News

Microsoft has renamed some of its .NET deliverables ahead of their release this year. The announcement came via Microsoft Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman’s blog, saying:

• ASP.NET 5 is now ASP.NET Core 1.0.
• .NET Core 5 is now .NET Core 1.0.
• Entity Framework 7 is now Entity Framework Core 1.0 or EF Core 1.0 colloquially.”

Hanselman explains, “Why 1.0? Because these are new. The whole .NET Core concept is new. The .NET Core 1.0 CLI is very new. Not only that, but .NET Core isn’t as complete as the full .NET Framework 4.6. We’re still exploring server-side graphics libraries. We’re still exploring gaps between ASP.NET 4.6 and ASP.NET Core 1.0.”

You can find out more about these changes here.

After April 12th 2016, support for SQL Server 2005 Express including security updates and hotfixes will end. Find out how this opportunity to upgrade to SQL Server 2014 Express can increase performance and maintain security and compliance.

The Wall Street Journal has published research on worldwide enterprise cloud adoption which finds that it is continuing to gather pace.

“Worldwide spending on public cloud services is estimated to grow by a 19.4% compound annual rate over the next four years, to $141 billion in 2019, from $70 billion in 2015…Over that period, businesses are expected to spend six times more on public cloud services, than they do on overall information technology...” says the article.

The research conducted by International Data Corp investigated the use of public-cloud services by businesses in 20 industries across 54 countries, also forecasts that Software-as-a-Service will remain the dominant cloud tool used by businesses for years to come, attracting two thirds of total spending on public cloud. Furthermore, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service will both grow at faster annual rates, of between 27% to 30% by 2019.

The article is available to read in full via the Wall Street Journal website here.

The new BizTalk Server product will be commercially released in Q4 2016, following the beta release in Q3 according to a white paper released by Microsoft.

Its release will follow the general availability of Windows Server 2016, SQL Server 2016, and Visual Studio 2015 and the white paper cites a number of key planned features for BizTalk Server “2016”:

• Platform alignment — SQL 2016, Windows Server 2016, Office 2016 and latest release of Visual Studio.
• BizTalk support for SQL 2016 AlwaysOn Availability Groups both on-premises and in Azure IaaS to provide high availability (HA).
• HA production workloads supported in Azure IaaS.
• Tighter integration between BizTalk Server and API connectors to enable BizTalk Server to consume our cloud connectors such as SalesForce.Com and O365 more easily.
• Numerous enhancements including:
  – Improved SFTP adapter,
  – Improved WCF NetTcpRelay adapter with SAS support
  – WCF-SAP adapter based on NCo (.NET library)
  – SHA2 support.
• Host Integration Server “2016”:
  – New and improved BizTalk adapters for Informix, MQ & DB2.
  – Improvements to PowerShell integration and installation and configuration.

For more details, the white paper is available for download as PDF via microsoft.com here.

Research conducted by CIO UK and IDG UK has found that the key focus for Chief Information Officers in 2016 is to drive business innovation.

The research, which surveyed over 100 CIOs and business technology leaders in the UK, also revealed that CIOs predominantly expect to have larger budgets, and an expectation to be able to spend more of this budget on business initiatives and revenue growth projects rather than supporting the IT function.

The report is available in full via cio.co.uk here.

Source: CIO UK