Brian ODonnell

Xamarin and Microsoft have teamed up to make all other development platforms irrelevant.  Xamarin is the creator of popular cross platform development tools that allow developers to create iOS, Android and Windows applications all in C#.  With the launch of Visual Studio 2013, Xamarin and Microsoft announced a partnership that will significantly improve the experience […]

With the newly released Xbox One, Microsoft has been very up front with their quest to take over your living room.  One of the main marketing pushes for the Xbox One is that it does more than play games.  It integrates with your cable box, it can multi-task  by snapping apps to the side (similar […]

“Start-up” and “Microsoft” are usually not said in the same sentence.  Microsoft has historically been synonymous with expensive licensing costs which is precisely why most start-ups have gravitated towards Linux.  It is free, it is stable and it is powerful.   While Windows and Windows Server may never be free, Microsoft has narrowed the gap […]

Last week Microsoft released Project Monaco which is essentially Visual Studio as a service.  An IDE in the cloud.  Visual Studio has long been regarded as one of the premier development environments for Windows based and Web development.  It integrates perfectly with the entire Microsoft stack and its debugging features are second to none.  It […]

Facebook has been one of the software pioneers when it comes to Big Data.  They have an continuously increasing amount of data that constantly needs to be indexed and queried in a fast, efficient manner.  Facebook originally developed Hive which is a distributed data warehouse that allows for querying and managing of large data sets.  They released […]

There are many things developers hate about JavaScript.  You can see this with all of the different ways people are trying to “fix” JavaScript.  Here are a couple of the ways: CoffeeScript is a language which is syntactically similar to JavaScript and attempts to expose the “good parts” of JavaScript Google went ahead and wrote […]

A Brief Background In my previous posts I have walked through setting up Hadoop on Windows Azure using HDInsight.  Hadoop is an extremely powerful distributed computing platform with the ability to process terabytes of data.  Many of the situations when you hear the term “Big Data”, Hadoop is the enabler.  One of the complications with […]

Edit: Part 3 using Mahout here In my previous post I described the basics of HDInsight on Windows Azure and an example of what a Hadoop cluster can do for you. Without further delay, lets build a cluster!  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account go here and sign up (it’s free!!) Setup […]

Windows Phone 8 has been fighting for relevancy in the market since its release. It has slowly but surely gaining market share in the US and Europe has recently seen an explosion of WP8 adoption partially due to very low cost hardware.  Microsoft and Nokia have been continuously pricing their full featured phones lower than the competition […]

Edit: Part 2 (setup) : Part 3 (Mahout) The internet is becoming increasingly personalized.  It has transitioned from indexing massive wells of information to delivering personalized information, or recommendations based on complex searches.  Evidence of this is seen in Google’s Knowledge graph, Amazon, the Bing engine, Facebook friends and twitter recommending people you may be interesting in […]

3D web environments are still in their infancy.  In fact the HTML 5 canvas element does not have a 3d context and the most popular way to run 3D graphics in a web browser, WebGL, is not yet considered a web standard.  WebGL is still very new. It originated as an HTML Canvas 3D extension […]

The Surface Pro pricing details were released recently and with little fanfare.  The Pro model is essentially an expensive Ultrabook that is packaged as a tablet.  The advantages of the Pro model are backwards compatibility with all pre-existing Windows software and more powerful hardware.  Those advantages are going to cost about $500 and half of […]