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News From BUILD

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Windows 8 Refined

imageDuring BUILD's Day 1 keynote speech, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives outlined the reach, design and economic opportunities for developers to build differentiated, touch-based apps for the Windows platform, including new developer tools and increased support. The Windows 8.1 Preview launched and preview releases of Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server and .NET 4.5.1 were shown. Read or watch the Day 1 Keynote for more information.The Day 2 keynote speech announced the PayPal software development kit, the availability of Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry Release Preview, developer productivity enhancements for .NET 4.5.1 and improved coding, designing, testing and optimizing of XAML applications in Windows 8.1. Read or watch the Day 2 Keynote to get all the details!

General Availability Release: Windows Azure Web Sites With SLA

The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps. With the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web sites, Microsoft is removing the "preview" tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites. It is now providing:

  • A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier
  • Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support)

The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called "Reserved" during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.