News

If you’re new to Quantum Computing, there’s a great introduction by Anita Ramanan (Software Development Engineer at Microsoft) on the Microsoft Developer Blog to help you get your head around it: Introduction to Quantum Computing.

^{Source: Microsoft}

Today Microsoft announced .NET Core 2.1 Preview 1. This is the first public release of .NET Core 2.1. All the details for this release are available on Microsoft’s .NET Blog here.

^{Source: Microsoft}

On Wednesday 21 February there will be a SharePoint Conference North America TweetJam happening between 5PM and 6PM GMT. 

This year’s SharePoint Conference North America is a big deal, because if the rumours are true, there will be a major product announcement. Taking place 21-23 May in Las Vegas, USA, with a keynote from Jeff Teper (Microsoft Corporate VP Office, OneDrive & SharePoint) and featuring over 140 sessions of content, Microsoft will be showcasing its vision for the SharePoint roadmap, as well as the latest innovations.

The TweetJam on Wednesday is your opportunity to ask questions and give feedback to the SharePoint, OneDrive, and Yammer product teams – as well as the event organisers – who will all be online. Head over to Twitter and use #CollabTalk and #SPC18 to join the discussion. More details available on the Microsoft website here.

Extended support for SQL Server 2008 ends on 9 July 2019.

Whilst this is more than a year away, end of extended support means Microsoft will no longer release security updates for any version of SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2. Any organisation still running SQL Server 2008 after the support cut off date will be risking broken systems and compromised data, and may be out of compliance with industry regulations such as the incoming GDPR. Further, every application relying on the database will be at risk.

To avoid disruptions and unwanted maintenance costs, now is a good time to plan your upgrade to a more recent version of the product, such as SQL Server 2017 or Azure SQL Database (we can help).

For more details on Microsoft’s Lifecycle Policy you can visit their FAQ page here.

Microsoft has unveiled the UK’s most powerful cloud services. In a post on its website, Microsoft says, “The M-Series virtual machines (VMs) in Azure can handle very large workloads that involve a lot of data. Microsoft is currently the only company to offer this level of cloud computing power in this country.”

The M-Series of Azure virtual machines are the largest-memory optimised VMs to date. Ideal for heavy in-memory workloads such as SAP HANA, the M-series offers the largest available memory capacities starting from 1 TiB of RAM on a single VM. Additionally they offer the highest virtual CPU count of up to 128 vCPUs on a single VM to enable high-performance parallel processing.