsoft program manager, broke the news that "at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7."

That same holds true for versions prior to Windows 7, leaving the new DirectX version exclusive to Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Server 2012.

DirectX is a collection of programming interfaces from Microsoft that enable 3D animation and other multimedia effects used mostly in games. Developers … Read more

REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company has sold 4 million copies of Windows 8 to consumers since the operating system debuted on Friday.

Ballmer made the announcement today at the start of the Build conference, a show Microsoft is hosting on its campus for more than 2,000 developers. Microsoft is hoping to convince developers to create applications for its new operating system and the Windows Phone 8 operating system that debuted yesterday.

"In a sense, what these launches really do is the kick off the golden age of opportunity for you as developers," … Read more

Within a year, the newly launched Windows 8 will likely be powering almost 400 million PCs and tablet computers.

Microsoft has built an application marketplace, the Windows Store, right into its new operating system. It's a place for consumers to find software programs to make their new machines more productive, more useful, and more fun.

But even though Microsoft announced the Windows Store more than a year ago to developers, the marketplace has about 5,000 applications for users in the United States, a few thousand more globally. If the opportunity is so big, why are the offerings so … Read more

Google released its first stable version of Dart, a programming language for Web applications that it believes improves on the incumbent JavaScript language.

"I'm pleased to announce that the M1 release of Dart is ready...This release is a more stable and comprehensive version of Dart," said Lars Bak, a programmer and key figure in the project, in a mailing list message today about the milestone 1 release. "Moving forward, we'll mainly focus on performance and completeness without introducing breaking changes to the Dart programming language."

It's hard to get new programming languages … Read more

First of all, don't panic.

If Moore's Law came to an end and computers stopped getting steadily faster, plenty of companies would suffer. But an end likely would come with lots of warning, lots of measures to cushion the blow, and lots of continued development even if transistors stopped shrinking.

The hardest hit would be companies dependent on consumers replacing their electronics every few years and tech companies such as Google whose long-term plans hinge on faster computers, cheaper storage, and better bandwidth. And the continuing miniaturization of computers -- mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to smartphones -- … Read more

As part of its "make the Web fast" effort, Google has released version 1.0 of a module designed to improve the very widely used Apache software that's very widely used to host Web sites.

The Apache Software Foundation's flagship project is Web server software that delivers Web pages to people's browsers when they request it. It can be extended, and Google believes its mod_pagespeed extension for Apache is ready for use, Google said in a blog post.

"Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, … Read more

Enough with having separate Web programming tutorials from Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

These five major browser makers, along with Facebook, Adobe Systems, Nokia, and Hewlett Packard, have become stewards of a new effort to centralize developer resources at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This Web Platform Docs project will include not just help on to use a bewildering array of new Web technologies, but also will detail which ones are accepted standards, how well the various tools work across multiple browsers, and how stable the standards are.

"A key part of this project is that it … Read more