Kotlin is a hot programming language right now, and its eclipse of Java for Android mobile development might leave Visual Studio developers wondering how they can get in on the action.
The already well-documented rise of Kotlin -- after being named a first-class language for Android by Google at its I/O conference in May -- is further chronicled in a new report from mobile database company Realm. Culling data from its large user base, Realm just today published its inaugural "Realm Report" to analyze choices developers make on programming tools, languages and platforms.
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Posted by David Ramel on 10/10/20170 comments
Somewhat lost among all the big "version 2.0" product releases last week was the new Entity Framework Core 2.0.
The open source object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for ADO.NET is now targeting the new .NET Standard 2.0 for consistent API usage across all .NET implementations, along with improved LINQ translation, a Like query operator and many more improvements.
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Posted by David Ramel on 08/21/20170 comments
While mostly known for its use in Linux-based development, the versatile curl tool for transferring data over HTTPS can be a nifty timesaver when using Visual Studio Code on Windows.
Specifically, this reporter has found it useful for quickly testing the results of a REST API call.
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Posted by David Ramel on 07/31/20170 comments
Microsoft hasn't been standing still since it became the new commercial steward of the R programming language by acquiring R specialist Revolution Analytics a year ago. The company has been busy revamping its acquired R offerings, including the open source version.
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Posted by David Ramel on 01/13/20160 comments
Less than a month after the first public preview of SQL Server 2016, Microsoft has released an update that for the first time puts the flagship relational database into "rapid preview" cadence.
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Posted by David Ramel on 06/25/20150 comments
Look out Microsoft. New Big Data services with a taste of SQL highlighted a bevy of new offerings added to the Oracle Cloud Platform yesterday.
At a live event, exec Larry Ellison was on hand to introduce more than 25 new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud products.
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Posted by David Ramel on 06/23/20150 comments
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) unveiled a new Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition offering for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2.)
A blog post authored by exec Jeff Barr yesterday said the new, pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) improves upon the Standard Edition by adding more computing power and memory. Standard allows for using up to 16 cores and 128 GiB of memory, while Enterprise can go up to 32 cores and 244 GiB of memory available in an extra-large instance.
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Posted by David Ramel on 06/17/20150 comments
With prior partnerships in place with Hortonworks Inc. and Cloudera Inc., Microsoft has now teamed up with MapR Technologies Inc., the final member of the "big three" distributors of Apache-Hadoop based software.
"Today, we are excited to announce that MapR will also be available in the summer as an option for customers to deploy Hadoop from the Azure Marketplace," Microsoft exec T.K "Ranga" Rengarajan said in a blog post yesterday.
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Posted by David Ramel on 06/11/20150 comments
Well, Microsoft lied to us. They didn't provide the public preview of SQL Server 2016 "this summer" as promised -- they delivered today.
"The first public preview of SQL Server 2016 is now available for download," the SQL Server 2016 Preview page says today. "It is the biggest leap forward in Microsoft's data platform history with real-time operational analytics, rich visualizations on mobile devices, built-in advanced analytics, new advanced security technology, and new hybrid cloud scenarios."
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/27/20150 comments
After stewarding the open source project from incubation to its new 1.0 release, MapR Technologies Inc. added Apache Drill for SQL-based Big Data analytics to its Apache Hadoop distribution.
The company -- one of the "big three" Hadoop vendors along with Hortonworks Inc. and Coudera Inc. -- this week announced the general availability of the open source Apache Drill 1.0 and its inclusion in the MapR Hadoop distribution.
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/22/20150 comments
Syncfusion Inc. has updated its Big Data Platform, unique for its claim to be "the one and only Hadoop distribution designed and optimized for Windows" and free for even commercial use.
"We have fine-tuned the entire Big Data Platform experience, from the download to the end result," said exec Daniel Jebaraj in a statement.
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/20/20150 comments
Native support for JSON in the upcoming SQL Server 2016 was buried among the many goodies announced earlier this month for the flagship RDBMS, but it's clearly an important feature for data developers, who this week got more details on the new functionality.
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Posted by David Ramel on 05/19/20150 comments