Tim Anderson

Analysis"On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts," said Facebook's Guy Rosen in a security update in September. The issue was serious. What was stolen was not passwords but access tokens, an opaque string that identifies a user and grants access …

InterviewA curious feature of Microsoft's cloud platform is that it has two fundamentally different platforms for microservices. One is based on the homegrown Service Fabric, while the other is orchestrated by the Google-originated Kubernetes, available on Azure through the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Both are open source. How …

Build"We're going to reinvigorate Windows desktop development," claimed Julia Liuson, Microsoft's corporate VP responsible for developer tools and programming languages. This is one of five missions on her mind, she told The Reg, another is "Visual Studio Live Share going public. We think that will transform how teams interact and …

BuildMicrosoft has used its Build developer shindig in Seattle to rip the wrapping off IntelliCode, an AI-assisted development for Visual Studio. IntelliCode, which Microsoft described as a "first experimental preview", is the name for a range of AI-enabled enhancements planned for its venerable but bloated development environment …

Adobe SummitBusiness success today is about "data required to understand each person's context in every moment", with the intelligence to take the right action, said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in the opening keynote of the company's EMEA Summit in London. "People are buying experiences, not products." Adobe Project Felix, a 3D design …

BuildAt its Build developer event under way in Seattle, Microsoft announced .NET Core 3.0, coming in 2019, with support for Windows desktop applications. .NET Core is the open source, cross-platform version of Microsoft’s .NET technology, allowing developers to use languages including C#, F# and Visual Basic on Windows, Mac and …

Hands OnMicrosoft has released Windows Admin Center (formerly known as Project Honolulu) to general availability. Windows Admin Center is a browser application for managing servers and computers on a Windows network. What’s the point? Under the covers, Windows Admin Center uses Remote Powershell and WMI (Windows Management Interface …

Adobe Summit"We've emerged beyond just the company that’s known for Photoshop," claimed Adobe's Cody Crnkovich, head of platform, partners and strategy, today as he introduced AI and profiling features designed to enable marketers to deliver more creepy personalised advertising and comms. He has a point. The Adobe Experience Cloud, an …

Qcon"How you deploy Java, how you get access to updates and patches is all changing. Although Oracle has told people about this, they haven't been shouting about it," Azul Systems deputy CTO Simon Ritter told attendees at QCon, a developer conference under way in London. Java used to evolve with comfortable though frustrating …

MWC2018Fancy a Flutter? Google is hoping users will take a bet on its new cross-platform mobile development framework, whose first beta was announced at Mobile World Congress last week. Flutter is based on Dart, an object-oriented C-style language developed at Google, where it was designed by Lars Bak and Kasper Lund. It was first …

MWC18As Mobile World Congress draws to a close in relatively warm Barcelona (13°C - balmy), it's time to tally up on whether it delivered on the hype. The buzz ahead of MWC was that Samsung would launch the Galaxy S9 smartphone, that 5G connectivity would come closer to commercial reality, and that advances in AI and machine …

MWC18Sony launched the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 compact at an early morning press event as Mobile World Congress opened in Barcelona. A key feature in the Samsung S9, super slow-mo video enabled by a 960fps camera (for short 0.2 second bursts), was already a feature in last year's Xperia XZ1, Sony reminded those present. Unlike Samsung …

MWCSamsung has formally launched its next-generation Galaxy 9 flagship smartphones just ahead of 2018's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This year's S9 and S9+ models feel like they're treading water versus last year's S8 and S8+. The screen spec is the same at 2960 x 1440 pixels, but Samsung says they're a bit brighter this …

Another year, another round of Windows 10 updates – most likely 1803 in March, and 1809 in September or thereabouts. The company calls this "Windows as a service", the idea being that users get a constant flow of improvements. The advantage for Microsoft is that it can begin to escape its legacy prison, where keeping …

Microsoft’s recent release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, with virtual and augmented reality built in, is a big moment. Microsoft was one-half of the duo with Intel – nicknamed Wintel - that during the 1990s made business computing a mass movement. Windows headsets paired with x86 PCs also promises this mass-market for …

Remember when Microsoft first hyped the Windows 10 development platform? "One Windows" was the theme. "Just one API and one package to reach all Windows 10 devices – PC, tablet, phone and more," said Windows developer corporate VP Kevin Gallo at the time. That was in April 2015. Just two months later, everything was different …

Hands OnJust over two years after the introduction of both Windows 10 and the "Windows as a service" concept, Microsoft has released the Fall Creators Update aka version 1709, build 16299. We took it for a spin. Microsoft’s efforts in making in-place upgrade smooth have paid off. There will always be cases where things go wrong, but …

JavaOneMicrosoft has announced Java support for Azure Functions, the serverless cloud platform which competes with AWS Lambda. The announcement was made at the JavaOne event under way in San Francisco this week. The service is now in public preview. Java is the latest language to be added following Microsoft’s redesign of the Azure …

Tens of thousands of tourists flocked to Florida's theme park town of Orlando last week, but they weren't there to see Mickey; they were there to imbibe the new wares at Microsoft's Ignite, which focuses on cloud computing and IT administration. Ignite is now Microsoft’s core conference, since cloud and server, rather than …

IgniteWhat’s new for Azure at Microsoft Ignite? The key point is not so much the list of new features, but the direction the company is taking with its cloud platform, which is to make it pervasive even for customers working mainly on premises. Azure Security Center began as a dashboard for monitoring the security of Azure virtual …

Ignite“It’s a big milestone for us as a company,” general manager Rohan Kumar told us, referring to the release of SQL Server on Linux, “the biggest server product from Microsoft”, announced here at the Ignite event in Orlando. SQL Server 2017 is being released simultaneously for Windows and various flavours of Linux: Red Hat …

IgniteAt the Microsoft Ignite conference today, the expert panel on stage burst into laughter. “This box right over here behind us – nothing! That’s a quantum joke, that’s an excellent joke,” said Microsoft Technical Fellow Michael Freedman as the curtain failed to open to reveal it. It being a quantum joke, the audience in Orlando …

Microsoft held its Edge Web Summit on 13 September, announcing that the web browser now has “330 million active devices”, just over two years since its launch with Windows 10 in July 2015. The stat was explained as devices where someone actively uses Edge during the course of a month. Edge Web Summit: Microsoft Edge Web …

Hands OnPC vendors are showing off Windows Mixed Reality headsets and controllers here at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, and this writer got to try new devices from Dell, Asus and Lenovo. Windows Mixed Reality is a key feature of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, with both hardware and software promised for general …

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 Insider Preview lets you link to an Android phone, with synchronised web browsing the first supported feature. Build 16251 also marks the moment when Microsoft forks the Windows 10 code between the RS3 (Redstone 3, the codename for the Fall Creators Update) and the version to follow. Testers now …