The Midweek Download: Nov. 14 Edition – Social Media in the Enterprise & HTML5 on Windows Phone 8

In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got stories on how Office, SharePoint and Yammer will transform the way we work, Internet Explorer 10 bringing HTML5 to Windows Phone 8, and how this year’s Imagine Cup winner has won again.

Putting social to work. This week in Las Vegas, Microsoft hosts the SharePoint Conference and Jared Spataro, senior director of the Office Division, helped kick off the event with a guest post on The Official Microsoft Blog. Jared writes about the growing role social media is playing in business and how Yammer, SharePoint and Office 365 are coming together to offer a powerful, secure and integrated approach to social collaboration for businesses large and small. You can find more SharePoint news over on the Microsoft News Center.

The new SharePoint bets big on social, mobile, cloud. SharePoint news continues on the Office News blog, which announced that collaboration and social technologies are fundamentally changing the way people and teams work, and as we celebrate this pivotal release of SharePoint, we are humbled to announce that the product has reached more than US$2 billion in annual revenue. Two in three information workers have SharePoint. Find out more about the significance of this release, including what means for developers, over on the Office News blog.

Imagine Cup winner on Time magazine’s best inventions of 2012 list. Remember team QuadSquad, winners of the 2012 Imagine Cup? The Ukrainian team won the software design category with Enable Talk, a project that enables deaf individuals to communicate verbally using custom-designed sensory gloves and a smartphone application to translate sign language gestures into speech. Steve Clayton, editor of Next at Microsoft, had the chance to see a live demo of Enable Talk this summer and thought it was stunning. Time Magazine appears to have been similarly impressed as the project has made their Best Inventions of the Year list. Check out the story and video on the Next at Microsoft Blog.

Internet Explorer 10 brings HTML5 to Windows Phone 8 in a big way. As we celebrate the release of Windows Phone 8 around the globe, we would like to share some of the exciting new features that will make building feature-rich HTML5 sites and applications for Windows Phone 8 easier than ever. It is important to mention that these features that help give Internet Explorer its fast and fluid performance (including the blazing fast JavaScript engine) work the same way in both Internet Explorer and any application that uses the WebBrowser control. In this Nov. 8 post, Jorge Peraza, a program manager on the IE team in Windows Phone, provides an overview of the huge advancements in HTML5 support that we are bringing with IE10. Check out the post and watch the video Webcast from Jorge’s recent talk at the Build 2012 conference.

What’s new in the Windows Phone Store—a developer perspective. For several months, we’ve been rolling out a series of infrastructure upgrades to the Windows Phone Store and Dev Center in preparation for Windows Phone 8. That work is now wrapping up so last week, the folks at the Windows Phone Developer Blog provided this update, explaining what these changes mean for you, and pointing you to some helpful resources.

Increase monetization by adding in-app purchase to your apps. In-app purchase is rapidly becoming the leading way to grow app revenue. Now, you can add it to apps and games that run on Windows Phone 8. Recently, we shared key ideas to consider when using in-app purchase in your app, and describe at a high level how to add in-app purchase to your code, based on our experience of adding in-app purchase to some of my apps. Get the what, why and how of in-app purchases in the latest post from Bernardo Zamora on the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

User experience integration testing for Windows 8 apps. In the blog post for testing Windows Store apps, we discussed what to test at the various runtime states for your app. We also discussed a few aspects of the Windows 8 user experience and how that affects the environment your app lives in. In this recent post, the Windows 8 App Developer Blog explores the new user experience a bit further and highlights some of the interesting interactions and scenarios your app can run into based on our testing of existing apps, and what you can do to make sure your app works correctly.

OData at Information on Demand 2012. Microsoft Open Technologies Senior Technical Evangelist Doug Mahugh attended IBM’s Information on Demand conference two weeks ago, where he had the opportunity to talk to people about OData (Open Data Protocol). Microsoft and IBM are collaborating on the development of the OData standard in the OASIS OData Technical Committee, and for this conference we were demonstrating a simple OData feed on a DB2 database, consumed by a variety of client applications. The illustration below gives a high-level view of the architecture of the demo app. For a demo video and more resources, head over to the Nov. 8 edition of the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog.

MS Open Tech open sources Rx (Reactive Extensions) – a cure for asynchronous data streams in cloud programming. If you are a developer that writes asynchronous code for composite applications in the cloud, you know what we are talking about, for everybody else Rx Extensions is a set of libraries that makes asynchronous programming a lot easier. As Dave Sexton describes it, “If asynchronous spaghetti code were a disease, Rx is the cure.” As you may recall, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. is open sourcing Rx. Get the full story, including a list of what libraries are available, in this Interoperability @ Microsoft post.

In case you missed it … US Department of Veterans Affairs marches to the Cloud with Office 365.

That’s it for this edition of The Midweek Download! Thanks for reading!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

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