The Midweek Download: Aug. 10th Edition–Microsoft Extends Support for Veterans, plus the BlueHat Prize, Windows Phone and Windows Azure

This edition of the Midweek Download has news bits on the BlueHat Prize, Windows Phone and a cool story from Geekwire on Microsoft 3-D modeling of the human face.

Microsoft extends support for U.S. veterans entering the work force. Microsoft announced Aug. 5th that it will expand its Elevate America veterans initiative by partnering with the U.S. Department of Labor to distribute 10,000 technology training and certification packages to veterans. These resources will be provided over a two-year period though the Department of Labor One-Stop Career Centers designed to provide a full range of assistance to job seekers under one roof. The announcement was made the same day President Barack Obama discussed the administration’s ongoing commitment to fostering opportunities to help prepare the nation’s veterans for their transition to the civilian work force at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. TechFlash also covered the story.

Microsoft announces the BlueHat Prize. Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group announced on Aug. 3rd the BlueHat Prize competition to reward security researchers with more than $250,000 in cash and prizes for developing innovative, new computer security protection technology. Three years ago, Microsoft took the unconventional approach to security challenges by creating the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) to help further protect customers. The BlueHat Prize has the potential to provide enhanced security for the Windows operating system, as well as for the applications that run on it, which positively impacts independent software vendors. To get the rest of the skinny on this story, read this press release on the Microsoft News Center.

Measuring mobile site performance. We consider helping developers to measure real-world performance of their mobile sites to be so important that we were on the leading edge of implementing the W3C Navigation Timing interface in Internet Explorer 9, and helped drive it to Candidate Recommendation status very quickly. If you don’t have a Mango device, you can download the easy-to-use emulator from the App Hub on MSDN. For the rest of this story, read this Aug. 2nd post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 released. Microsoft announced on Aug. 3rd release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Developers can download the tools here using the Web Platform Installer. To find out what’s new in this release, check out this post on the Windows Azure Blog.

Developing a near-perfect 3-D model of the human face. “You know you’re on to something in computer graphics when you get to explain in your research paper how you’ve advanced the state of the art beyond The Matrix: Reloaded and the Beowulf remake.” Earlier this week, Geekwire Editor Todd Bishop covered Microsoft’s efforts to develop a near-perfect 3-D model of the human face using 3-D scanning and motion capture technology. Head over to Geekwire to get the whole story.

That’s a wrap for this edition of the Midweek Download. Thanks for reading!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

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