Microsoft released Windows Server 2022 a few weeks ago. It did so earlier than expected, which is pretty odd, but it seems that the development of new features was already complete and mature so there was no point to wait a few months more. The last sentence pretty much explains the current status of Windows Server: so few changes, albeit interesting ones, that the product can be released months earlier than planned and without much fanfare.

While generally speaking the development of new features and functionalities for server applications mostly moved out of the base operating system and while we can also concede that Windows Server has many features at the OS level so [...]

A few days ago Microsoft introduced its new operating system designed for IoT devices: Azure Sphere OS. The new operating system aims at providing a secure-by-default platform to build IoT services and thus avoiding the pitfalls that made such devices so prone even to unsophisticated attacks that rogue organizations use them to build botnets or to compromise users’ privacy.

The new OS

Azure Sphere is just a part of a broader solution to provide a secure platform for IoT that also includes custom microcontrollers that implement Microsoft 7 rules for IoT security and a security service that runs on Azure to verify the status of each device and report any error or [...]

PHP 7 has been released on December 3rd and its first update (v7.0.1) has been released on December 17th. This new version brings a lot of changes in, including major performance enhancements compared to PHP 5.6 (up to a 2x performance increase!), better (meaning reduced) memory footprint plus support for 64bit runtimes. There are of course many other enhancements but those three alone should provide a good reason to update websites to the new version. There could be problems in doing so if you are using deprecated or non-supported code but if your application followed recommendations, you should be able to upgrade to PHP7 and enjoy the enhancements.

There are a few handful [...]

Amazon risponde ad Azure nel settore dell’Internet of things (IoT) presentando Kinesis Firehose, un sistema capace di aggregare dati da un numero molto elevato di dispositivi wireless ed embedded e trasferirli nella propria piattaforma di memorizzazione cloud, senza che le aziende debbano sviluppare applicazioni specifiche. Firehose è molto simile a Kinesis Streams ma quest’ultima richiedeva lo sviluppo di applicazioni specifiche per il collegamento agli endpoint dei servizi mentre con la nuova versione l’offerta di Amazon è molto vicina a quella di Azure IoT.

Firehose, disponibile da subito, consente alle aziende di sfruttare una API unificata per trasferire [...]

A few days ago Microsoft released ASP.NET 5 beta8, the first feature-complete version of its flagship Web framework. A lot of expectations come with this new version, both because Microsoft decided to change ASP.NET down to its basis and because this one will be the first multi-platform release for the technology, allowing developers to run their Web or console applications on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. However, the new version will also be the first one designed from the ground up for the cloud era and thus adopting all methodologies, technologies and conventions that emerged in past few years. As we detailed in a past article (sorry: Italian language only this time!), ASP.NET 5 [...]