We believe that everyone is a creator at heart and that creativity is an essential human trait. And, no matter who you are, Windows 10 is built to empower the creator in all of us. To show you some of the great new features coming in the Creators Update, we’ve got a special episode of This Week on Windows just for you. New innovations in the Windows 10 Creators Update include 3D in Windows 10, built-in game broadcasting, new tab management features and more in Microsoft Edge, and enhanced security features such as a new Microsoft privacy dashboard.

You can get the Creators Update in a few different ways. If you already have a Windows 10 PC and have automatic updates enabled, the update will be delivered to you when it’s ready. If you are an advanced user and would like to get the update manually, visit this blog post to learn how to get the Creators Update. Another great way to take advantage of the Creators Update is to purchase a new Windows 10 PC from Surface or our partners. Currently, we’ve got some great offers on Windows 10 PCs from Microsoft Store – you can save up to 33% on select PCs, including Dell Inspiron 15, Dell Inspiron 13, HP Pavilion x360, and ASUS ZenBook Flip, at Microsoft Store and microsoftstore.com in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico through April 17.

And, in case you missed it, yesterday we announced new creativity apps with unique capabilities for Surface Dial.

Here’s a more detailed list of what’s new in the Windows 10 Creators Update

3D in Windows 10

Now with the Creators Update, you have a new app called Paint 3D and access to an online creative community at Remix3D.com.

3D in Windows 10 comes to life in the Creators Update to allow anyone to experience, create, and share in a new dimension. With 3D, we can communicate ideas and express ourselves better, and learn faster, because it’s much more representative of the world we live in.

Now with the Creators Update, you have a new app called Paint 3D and access to an online creative community at Remix3D.com. The all-new Paint 3D allows you to create or modify 3D objects, easily change color or texture, or turn 2D images into 3D works of art. To launch Paint 3D, click here.

With Remix3D.com, you can share, discover, and be inspired by millions of 3D objects. Remix3D.com lets you connect with other creators, find new ideas, and get instant access to a library of 3D objects to customize, remix, and share with the creative community.

New features for Windows 10 PC gamers: gamers can share their passion by connecting, streaming and playing together 

Beam game broadcasting

With the Creators Update, built-in game streaming with Beam is the easiest and most interactive way to stream your gameplay on Windows 10. Pressing Windows key + G while playing your game will bring up the Game bar, where you’ll find we’ve added a broadcast icon to launch Beam – no extra software required.

Built-in game broadcasting on Windows 10. Now you can effortlessly stream your gameplay using the Game Bar—just hit Windows key + G, click Broadcast, and start streaming on Beam—all without the need for additional log-ins.

This offers everyone the opportunity to showcase their creativity as a game broadcaster. And with Beam’s low-latency technology, viewers experience less than a second of delay, enabling broadcasters to engage and interact with their viewers in near real-time. This low-latency technology enables Beam broadcasters to incorporate interactive features, such as animation and sound triggers, right into their streams.

New gaming section in System Settings

Inside the main Windows System Settings, a new section has been added: Gaming, identified with the Xbox logo. This new section unifies your Windows 10 gaming settings in one place. In the Creators Update, there are four settings options: Game bar, GameDVR, broadcasting, and Game Mode. Game Mode may be easily turned on and off for specific games using the Game bar (Windows key + G).

Game Mode

With Game Mode, it’s our goal to provide a better and more consistent gaming experience on Windows 10, by dedicating more system resources to your game. Game Mode also works for both Win32 and UWP games. To enable Game Mode while playing a game, pull up the Game bar (Windows key + G) and click on the Settings button to opt the running game into using Game Mode. The Creators Update is just the first milestone in our commitment to Game Mode and Windows 10 performance improvements for PC gaming.

More games supported by Game bar

In the Windows 10 Creators Update, we’ve continued to expand support for Windows Game bar in full-screen mode to more than 80 of the most popular PC games. You can also now manage this feature in the new Gaming section of Windows Settings. Look for “Game bar,” and make sure the “Show Game bar when I play full-screen games Microsoft has verified” setting is checked. A regularly updated list of supported titles is available here.

To learn more about all the new gaming features available in the Creators Update, head over to Xbox Wire.

Microsoft Edge gets even better with a whole new suite of tab management features, new extensions, and a new bookstore and reading experience

Microsoft Edge is the faster, more secure browser built for Windows 10, and with the Creators Update, Microsoft Edge is faster than Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox and offers longer battery life. When unplugged and on-the-go, you can stream video and browse longer. Microsoft Edge streams video up to 3 hours longer than Google Chrome and up to 5 hours longer than Mozilla Firefox, letting you binge watch your favorite show longer without needing a charge. You can also browse nearly a full hour longer with Microsoft Edge when compared to Google Chrome, and nearly two hours longer when compared to Mozilla Firefox.**

Tab preview bar: It’s easy to lose track of what’s in your tabs, especially when you have many tabs from the same site, with similar titles and icons.

Tab preview bar: It’s easy to lose track of what’s in your tabs, especially when you have many tabs from the same site, with similar titles and icons. Tab preview bar allows you to easily glance at a visual preview of every tab you have open without leaving your page. You can scroll through the list with touch, mouse wheel, or a touchpad.

Set tabs aside: We’ve added two new buttons next to your tabs in Microsoft Edge to help you quickly manage all your tabs without losing your flow.

Set tabs aside: We’ve added two new buttons next to your tabs in Microsoft Edge to help you quickly manage all your tabs without losing your flow. Set these tabs aside feature allows you to sweep away your open tabs, giving you the ability to restore them later. And with Tabs you’ve set aside, you can preview thumbnails of web pages you set aside, and restore an individual or a collection of web pages to pick up where you left off.

Import favorites from another browser when you switch to Microsoft Edge: You can import your favorites, browsing history, and other data from another browser you have installed, in one simple step. Use the Import from another browser feature under Settings to select the browsers you want to move your data from.***

Jump List for Microsoft Edge: You can now launch a new window or new InPrivate window for Microsoft Edge straight from its Taskbar icon.

Jump List for Microsoft Edge: You can now launch a new window or new InPrivate window for Microsoft Edge straight from its Taskbar icon. Simply right-click or swipe up on the Microsoft Edge icon in the Taskbar, and pick the task you want!

The Creators Update will also bring more extensions to Microsoft Edge.

The Creators Update will also bring more extensions to Microsoft Edge, including Ebates, Intel TrueKey, Read & Write, Ghostery, and RoboForm, among others.

Tap the pen or highlighter in Web Note, and you’ll now see the full set of Windows Ink colors.

What’s new in the Windows Store with the Creators Update

We’ve added a new digital category in the Windows Store called books (US only) joining games, apps, movies/TV, and music. With books in the Windows Store, you can discover and read e-books from your favorite authors across genres you love – from sci-fi to thrillers, to children’s books, and everything in between.

With books in the Windows Store, you can discover and read e-books from your favorite authors across genres you love – from sci-fi to thrillers, to children’s books, and everything in between.

In the Windows Store, readers will find favorite titles, including New York Times Bestsellers, amongst hundreds of thousands of others. We have partnered with the top publishers and partners, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as well as Ingram Content Group, to bring an extensive catalog of great books to the Windows Store. It will feature content such as Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Cross the Line by James Patterson, End of the Watch by Stephen King, and Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss.

Once you’ve purchased a book from the Windows Store, you can start reading immediately with Microsoft Edge, which supports offline reading without an internet connection.

Once you’ve purchased a book from the Windows Store, you can start reading immediately with Microsoft Edge, which supports offline reading without an internet connection. What’s more, in Microsoft Edge you can easily personalize your reading experience with custom font sizes, layouts, and themes. Cortana* integration pulls information from the web right into your reading experience. Microsoft Edge has integrated Learning Tools accessibility features like Read Aloud and text spacing to make it easier for everyone to read, including people with learning differences like dyslexia and English Language Learners. Books is available across Windows 10 devices, from laptops to 2-in-1s, desktops, and mobile.

Dolby Atmos app for Windows 10 now available in the Windows Store

Additionally, for the first time, once you’re running the Creators Update, you will be able to experience the Dolby Atmos audio experience via the Dolby Access app, available today in the Windows Store. With the app, you will be able to experience immersive audio from a Windows 10 PC running the Creators Update via headphones or an HDMI connection to a Dolby Atmos-enabled sound bar or home theater system. Check out the app today!

A digital assistant that works across devices can now do even more to help you stay on top of everything. Here’s what’s new for Cortana* in the Creators Update.

At work and in life, Cortana is your personal digital assistant, there for you wherever you need her, helping make sure nothing slips through the cracks. With Cortana, it is easier to stay on top of your schedule, your commitments, and all the important things you need to remember to keep your day running smoothly.

Cortana loves music: You can now use Cortana to control music playback on more of your favorite music apps (EN-US only). And Groove now supports the ability to play music by mood, category or activity so you can say “Hey Cortana, play me some workout music” (EN-US only).

We’ve also enabled natural language compatibility for iHeartRadio and TuneIn Radio. This will work both above the lock screen (PC is locked) as well as below! You can try queries like…

• Play Drake on iHeartRadio
• Play Top 40 on iHeartRadio
• Play NPR Hourly News on TuneIn
• Play jazz music on TuneIn
• Play Z100 on iHeartRadio
• Play KUOW on TuneIn

Adding music recognition support to Chinese (Simplified): Cortana can now recognize music for customers in China. Simply tap the music notes icon in the top corner of Cortana’s home page, and Cortana will listen to whatever music is playing and use Netease to tell you what song it is.

Full screen when Idle: When using “Hey Cortana” while your PC is unlocked and idle, you’ll get a full-screen experience that is optimized for viewing from afar. Give it a try by enabling “Hey Cortana”, and then wait for about 10 seconds or so without touching your PC (available in all Cortana markets).

Cortana can help you pick up where you left off: When you switch computers, Cortana will display quick links in the Action Center to help you easily get back into Microsoft Edge websites and SharePoint (or other cloud-based) documents you used most recently.

Cortana can help you pick up where you left off: When you switch computers, Cortana will display quick links in the Action Center to help you easily get back into Microsoft Edge websites and SharePoint (or other cloud-based) documents you used most recently. For example, if you were working on a PowerPoint deck on your laptop, when you later return to your desktop, a link to that deck appears in the Action Center (EN-US only).

Have more fun with improvements across a suite of built-in apps for music, maps, and photos that will work across Xbox and Windows Mixed Reality

Built-in experiences including Windows Photos, Windows Maps, Groove Music, and Movies & TV take advantage of the best capabilities of Windows 10 to help you capture ideas and express yourself.

• Use Windows Ink**** to draw on pictures and videos in the Photos app to make them your own. Have fun, express yourself, and create something new with videos and photos that feature your personal touch. Here’s how to get started with inking in the Photos app.
• Draw on a 2D or 3D map in the Maps app and make it yours with Windows Ink. Create routes with turn-by-turn directions, measure the distance between any two points, add notes, and mark places to visit. Here’s how to get started with inking in the Maps app.
• With Groove, you can upload music from your PC to OneDrive to play your own tunes and make a playlist once for all your devices including Windows, Xbox, Android, iOS, and Sonos.
• Fully immerse yourself in 360° videos and watch hit movies and TV shows in 4K or HD with the Movies & TV app.***** You can go directly from playing videos from your own collection to renting or buying hit movies and commercial-free TV shows to watch at home or on the go on your Windows PC or Xbox. And with the Creators Update, you can now explore new immersive 360° video content for the first time from partners like GoPro, Baobab Studios, SLIVER.tv, LIFE VR, and NextVR.

The mini view feature lets you keep an ever-present small window on top of what you’re doing. This means you can do things like binge watch your favorite show, carry on a Skype conversation or control your music, regardless of what else you’re working on.

• The mini view feature lets you keep an ever-present small window on top of what you’re doing. This means you can do things like binge watch your favorite show, carry on a Skype conversation or control your music, regardless of what else you’re working on.

You can now lower the amount of blue light emitted from your PC at night with Night light.

• You can now lower the amount of blue light emitted from your PC at night with Night light. Settings to turn this functionality on or off in Settings > System > Display.
• The Creators Update enables immersive experiences that blur the lines between the physical and digital worlds. It enables developers to create new, exciting Windows Mixed Reality apps and experiences with the recently available Windows Mixed Reality dev kits. Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo will ship the world’s first Windows Mixed Reality-enabled headsets later this year, starting at just $299 USD.

The most comprehensive security for everything you do on your Windows device – from visiting websites to checking emails to uploading or downloading files in the cloud

The new Windows Defender Security Center dashboard coming with the Windows 10 Creators Update gives you visibility of your device security, health, and online safety.

Windows continues to expand its security features with the Creators Update, which brings, even more, security capabilities to all customers to help better protect, defend, and respond to threats on their devices and networks.

• The Windows Defender Security Center offers a single dashboard display so you can control your security options from one place – everything from anti-virus, network, and firewall protection; to assessing your device performance and health; to security controls for your apps and browser; to family safety options. For our enterprise customers using the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service, the centralized portal first delivered in the Anniversary Update called the Windows Security Center will link to Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, via the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, to allow IT administrators to easily follow an attack across endpoints and email in a seamless and integrated way.
• Dynamic Lock: Windows Hello can use any paired iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone to detect when you step away from your PC or tablet, automatically locking it behind you for an extra measure of security and privacy. This feature works with smartphones, fitness bands, or any device that’s paired to your PC or tablet.
• We’re adding new actions and insights in Windows Defender ATP to investigate and respond to network attacks, including sensors in memory, enriched intelligence, and new remediation actions.

Simple privacy settings that let you choose your experience with Windows

• A new Microsoft privacy dashboard will let you see and manage your activity data across multiple services, as well as changes to how Windows 10 privacy settings will be designed and featured for customers in the upcoming Creators Update.
• The Creators Update introduces a new setup experience for you to choose the settings that are right for you, simplifies Diagnostic data collection from three levels to two: Basic and Full, and further reduces the data collected at the Basic level.

Skype makes it easy for you to connect with friends, family, and colleagues

The Creators Update includes the best Skype ever for Windows PCs. This next-generation version of Skype was built for Windows 10 and includes exclusive features such as mini view, SMS relay for Windows Phone, and Skype Translator for calls to mobile phones and landlines.

The Creators Update includes the best Skype ever for Windows PCs. This next-generation version of Skype was built for Windows 10 and includes exclusive features such as mini view, SMS relay for Windows Phone, and Skype Translator for calls to mobile phones and landlines. It is easy to use with keyboard shortcuts, conversation search, and a redesigned group video calling view that brings everyone even closer together. Be more productive on your PC and collaborate over Skype – share screens, photos, videos, documents, and files (up to 300MB). Say “hello” with an instant message, voice or video call, all for free, no matter what device you use Skype on.

The Creators Update begins rolling out worldwide today. To learn more about the update you can visit your local Microsoft Store to see what the Creators Update has to offer and get assistance from knowledgeable and friendly Answer Desk technicians, including a free consultation for your device. You can also schedule a free appointment with a Microsoft Store Answer Desk technician by visiting your local Microsoft Store or going online to microsoftstore.com/answerdesk. If you are an advanced user and you’d like to learn more about how to get the Creators Update, visit this link

*Cortana available in select markets.
**More information available here.
***Microsoft Edge can import browsing history, passwords, and other data only from Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Favorites can be imported from Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and 360.
****Touch–capable tablet or PC required. Pen accessory may be sold separately.
*****App availability and experience may vary by region and device; some content sold separately.

The post What’s new in the Windows 10 Creators Update appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

A key part of our phased approach is to listen closely to all available feedback and make the appropriate product updates during the rollout. This allows us to provide high-quality experiences for the broadest set of users, while also continually increasing the quality and security of Windows 10. Just today we released a cumulative update based on insider and early adopter feedback that includes fixes for such issues as driver compatibility for connecting to specific printers. Please continue to give us feedback about your experience via the Feedback Hub app.

For the optimal experience, we recommend you wait until Windows 10 is automatically offered to you on your device. But If you don’t want to wait, you can manually get the update now by following the steps below via the Software Download Site. This option is recommended for advanced users on devices running a licensed version of Windows 10.

There are two ways to get the Windows 10 Creators Update

1. Automatically get the update via the phased rollout

As we announced previously, when your device becomes eligible for the Creators Update rollout, you’ll be prompted to make some important choices on your privacy settings before the Creators Update can install.

Based on customer feedback you will have expanded options for when you complete the installation. You will have the ability to specify a time that is convenient for you, snooze pending updates for a few days, and expand the “active hours” time window during which you don’t want to be disturbed by an update.

2. Manually update via the Software Download Site

As an advanced user, you have two manual installation options. The recommended method is to utilize the Update Assistant. To do so, click the Update Now button on the Software Download Site. Alternatively, you can download and run the Media Creation Tool which will help you perform a clean installation, or reinstall Windows 10. During a manual update, the privacy settings experience will be shown to you as part of your first-run experience on the Creators Update.

The Creators Update for Windows Phone will follow the same phased approach, with rollout scheduled to begin in late April. Note that update availability may vary by manufacturer, model, country or region, mobile operator or service provider, specific installed software, hardware limitations and other factors such as feedback from customers.

We hope you enjoy the Windows 10 Creators Update and the many new features it brings. If you have feedback about your experience, please use the Feedback Hub app to share it with us. We’ll have more to share on the roll out of the Creators Update in the coming weeks. Thank you!

The post How to get the Windows 10 Creators Update appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

Today, we are releasing a new Security and Quality Rollup and Security Only Update for the .NET Framework. You can read the April 2017 Security Updates Release Notes to learn about all changes being released today.

Security

Microsoft Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures CVE17-0160

A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Microsoft .NET Framework fails to properly validate input before loading libraries. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would first need to access the local system with the ability to execute a malicious application. The security update addresses the vulnerability by correcting how .NET validates input on library load.

Note: You can search for the security update at Security TechCenter. Search for “CVE” 17-0160.

Quality and Reliability

There are no quality and reliability changes this month.

Getting the Update

The Security and Quality Rollup is available via Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services and Microsoft Update Catalog. The Security Only Update is available via Windows Server Update Services and Microsoft Update Catalog. The Windows 10 updates are integrated with the Windows 10 Monthly Update.

See .NET Framework Deployment tables for detailed deployment information on the release.

See the table below to learn about version applicability and more detailed release-specific information.

Docker Images

The Windows ServerCore and .NET Framework Docker images are being updated today. Pulling the latest image will update your local Docker image cache.

Previous Monthly Rollups

The last couple .NET Framework Rollup updates are listed below for your convenience:

• December 2016
• October 2016

Note: Previously released security and quality updates are included in today’s release.

More Information

You can read the .NET Framework Monthly Rollups Explained to learn more about how the .NET Framework is updated.

Previous posts:

• On .NET on SonarLint and SonarQube, Happy birthday .NET with Dan Fernandez, nopCommerce, Steve Gordon
• On .NET with Sidharth Gupta on Tizen, Happy birthday .NET with Bertrand Le Roy, JSON.NET 10, Gunnar Peipman
• Happy birthday .NET with Mads Torgersen, Coypu

.NET Framework 4.7

This week, we announced the release of the .NET Framework 4.7. We’ve added support for targeting the .NET Framework 4.7 in Visual Studio 2017, also updated today.

The .NET Framework 4.7 includes improvements in several areas:

• High DPI support for Windows Forms applications on Windows 10
• Touch support for WPF applications on Windows 10
• Enhanced cryptography support
• Performance and reliability improvements

You can see the complete list of improvements and the API diff in the .NET Framework 4.7 release notes.

Read the blog post: Announcing the .NET Framework 4.7 by Rich Lander.

New .NET reference documentation

Almost a year ago, we piloted the .NET Core reference documentation on docs.microsoft.com. Today we are happy to announce our unified .NET API reference experience. We understand that developer productivity is key – from a hobbyist developer, to a startup, to an enterprise. With that in mind, we partnered closely with the Xamarin team to standardize how we document, discover, and navigate .NET APIs at Microsoft.

• Announcing a unified .NET reference experience on docs.microsoft.com by Jeff Sandquist.
• The new .NET reference documentation

On .NET

Last week, Sébastien Ros was back on the show to demo the fantastic support for modularity that was built for Orchard Core, that can now be used in any ASP.NET Core application:

Happy birthday .NET with Immo Landwerth

Back in February we threw a party for the 15th anniversary of .NET. We caught up with Immo Landwerth, a program manager on the .NET team at Microsoft, who joined Microsoft in 2010. He tells us about his journey from being a customer using .NET to an employee and the cultural changes he’s witnessed as .NET has moved to open source.

Tool of the week: JustAssembly

This week, Telerik introduced JustAssembly, a free utility tool that compares two .NET assemblies and shows the differences in each assembly code line by line.

Read Stefan Stefanov’s blog post introducing the tool.

Meetups of the week: VS 2017, AppInsights, and IoT in Adelaide

The Adelaide .NET User Group holds a Visual Studio 2017 launch event on April 12 at 5:30PM with a talk from Paul Usher on AppInsight and another on IoT with Jack Ni.

.NET

• .NET Framework April 2017 Monthly Rollup by Rich Lander.
• Introducing Windows Forms HDPI Improvements in .NET Framework 4.7 by Stacey Haffner and Merrie McGaw.
• Contributing to Open-Source – My first Roslyn pull request – Getting the environment ready and Fixing the bug by Maxime Rouiller.
• MSTest V2 is open source by Pratap Lakshman.
• Installing Ubuntu 16.04 on a Raspberry Pi 3, installing .NET Core 2, and running a sample .NET Core 2 app by Jeremy Lindsay.
• Building a realtime server backend using the Orleans Actor system, Dotnet Core and Server-side Redux by Maarten Sikkema.
• Extending .NET CLI with custom tools – dotnet init initializes your NuGet package by Maarten Balliauw.
• RyuJIT and the never-ending ThreadAbortException by Christophe Nasarre and Kevin Gosse.
• [Webinar recording: Exploring .NET’s memory management](Why VB2017 only supports consuming ref returning methods) by Maarten Balliauw.
• Automapper for .NET Core by Jimmy Bogard.
• Implementing OpenID Implicit Flow using OpenIddict and Angular by Damien Bowden.

ASP.NET

• Getting started with ASP.NET Core by Andrew Lock.
• JWT Validation and Authorization in ASP.NET Core by Jeffrey T. Fritz.
• Using Consul for Service Discovery with ASP.NET Core by Cecil Phillip.
• Adding favicons to your ASP.NET Core website with Real Favicon Generator by Andrew Lock.
• How to troubleshoot: “An error occurred while starting the application” in ASP.NET Core on IIS by Scott Sauber.
• Running multiple independent ASP.NET Core pipelines side by side in the same application by Filip W.
• ASP.NET Core Lazy Command Pattern by Muhammad Rehan Saeed.
• Alba 1.0 – Recipes for ASP.Net Core Integration Testing by Jeremy D. Miller.
• HTTP/2 with Server Push proof of concept for ASP.NET Core HttpSysServer by Tomasz Pęczek.
• Hosted ASP.NET Core builds with AppVeyor (video) by the ASP.NET Monsters.

C#

• Micro-Benchmarking the Three Ways to Cast Safely by Daniel Crabtree.
• Is Operator Patterns – You won’t need ‘as’ as often by Daniel Crabtree.
• Dissecting Local Functions to understand how they capture local variables by Daniel Crabtree.
• Local Functions are Funcs too by Daniel Crabtree.
• Ref Returns, Ref Locals, and how to use them by Daniel Crabtree.
• Try catch, finally throw — or Exception Handling 101 for .NET by Alex Yakunin.

F#

• Getting Started with .NET Core using F# (video).
• Building a security testing service with F# (video), by William Blum.
• Using F# to write serverless Azure functions, by Lee Stott.
• Gram Schmidt in FSharp, by Jeremy Bellows.
• Slack TypeProvider, by Flechner Romain.
• A Reusable ApiController Adapter, by Mark Seemann.
• Creating an Azure Functions solution diagram, by Mathias Brandewinder.

New F# Language Suggestions:

• Implicit interface implementation from an object expression
• Implement [] and [] for simple class types

Check out F# Weekly for more great content from the F# community.

VB

• Why VB2017 only supports consuming ref returning methods by Anthony D. Green.

Xamarin

• Stable Release: 15.1 by Bri Brothers.
• Stable Release: Xamarin.Forms 2.3.4.224 by David Ortinau.
• Announcing Xamarin.Forms Stable Release 2.3.4 by David Ortinau.
• Announcing Xamarin’s Xcode 8.3 Support by Miguel de Icaza.
• Securing Web Requests with TLS 1.2 by James Montemagno.
• Spring into April with Xamarin Developer Events by Jayme Singleton.
• Snack Pack 9: Installing Xamarin for Visual Studio 2017 by The Xamarin Show.
• Xamarin.Controls – Xamarin.Forms PinView by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Tips – Restrict the Length of Your Entry Text by Alex Dunn.
• Xamarin.Tips – Sending Authorized SignalR Requests by Alex Dunn.
• Launching A Mobile App Via A URI Scheme by Adam Pedley.
• MFractor – Productivity tools for Xamarin Studio by Adam Pedley.
• Persist Whatever You Want With Xamarin.Forms by Matthew Soucoup.
• Set alternate app icons in iOS using Xamarin by Marco Kuiper.
• Validate input in Xamarin.Forms using INotifyDataErrorInfo, Behaviors, Effects, and Prism by Davide Zordan.
• Solution: Xamarin.Forms Intellisense not working by Subramanyam Raju.

Azure

• DocumentDB Transactions from .NET by Derek Comartin.
• Blue Green Deployments with Azure – The Simple way by Faesel Saeed.

UWP

• Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.4 by David Catuhe.
• ICYMI – Your weekly TL;DR By the Windows Apps Team.
• Managing Windows IoT Core devices with Azure IoT Hub By Artur Laksberg.
• New Share Experience in Windows 10 Creators Update By Juan Sebastian Oviedo.
• Updating your tooling for Windows 10 Creators Update By Clint Rutkas.
• Windows 10 Creators Update and Creators Update SDK are Released By Kevin Gallo.

Data

• Step by step: Couchbase with .Net Core by Carlos Mendible.
• Using ElasticSearch, Kibana, ASP.NET Core and Docker to Discover and Visualize data by Daniel Jimenez Garcia.
• Avoid Lazy Loading Entities in ASP.NET Applications by Steve Smith.

Game Development

• Ludum Dare 38 Theme Slaughter.
• [MineCraft] It’s time to discover… Marketplace!.
• How Firewatch’s UI enhances immersion by Abhishek Iyer.
• The Job Simulator Postmortem by lexander Schwartz and Devin Reimer
• ‘Make me think, make me move’: New Doom’s deceptively simple design by Kris Graft.
• 11.5 Unity Tower defense tutorial – Frost and Storm debuffs by inScope Studios.
• [Unity 5.5] Tutorial: How to create a Pickable Object by Gamad.
• Getting Started with MonoGame using 2D by Simon “Darkside” Jackson.

And this is it for this week!

Contribute to the week in .NET

As always, this weekly post couldn’t exist without community contributions, and I’d like to thank all those who sent links and tips. The F# section is provided by Phillip Carter, the gaming section by Stacey Haffner, and the Xamarin section by Dan Rigby, and the UWP section by Michael Crump.

You can participate too. Did you write a great blog post, or just read one? Do you want everyone to know about an amazing new contribution or a useful library? Did you make or play a great game built on .NET?
We’d love to hear from you, and feature your contributions on future posts:

• Send an email to beleroy at Microsoft,
• comment on this gist
• Leave us a pointer in the comments section below.
• Send Stacey (@yecats131) tips on Twitter about .NET games.

This week’s post (and future posts) also contains news I first read on The ASP.NET Community Standup, on Weekly Xamarin, on F# weekly, and on The Morning Brew.

Since its general availability in July 2016, organizations around the world have been connecting with millions of customers through the scale, reliability and flexibility of Azure AD B2C. Taking a step further to help organizations comply with industry regulations and data protection laws, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Europe-based Azure AD B2C directories. Read more about Azure AD B2C’s region availability and data residency.

The directory placement is determined based on the country selected by the administrator when creating an Azure AD B2C directory in the Azure portal. If a European country is selected, the Azure AD B2C directory will reside in European datacenters. For the rest of the countries/regions, the directory will be placed in the closest location among the North American and European Azure datacenters.

What’s next

• Continue expanding Azure AD B2C’s global presence with directories that reside in Asia-Pacific and China.
• Deliver multi-language support to allow organizations to deliver experiences to their customers in their own language. If you’d like to try out this functionality and provide feedback, send us a note at aadb2cpreview@microsoft.com

Resources to get started

• Visit the Azure AD B2C web page
• Learn more through our documentation and samples
• Get help on Stack Overflow using the azure-ad-b2c tag.
• Let us know what you’d like to see in Azure AD B2C via our UserVoice forum
• Tweet us (@azuread)

Most customers we talk with are using a Hybrid Cloud approach to take advantage of the cloud and their existing applications and infrastructure. Whether you’re considering migrating some or all your applications to the cloud, the transition from on-premises requires careful planning. You need to understand how much it will cost, how to size your environment, what virtual machine options to choose, and more – and you want to do all this in the smartest and most cost-effective way possible.

With this in mind, today we are offering new tools and resources to help you tap into the power of the hybrid cloud to optimize your business:

• A free Cloud Migration Assessment, which helps you discover the servers across your IT environment, analyze their hardware configurations, and provides a detailed report including the estimated cost benefits of moving to Microsoft Azure.
• Starting today, you can activate your Azure Hybrid Use Benefit directly in the Azure Management Portal, simplifying your path to the cloud in the most cost effective way possible. With the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit you can save up to 40% with Windows Server licenses that include Software Assurance. All customers can use this easy provisioning experience to save money on Windows Server virtual machines in Azure.
• Azure Site Recovery is another tool to make the journey to the cloud as easy as possible. This is a tool you can use to migrate virtual machines to Azure, and it’s a great way to move applications whether they are running on AWS, VMware, Hyper-V or on physical servers. You can already configure ASR to use your Hybrid Use Benefit with PowerShell, and today we’re announcing a new experience that will be available in Azure Site Recovery in the coming weeks that will allow you to tag virtual machines within the Azure portal itself. This capability will make it easier than ever to migrate your Windows Server virtual machines. 

With Azure, you get truly consistent hybrid capabilities across cloud and on-premises environments, offering you the flexibility to choose the optimal location for each application, based on your business requirements and reducing the complexity of moving to the cloud. Migrating virtual machines to the cloud is often one of the first steps organizations take in their cloud journey and is a natural part of any hybrid cloud strategy.

Learn more about the tools and resources available today by visiting the Azure Migration page. We’d love to hear from you on how we can continue making your path to the cloud easy and effective.

Yesterday, we released TFS 2015 Update 4.  This will likely be the last release in the TFS 2015 line.  TFS 2017 shipped almost 6 months ago and we are already hard at work on TFS 2017 Update 2.  This TFS 2015 Update 4 release just contains fixes for commonly reported customer issues – about 30 in total.  Read the release notes for more details.

• TFS 2015 Update 4 Release Notes
• TFS 2015 Update 4 web installer
• TFS 2015 Update 4 ISO installer
• TFS 2015 Update 4 Express Edition web installer
• TFS 2015 Update 4 Express Edition ISO installer

Brian

We’re ushering in the new season with fresh deals in the Windows Store, with more than 100 special offers on top games, movies & TV, apps and music. Hop into the Windows Store now through April 17* for big savings!

Below are 10 of our favorite Spring Sale deals for Windows 10 devices:

Up to 50% off great games

Forza Horizon 3: Ultimate Edition– 40% off

Take to the open roads of Australia, then connect them into the wildest, most far-ranging Forza game yet.

Halo Wars 2: Ultimate Edition– 35% off

Real-time strategy makes an explosive return to the Halo universe in Halo Wars 2: Ultimate Edition, where you lead Spartans, Warthogs and other classic Halo fighting forces in a brutal war against a terrifying new enemy.

Fallout Shelter– Up to 50% off in-game add-ons

You’re in control of a state-of-the-art underground vault from Vault-Tec, where you must build the perfect shelter, keep your dwellers happy, and protect them against the dangers of the Wasteland,

Up to 50% off top movies & TV

Arrival– 33% off

Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is an expert translator in this science-fiction thriller. Mysterious spacecraft have landed around the globe. As she struggles to decipher their intent, tensions mount and the world wonders if it’s about to face global war.

Star Wars: The Digital Six Film Collection– 17% off

Join heroic Jedi Knights on an epic journey to defeat the evil Empire. From the original 3 blockbusters through the prequel trilogy, your Star Wars fix is available here.

Resident Evil Complete Collection– 9% off
Follow Alice (Milla Jovovich) in this action-packed sci-fi franchise as she battles to save the human race against the evil Umbrella Corporation

Up to 75% off popular apps

Adobe Photoshop Elements 15– 30% off

Easy photo and video organization, editing, creating and sharing is the goal of this favorite app, and this latest release further automates these functions.

Drawboard PDF– 30% off

For reading, annotating and marking up PDFs, it’s hard to beat the features in this handy app, which virtually replaces pen and paper.

Grapholite– 75% off

For diagram-designing magic, this app is not-to-be-missed. Format text in any diagram elements, enjoy high-resolution .jpg and .png support, and convert almost any built-in diagram element to editable splines.

Up to 30% off hit music

Beauty and the Beast Soundtrack– Up to 30% off
As Belle and her beau take to the big screen, the magical soundtrack of this lavish and beloved musical gets a new airing as well,

This is just the beginning of what you’ll find in the Spring Sale Collection in the Windows Store. Don’t miss out – Spring Sale ends April 17!

And, for even more savings, don’t miss the Spring Sale deals available now in the Xbox Store and Microsoft Store, including more than 350 console games, plus Xbox Design Lab controllers on sale.

*Available through April 17, 2017 through the Windows Store and on Windows devices in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and China. Offers and content varies by market. Limited availability; offers may change at any time.

The post Spring Sale is on now in the Windows Store appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

Deploying a virtual machine on Microsoft Azure is a great way to add scalability and flexibility to an existing datacenter and applications. Now customers can deploy Windows Server virtual machines in Azure and save up to 40 percent with the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit.  Due to its popularity, we’ve recently made new UI changes in Azure that make it even easier to discover and utilize this benefit directly from the Azure Portal. To learn more on how to use the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit as part of a bigger datacenter migration strategy, check out the announcement we made today!

This post was authored by Julia White, Corporate Vice President.

Odds are youve got a hybrid cloud strategy and have already started implementing this approach. Thats just one of the findings in our brand-new 2017 State of Hybrid Cloud research study that digs deeper into the numbers behind hybrid cloud adoption. It also shows us that a hybrid cloud strategy is linked to the business strategy, with business growth and digital transformation being top drivers behind a hybrid approach.

Hybrid cloud is a durable approach, not a short-term transition state. We know this because 9 in 10 of IT workers report that hybrid cloud will be the approach for their organizations five years from now. But, its not just about what people believe, its also about technology truth. A hybrid cloud approach lets you uniquely optimize your overall IT environment for maximum performance, agility, cost, and compliance. This enables an environment that has a combination of pure cloud systems, apps that span cloud and local systems, modern front ends in cloud with legacy on-premises back-end systems, smart IoT and edge devices combined with cloud analytics, and fully on-premises systems. And, for companies with significant on-premises technology today, with a hybrid cloud strategy, your existing investments become an asset in your organizations digital transformation and helps you differentiate, versus just being treated as legacy investments.

We have also heard that hybrid cloud can be complex in fact more than half of survey respondents point to complexity as the top challenge. It doesnt help that most vendors only recognize half of your IT environment. Public cloud-only vendors push the idea that everything is going to the cloud fast and there is no use for on-prem tech, so just run a hybrid cloud like two disparate systems for this short-term situation. On-premises-only vendors repackage legacy technology and call it cloud, then provide loose integration with public clouds that still requires different systems to manage it. Neither of these approaches are helpful to customers. Hybrid cloud should seamlessly bring together and maximize the combination of cloud and on-premises environments, not proliferate different systems in multiple places. A hybrid cloud run with multiple different systems is what makes hybrid cloud expensive, complex, and risky. It doesnt need to be this way.

The answer to complexity is consistency. Consistency across cloud and on-premises environments means you can leverage common skills for both. Consistency enables the portability of applications and workloads and the flexibility to decide the best place for each to reside. You dont have to worry about siloed data, disparate management systems, or multiple user identities.

While other vendors have only recently recognized the importance of hybrid cloud, we have been at it for more than seven years, using our enterprise experience to integrate hybrid capabilities everywhere in our Azure cloud. We build consistency into every area: application development, management and security, identity management, and the data platform. We believe these capabilities outlined in this white paper are fundamental requirements for success with hybrid cloud.

Our focus on enabling hybrid cloud goes beyond product innovation and extends to ways we can save you money as you move to cloud. For example, you can save up to 40 percent on Windows Server virtual machines running in Azure by using your existing Windows Server licenses with Software Assurance (check out the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit). And weve just turned on the capability for any customer to apply that benefit to any Windows Server virtual machine running in Azure right within the Azure Management Portal. We also have a new free cloud migration assessment to help you discover and evaluate which workloads to migrate now to Azure.

Microsoft uniquely understands the benefit of an IT environment that maximizes cloud and on-premises systems. And, Azure stands alone as the only truly consistent hybrid cloud that takes the complexity out. Visit our hybrid cloud website to read more about how were working with companies to accelerate their digital transformation. A hybrid strategy isnt enough its time for hybrid action.

Howdy folks,

This is a blog post I’ve been as eager to publish as I suspect you’ve been eager to read it. I’m excited to let you know that Azure AD business-to-business (B2B) collaboration is generally available worldwide!

Azure AD B2B collaboration capabilities enable any organization using Azure AD to work safely and securely with users from any other organization, small or large, with or without Azure AD, & with or without an IT organization.

Organizations using Azure AD can provide their B2B partners access to documents, resources, and applications while maintaining control over corporate data. Developers can use the Azure AD B2B APIs to write applications that bring two organizations together in a secure way that is also seamless and intuitive for end users to navigate.

Customer demand for these capabilities is sky high! Already during the public preview, customers have invited 2.6M guest users using these new capabilities.

And more than 20% of Azure AD Tenants with >10 users are now using Azure AD B2B!:

We have spent thousands and thousands of hours with these customers diving into how we can best serve their needs with Azure AD B2B.

I’d like to thank all of you who spent time with us providing feedback and suggestions. We would not have reached this point without your partnership.

Now you can dive in and use Azure AD B2B in your organization! Here are a few of highlights of the things you can do now:

Easily add B2B users to your organization:

Enable your collaborators to bring their own identity to work with you:

Delegate to application and group owners so they can add B2B users directly to any of the thousands of apps that work with Azure AD:

Have consistent authorization policies protecting your corporate content across your employees and partners:

Use our APIs and sample code to easily build applications to onboard your external partners in ways customized to your organization’s needs:

With Azure AD B2B collaboration, you can get the full power of Azure AD to protect your partner relationships in a way that end users find easy and intuitive.

Work with any user from any partner

• Partners use their own credentials
  
• No requirement for partners to use Azure AD
  
• No external directories or complex set-up required
  

Simple and secure collaboration

• Provide access to any corporate application or resource
  
• Seamless user experiences
  
• Enterprise-grade security for applications and data
  

No management overhead

• No external account or password management
  
• No sync or manual account lifecycle management
  
• No external administrative overhead
  

Get started today on the Azure portal.

Learn More

There’s far more detail about the new Azure AD B2B Collaboration features in our updated documentation, so take a look and let us know if you have any questions! And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out (below) the latest short video about Azure AD B2B we put together, too.

As always, connect with us for any feedback, discussions and suggestions through our Microsoft Tech Community. You know we’re listening!

Best Regards,
Alex Simons (@Twitter:@Alex_A_Simons)
Director of Program Management
Microsoft Identity Division

Organizations are transforming how they operate in a digital world. This means seizing new opportunities quickly, reinventing business processes, and delivering greater value to customers. More important than ever are the strong and trusted relationships with the whole ecosystem in which an organization operates. This includes business partners, contractors, and of course customers. While business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions may be different, sustaining both requires information security combined with intuitive user experiences.

As your network of B2B and B2C connections grows online, securing them across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid scenarios becomes more of a challenge. A secure identity platform is critical to support this growth and to enable digital business securely. With this goal in mind, today we announce two important extensions in the capability of Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration now generally available

Businesses are increasingly dispersed, mobile, and collaborative, relying on wide range of vendors, partners, and contractors to stay nimble and capitalize on changing markets. Azure Active Directory (AD) is the foundation of our identity-driven approach to security and extends beyond your own employees to secure the identities of external collaboratorspartners, contractors, and vendors. Our goal is to make it easy and secure to collaborate with the employees of any organization. Azure AD B2B collaboration is generally available today and is part of Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS).

B2B collaboration provides external user accounts with secure access to documents, resources, and applicationswhile maintaining control over internal data. Theres no need to add external users to your directory, sync them, or manage their lifecycle; IT can invite collaborators to use any email addressOffice 365, on-premises Microsoft Exchange, or even a personal address (Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.)and even set up conditional access policies, including multi-factor authentication. Your developers can use the Azure AD B2B APIs to write applications that bring together different organizations in a secure wayand deliver a seamless and intuitive end user experience.

Millions of users from thousands of businesses have already been using Azure AD B2B collaboration capabilities available through public preview.

As early adopters of Azure AD B2B collaboration, we used this service to provide a simple and secure way for partners, large and small, to use their own credentials to access Kodak Alaris systems. The latest enhancements are interesting, and we plan to use the invitation manager API in our Partner Relationship Management portal for a more customized guest onboarding/provisioning experience. The Azure AD team has been an incredible partner in our re-creation of a more agile and cost-effective hybrid cloud IT infrastructure. Steve Braunschweiger, Chief Enterprise IT Architect Kodak Alaris

Heres how you can get started with Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration:

• Watch this Mechanics Video to see the benefits of cloud-based B2B identity and access management
• Read more details from the Azure AD B2B team blog
• Get started with Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration

Azure Active Directory B2C now available in Europe

Another important audience within most enterprise ecosystems are the customers who trust your business with their own sensitive personal and financial information. Azure Active Directory B2C enables organizations to securely connect with their customers at scale. Today, Azure AD B2C is generally available in Europe. Azure AD B2C is a highly available, global identity and access management service for your consumer-facing applications. It scales to hundreds of millions of protected identities, integrates easily with nearly any platform on any device, and includes optional multi-factor authentication for additional protection. Your consumers will be able to use existing social media accounts or create new credentials for single sign-on access to your applications through a fully customizable experience.

Organizations now have the option to use Azure AD B2C tenants that operate and store data only in European datacenters. For all other regions, Azure AD B2C is available through the North American or European datacenters.

Heres how you can get started with Azure Active Directory B2C:

• Watch this video to see the benefits of cloud-based consumer identity and access management
• Read more details from the Azure AD B2C team blog
• Get started with Azure AD B2C in your consumer app

As companies adopt a cloud-first position to take advantage of increased agility and faster innovation, like B2B and B2C, we recognize that cloud-first doesnt mean cloud-only. As we announced today, we make it easy for customers to maximize their existing investments to adopt cloud. A hybrid approach is a strategic plan for businesses financially, for security, and for their identities and applications.

In November, we announced Visual Studio for Mac, a fully featured IDE that we hope will help every Mac developer create mobile and cloud applications. We started with a solid foundation for mobile development using Xamarin, and cloud development using .NET Core.

Over the past few months we have been working on porting C# code that was originally designed to work on Windows to the Mac. Luckily for us, the architecture of Visual Studio is so good that reusing the code has been a breeze. This has been helped by both the love and dedication that our Mac and Windows teams have, to create a great developer experience for our users.

Here are some of the changes that we have made since then.

Web Editing

In the latest release, we have completed the work to bring the rich HTML, CSS and JSON editors to macOS. You will get the same code completion, indentation behavior, and validation that you get on Windows for those file formats. When you install the update today, you will get to enjoy the glory of an IDE with a state-of-the-art web editor.

.NET Core

We have polished and improved our .NET Core and ASP.NET Core support to make it even simpler to create your server code, either for your standalone web sites, or as a service backend for your mobile applications or your hosted services.

We have upgraded our debugger to make async debugging as natural and simple as regular code – just like you expect from Visual Studio on Windows.

Azure Publish

To complement our improved .NET Core support, you can now publish your applications directly to Azure from within Visual Studio for Mac. Using the same publishing profiles and commands that you are used to.

C# 7

We also introduced support for C# 7.0, a big upgrade with many language improvements that you will love. The support is what you expect from Visual Studio with refactoring tools, live code checking and great IntelliSense.

It is hard to pick favorite features in C# 7. I love pattern matching and I love the new native tuple support. Local functions, while not immediately obvious, has made some of my own code simpler and cleaner.

Support for the latest Apple and Google platforms

As you have come to expect from us, we deliver first-class support for the latest versions of Apple and Google operating systems – including the just updated versions of macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS.

Additionally, we are taking away some of the complexity involved in managing the signing certificates and provisioning profiles for your Apple-based applications, by integrating with the popular open source Fastlane project.

Accessibility

Visual Studio now integrates with Apple’s macOS accessibility platform. We are committed to making the entire IDE accessible and we are very happy with the first steps that we have taken in this space.

Testing

I hope that you take some time to try out the new features in Visual Studio for Mac and share your experiences with us. My team is committed to delivering developer tools that delight developers. We want to hear from you, and find out what parts of the experience can be improved and how we can make you more effective mobile and cloud developers.

If you already have Visual Studio for Mac Preview installed, make sure you update to the latest version from within the app. If you haven’t tried out a preview yet, head on over to VisualStudio.com to download the latest one.

Use Visual Studio for Mac’s “Report a Problem” or “Provide a Suggestion” dialog (within the Help menu) to provide feedback. Also, don’t forget about our Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac community forums, which provide a great place to leave feedback and learn from other developers.

Enjoy!

Miguel.

Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer, Mobile Developer Tools Miguel is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, focused on the mobile platform and creating delightful developer tools. With Nat Friedman, he co-founded both Xamarin in 2011 and Ximian in 1999. Before that, Miguel co-founded the GNOME project in 1997 and has directed the Mono project since its creation in 2001, including multiple Mono releases at Novell. Miguel has received the Free Software Foundation 1999 Free Software Award, the MIT Technology Review Innovator of the Year Award in 1999, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 innovators for the new century in September 2000.

Last month, we announced that we’re bringing major improvements to how Google Accounts work in Outlook 2016 for Mac—including an improved setup experience and Google Calendar and Contacts support. We’re excited to be delivering on these highly requested features for Mac users—matching Outlook for iOS and Android—by providing Google Accounts with a more powerful way to stay in control of the day ahead. These updates are currently available to our Office Insider Fast community, and we’ve been excited by the response we’ve seen.

However, we still need some additional feedback before making these updates broadly available. Today, we are announcing a worldwide preview of these features that will run until June 30, 2017. During this time, anyone can install the earliest Outlook for Mac Preview build and help us test the new Google Account experience. You will have access to the same experience as our Insider Fast community—without the requirement of being an existing Office 365 customer.

Getting the Outlook for Mac Preview is simple—just visit the preview website and click the Download button.

What should I do if I’m already an Outlook for Mac user?

If you are already using Outlook as part of Office 365, this preview isn’t for you. Existing users can get access to the new Google Account features, and all the latest Outlook innovations, simply by joining our Insider Fast community. Just open Outlook, click Help > Check for Updates and then follow these directions.

What if I don’t use Outlook for Mac?

This preview is for you! To try Outlook for Mac with your Google Account and test drive the new updates, visit our preview website and click the Download button. This will install the latest preview version of Outlook 2016 for Mac, which you can use until June 30, 2017. You will receive the same builds and weekly updates as our Insider Fast community. As you use the new features, check out this list of known issues and share your feedback by going to Help > Contact Support in Outlook.

Why stop there? Install Outlook for iOS and connect your Google Account to get the same, rich Outlook experience on your Mac, iPad and iPhone. Your Gmail will get better with advanced features like Focused Inbox and richer experiences for travel reservations and package deliveries.

Once the preview is over, you can become an Office 365 customer to continue getting all the latest features and innovation in Outlook and Office for your Mac and iPhone. Just go to Outlook menu and select Subscription Options.

Make your voice heard!

Got a suggestion for how to improve Outlook for Mac? Please suggest and vote on future feature ideas on our Outlook for Mac UserVoice page.

—The Outlook team

The post Come try the Outlook for Mac Preview with Google Calendar and Contacts appeared first on Office Blogs.

The partnership kicks off today with open registration for Porsche’s esports sponsorship debut in Forza Racing Championship Season 3: The Porsche Cup – the most inclusive racing esports program and home to the largest online racing community in gaming. Today also brings the release of the Forza Horizon 3 Porsche Car Pack, featuring an exciting lineup of Porsche cars for 2016’s best-selling racing game Forza Horizon 3, exclusively on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs.

Kicking off ForzaRC this year is the Forza Racing Championship 2017 New York Invitational Presented by Porsche on April 15-16 at Microsoft’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue, showcasing 18 of ForzaRC’s Elite players from around the world competing for a chance to win $25,000 in cash prizes, plus a Drift competition between two of ForzaRC’s top drifters. Guests will also have a chance to race ForzaRC Elite drivers and even Porsche professional driver Matt Campbell on April 15. We also invite fans to join us from home by tuning into the Beam livestream, Twitch and YouTube, featuring a guest appearance by Campbell.

We look forward to collaborating with Porsche to continue delivering more content and ForzaRC experiences for our fans, so stay tuned to ForzaMotorsport.net for future updates.

Porsche Car Pack for “Forza Horizon 3”

Also available today, the Forza Horizon 3 Porsche Car Pack adds seven acclaimed Porsche vehicles to the open world of Australia’s Horizon Festival, including cars new to Forza and making their debut on this console generation. With this car pack, players can experience prime examples of the breadth and depth of Porsche’s automotive history from classic racing models like the 1960 718 RS 60 to modern-day vehicles like the 2016 911 GT3 RS, the 2016 Cayman GT4, the recently launched 2017 Panamera, and more. Head over to ForzaMotorsport.net for more details on each of the cars featured in the pack.

Head over to ForzaMotorsport.net for more details on each of the cars featured in the pack, or Xbox Wire for more about today’s news!

The post Porsche and Microsoft announce partnership for industry-leading Forza franchise appeared first on Windows Experience Blog.

This post is by Mary Wahl, Data Scientist, T.J. Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager, Miruna Oprescu, Software Engineer, and Sudarshan Raghunathan, Principal Software Engineering Manager, at Microsoft.

Summary

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are extraordinarily versatile and increasingly popular machine learning models that require significantly more time and computational resources for execution than traditional approaches. By deploying these models on Microsoft HDInsight clusters, data scientists and engineers can easily scale available computation resources to achieve a desired throughput rate while using familiar scripting languages and deep learning frameworks. In this blog post, the fifth in our series showcasing deep learning applications on Azure, we show how DNNs produced in two common deep learning frameworks, Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) and Google’s TensorFlow, can be operationalized for scoring large image collections harbored on Azure Data Lake Store using PySpark. We apply this approach to a common DNN use case – aerial image classification – and demonstrate how the method can be used to identify recent patterns in urban development.

This blog post is a short summary of our work. Please see the full tutorial for sample data/code/models and step-by-step walkthroughs.

The previous four blog posts in this series, listed below, cover training and operationalization of DNNs with other deep learning frameworks, scripting languages, use cases, and/or Azure services. All four posts utilize MXNet, an alternative deep learning framework to CNTK and TensorFlow. Whereas the work highlighted in this post uses Python/PySpark, posts 1-3 showcase Microsoft R Server/SparkR. Post 4 discusses the training of a text classification model and its operationalization on Azure Web Apps (rather than HDInsight Spark).

1. Building Deep Neural Networks in the Cloud with Azure GPU VMs, MXNet and Microsoft R Server
   
2. Applying Deep Learning at Cloud Scale, with Microsoft R Server & Azure Data Lake
   
3. Training Deep Neural Networks on ImageNet Using Microsoft R Server and Azure GPU VMs
   
4. Cloud-Scale Text Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks on Microsoft Azure
   

Description of the Aerial Image Classification Use Case

The classification of aerial images is a common task with significant economic and political impact across a wide range of industries. Aerial photography is often analyzed in precision agriculture to monitor crop performance and identify regions in need of corrective treatments. In marketing and finance, image classifiers can identify property features and aid in property value estimation. Government agencies may use aerial imagery classification to enforce regulations: for example, Greece recently uncovered tens of thousands of tax evaders by identifying properties containing home pools. Image classifiers are also employed in geopolitical surveillance to identify novel remote settlements, and to estimate population density or infer economic vitality when direct data are unavailable. Researchers in government in academia may also use aerial data to track urban expansion, deforestation, and the impact of climate change.

This blog post and the associated tutorial focus on a specific use case: predicting a region’s land use type (developed, cultivated, forested etc.) from aerial imagery. Large training and validation datasets for this application can easily be constructed from the vast troves of regularly-published and freely-available U.S. aerial images and ground-truth land use labels. Image classifiers trained on this data can quantify trends in land use and even identify new land development at the level of individual properties, as we will illustrate below.

Training Aerial Image Classifiers Through Transfer Learning

Producing a DNN from scratch can require weeks of GPU compute time and extraordinarily large training datasets. A common alternative is to repurpose an existing DNN trained to perform a related task: this process is called transfer learning or retraining. To illustrate how transfer learning is performed, we introduce the DNN architecture of AlexNet (a prototypical image classification DNN employed in this use case) and the practical role of each layer.

The first layer in AlexNet (and most other image classification DNNs) is a convolutional layer. Each neuron in the layer takes as input data from an 11 pixel x 11 pixel x 3 color channel (RGB) region of the input image. The neuron’s learned weights, which are collectively referred to as its convolution filter, determine the neuron’s single-valued output response to the input. A convolution with dimensions 55 x 55 x 1 could be produced between the neuron’s filter and the full 224 x 224 x 3 input image by sliding the input region along the image’s x and y dimensions in four-pixel strides. In practice, the equivalent convolution is normally implemented by statically connecting 55 x 55 identical copies of the neuron to different input regions. Ninety-six such sets of neurons make up the first layer of AlexNet, allowing 96 distinct convolution filters to be learned.

During training, many of the neurons in the first layer learn convolution filters that correspond to edge detectors, each potentially with a different orientation and/or color sensitivity. This functionality can be visualized either by examining the convolution filters themselves or by identifying images that would strongly activate the neuron, a technique pioneered by Zeiler & Fergus (2013). The image below, reproduced with permission from Matt Zeiler, shows the convolution filter (top) and sample strongly-activating images (bottom) for four example neurons in the first layer of AlexNet:

Typical image classification DNNs contain additional convolutional layers that combine the output of first-layer neurons to identify more complex shapes. Sample images that strongly activate example neurons in the second through fifth layer of a trained DNN are shown below (reproduced with permission from Matt Zeiler). Neurons in lower layers are strongly activated by simple shape and color combinations that may be present in images of many labels, such as round objects or legs. In higher layers, neurons are often more class-specific: they may be activated by the same object viewed from multiple perspectives, or by different objects with the same label.

The complex shapes identified by later convolutional layers are excellent predictors of an image’s classification, but are most effective in combination. For example, “tire” shapes may be present in images of cars and motorcycles, but an image that contains both “tire” and “helmet” shapes probably depicts a motorcycle. The fully-connected layers that typically follow convolutional layers in image classification DNNs encode such logic in the trained model. The model’s final fully-connected layer comprises a number of neurons equal to the number of classes (1000, for the original AlexNet); the model’s predicted output label is given by the index of the maximally-activated neuron in this layer.

In transfer learning, a pretrained model’s final layer (and, sometimes, more of the fully-connected layers) is removed and replaced with a new layer/layers that will be trained for the new classification task. In the simplest form of transfer learning, the trained model’s preserved layers are “frozen”: no changes are made to their weights during retraining. This reduces the potential for overfitting by limiting the number of free parameters in the model, but creates image features that may not be ideally suited for the new image classification task. An alternative method called fine-tuning allows updates to the old layers’ weights, which better adapts featurization for the new task but typically requires a larger training set to avoid overfitting.

To train our aerial image classifiers, we replaced the final layers from ImageNet-trained image classification DNNs (AlexNet for CNTK, a 50-layer ResNet for TensorFlow) and froze the remaining layers. We were delighted to find that the features developed to distinguish the categories in ImageNet were suitable even for the apparently unrelated task of classifying aerial imagery. (Overall accuracy for both models was ~80% across six land use categories, rising to ~92% when undeveloped land categories were grouped together; the confusion matrix for the CNTK model is shown below.) Many others have also reported improbable efficacy for models developed through transfer learning: such anecdotal successes, combined with relatively low resource requirements and the ability to tolerate small training sets, explains why transfer learning is now far more common in industrial applications than de novo model training.

Operationalization on Spark

Data scientists commonly employ a method called minibatching during DNN training. In this approach, a subset of the available training images are scored in each training round (usually in parallel across many cores of a GPU), and the results are combined to better infer a gradient for parameter updates. Most deep learning frameworks, including CNTK and TensorFlow, implement minibatching with handy methods to describe how training files should be loaded and preprocessed. Users would be remiss not to take advantage of these efficient functions during training, but may be unable to use them when applying the trained model to new data. Our use case, for example, requires applying the trained DNNs to large image sets on Azure Data Lake Store using PySpark: in this context, the built-in image loading/preprocessing in CNTK and TensorFlow can’t be used because the files are not stored locally. (The same issue arises e.g. in many web service and robotics applications.) It is necessary in such circumstances to faithfully replicate the loading and preprocessing steps that were performed during model training. Example Python scripts illustrating the details of this process are available in the associated Git repository.

Deep learning framework installation and adaptations to evaluation scripts for parallelization are also important considerations for operationalizing DNNs on Spark clusters. We provide an example script action to coordinate the installation of CNTK, TensorFlow, and all dependencies. Spark clusters are designed to quickly perform distributable tasks by assigning a proportion of the workload to each “worker node”: the number of worker nodes can be specified during deployment and dynamically scaled later to accommodate changing needs. As shown below, the total time required to execute the image processing task scales inversely with the number of nodes available for processing. The colocation of the Spark cluster on the same Azure Data Lake Store as the input data and a rational choice of image partitioning across workers reduced the load latency for both images and models. Sample Jupyter notebooks included in our tutorial illustrate the specifics of our image processing coordination using PySpark.

Applications of the Aerial Image Classifier

To demonstrate the potential uses of our trained classifier, we applied the CNTK model to aerial images tiling Middlesex County, MA (home of Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center). By comparing the model’s predictions on images collected in 2016 to the most recent available ground-truth labels (from 2011) allowed us to identify newly-developed areas in the county, including single properties in some cases (see center 224 meter x 224 meter tile below).

The accuracy of our model was also sufficient to capture the major trends in urban development across the county. In the figure below, each pixel represents the classification of a single 224 meter x 224 meter region, with green pixels representing undeveloped land, red pixels representing developed land, and white pixels representing cultivated land. (The ground-truth labels from the National Land Cover Database are provided at left; predictions on contemporary and more recent aerial images are shown at center and right, respectively.)

For a more detailed description of our work, including sample data/code and walkthroughs, please check out the associated tutorial.

Mary, T.J., Miruna & Sudarshan

Our thanks to Mario Bourgoin, Yan Zhang and Rahee Ghosh for proofreading and test-driving the tutorial accompanying this blog post.

Microsoft can help you do amazing things with your data in the cloud! Here are five examples to help you get started. If you’d like more information about using the cloud to get the most from your data, please join us for the upcoming Microsoft Data Amp event on April 19 at 8 AM Pacific. The online event will showcase how data is the nexus between application innovation and artificial intelligence—how data and analytics powered by the most trusted and intelligent cloud can help companies differentiate and out innovate their competition.

1: Build data-driven apps that learn and adapt

Applications show intelligence when they can spot trends, react to events, predict outcomes or recommend choices—often leading to richer customer experiences, improved business process, or addressing issues before they arise. The three key ingredients to creating an intelligent app are:

1. Ingest data in real time
2. Query across historical and real-time data
3. Analyze patterns and make predictions with machine learning

With Azure, you can make your applications intelligent by establishing feedback loops, and applying big data and machine learning techniques to classify, predict, or otherwise analyze explicit and implicit signals. Today, apps for consumers and enterprises can deliver greater customer or business benefit by learning from user behavior and other signals.

Pier 1 Imports launched a mobile-friendly pier1.com, making shopping online easier. It enabled the selection of delivery options like direct shipment, picking up products in the local store, or a white-glove delivery option from any mobile device. “Although the Pier 1 Imports brand is the same as it has been for more than 50 years, we are continually getting better at identifying what our customer wants, using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and resulting data insights,” Sharon Leite, EVP Sales and Customer Experience.

Get started with sample code

If you want to learn more about building an intelligent app, try the AdventureWorks Ski App. This sample application can be used to demonstrate the value of building intelligence into an existing application. Learn more by going to GitHub and watching the application being built here.

2: Run big cognition for human-like intelligence over petabyte scale

Microsoft’s Cognitive Services APIs allow developers to integrate vision, speech, language, knowledge and search APIs into your apps. To run these services over petabyte scale, we’ve integrated the capabilities directly into Azure Data Lake. You can join emotions from image content with any other type of data you have and do incredibly powerful analytics and intelligence over it. This is what we call “Big Cognition.” This goes beyond extracting one piece of cognitive information at a time, understanding an emotion or whether there’s an object in an image. Big Cognition joins all the extracted cognitive data with other types of data, so you can do some really powerful analytics with it.

On a global scale, Azure Data Lake is also being used by Carnival Corp., the world’s largest leisure travel company, which has a total of over 100 ships across 10 global cruise line brands, at its Fleet Operations Centers. “We chose to partner with Microsoft to kick off a project of the Internet of Things, because it was strategic for us to rely on a platform that would allow us to collect, analyse, and display data from sensors in a simple, integrated and immediate way on our ships and make them available both to the officers on board and to our operations centre on the ground,” says Franco Caraffi, IT Marine Systems Director of Costa Cruises.

Get started with sample code

We have demonstrated Big Cognition at Microsoft IgniteandPASS Summit, by showing a demo in which we used U-SQL inside Azure Data Lake Analytics toprocess a million imagesand understand what’s inside those images. You can watch this demohereand try it yourself using asample project on GitHubor discover more ways to get started with Azure Data Lake on GitHub.

3: Deliver <10ms latency to any customer, anywhere on the planet

With today’s globally connected world, developers and organizations alike have three simple requirements for their customer-facing applications: millisecond performance across global distribution, and application availability—without hard tradeoffs. NoSQL can be a great technology for tackling these tough challenges, especially when facing increasing data volume and variety.

Most NoSQL technologies force customers to make binary choices among global performance, availability, and transactional consistency. With Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft’s fully managed NoSQL database service, you get four tunable consistency levels to reduce friction related to tradeoffs and unlock new application patterns previously not possible—without ever trading off availability or <10ms latency, which are guaranteed. For example, session consistency gives an ideal blend of performance and consistency for multitenant applications. Tenants are able to achieve strong consistency within the scope of their own session, without having to trade off performance for other tenants. IoT devices emit events at an extremely high rate. Thus, a scale-out database is required to handle heavy write ingestion to persist the full fidelity of unaggregated streams of events. The events from each generation of device looks slightly different as new capabilities and sensors are added. DocumentDB can uniquely ingest a high write of events with varying schema with automatic indexing—and serve it back out using rich queries with low latency, enabling applications to react with real-time anomaly detection.

Citrix delivers solutions used by more than 400,000 organizations and more than 100 million individuals globally. The Citrix web portal was getting a lot of traffic, which was good news, but it was running into challenges integrating the web identity into its SaaS portals. It turned to Azure Service Fabric and DocumentDB to run its Citrix Identity Platform to deliver against its availability, durability, and performance requirements.

Get started with sample code

There are so many great code samples available on GitHub for DocumentDB that we aggregated our 10 favorite GitHub samples into a single blog for you. Check out these samples across .NET, Node.js, and Python for an array of app scenarios and start playing with DocumentDB today.

4: Serve up a first-class search experience with just a few lines of code

Azure Search is a cloud search-as-a-service solution that delegates server and infrastructure management to Microsoft, leaving you with a ready-to-use service with which, using only a few lines of code, you can populate your data and then easily add a first-class search experience to your web, mobile, or cognitive-based application. Azure Search allows you to easily add a robust search experience to any application using a simple REST API or .NET SDK without managing search infrastructure or becoming an expert in search.

autoTRADER.ca, Canada’s largest automobile search site, uses Azure Search to help dealers advertise and inventory products, determine the best pricing, and provide market data on which vehicles are in high demand. “We’re really excited about using Azure Search for marketplace. It gives us an opportunity to provide better and better services to our customers with instant, seamless experiences across all devices,” says Shane Sullivan, director of Software Engineering.

Get started with sample code

Try the First Response app code on GitHub—an online collaboration platform built to support first responders—which lets police, fire fighters, and paramedics share critical data with each other in real time. This app scenario and demo and toolkit combine App Service, DocumentDB, and Search with Xamarin support for cross-device support into a real-time mobile app.

5: Scale your business, protect your margins

For software builders with existing packaged apps looking to also extend their business to SaaS or those building a new business app as SaaS, the number one question we get is, “how do I run and grow my business on a cloud while ensuring operating costs don’t accidently consume my margins?” When we dig into this app pattern with customers, the concern really boils down to how to manage the costs associated with isolating and managing your customers’ data while ensuring each customer gets the best performance despite varying performance demands. There are two challenges as a result of this: First, managing and maintaining an isolated database for each customer would require more staff as you grow; second, over-provisioning resources to ensure spikes in demand don’t cause a poor experience and overspending on operating costs. We dove into this problem with customers and as a result introduced SQL Database Elastic Pools—a unique solution to help you manage thousands of databases as one while maintaining isolation and security at dramatic cost savings.

SQL Database Elastic Pools are a simple, cost-effective solution for managing and scaling multiple databases that have varying and unpredictable usage demands. The databases in an elastic pool are on a single Azure SQL Database server and share a set number of resources at a set price.

SnelStart makes popular financial- and business-management software for small and medium-sized businesses in the Netherlands. Its 55,000 customers are serviced by a staff of 110 employees, including an IT staff of 35. By moving from desktop software to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering built on Azure, SnelStart made the most of built-in services, automating management using the familiar environment in C#, and optimizing performance and scalability by neither over- or under-provisioning businesses using elastic pools. “By using elastic pools, we can optimize performance based on the needs of our customers, without over-provisioning. If we had to provision based on peak load, it would be quite costly. Instead, the option to share resources between multiple, low-usage databases allows us to create a solution that performs well and is cost effective,” says Henry Been, solution architect.

Get started with sample code

We built this Contoso shopkeeper app to demonstrate just how easy it is to build a multitenant SaaS app using SQL Database Elastic Pools. You’ll see how easy it is to scale out to support your growing customer base with no scheme changes required for your app and also how easy it is to manage many databases as one.

Azure can help you do amazing things with data in the cloud. Organizations have used Azure to transform their business, providing compelling customer experiences while managing costs. Try one of these five new amazing things you can do with Azure today! And to learn more, join us for the upcoming Microsoft Data Amp event on April 19 at 8 AM Pacific.

In the 1.116.0 release of the Visual Studio Team Services extension for Visual Studio Code, we have added support for Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). TFVC support works for both Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 (or later) as well as Team Services. Its core features enable users to work with their TFVC repositories from inside of Visual Studio Code. Users can seamlessly develop without needing to switch back and forth from Code to the command line to perform common TFVC actions. The extension also includes additional features you otherwise wouldn’t get from the command line client, such as seeing an updated status of your repository’s related builds along with the capability to browse work items assigned to you or from your personal queries.

The following are the current features supported by the extension:

• Execute all basic version control actions such as add, delete, rename, move, etc.
• View local changes and history for your files
• Include and Exclude changes (and move files between the two states)
• Merge conflicts from updates
• Check-in and update local files
• Associate work items to check-ins
• Provides an integrated TFVC Output window
• Support for a TFS proxy
• Supports workspaces created with Visual Studio (via tf.exe) or the JetBrains IDEs and Eclipse (via the Team Explorer Everywhere Command Line Client)

To start using the TFVC features, review the documentation and check out the TFVC Source Code Control for Visual Studio Code video which shows you how to configure and use the TFVC features. The extension supports TFVC across Windows, macOS and Linux (with separate configuration instructions for macOS and Linux; see video).

If you’ve never used the extension before, we also have a walkthrough to get you started.

If you would like to contribute to the extension, have a question or would like to provide feedback, visit our repository on GitHub.