Skip navigation
ITPro SnapShot Hero

ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (Jan. 26 - Feb. 2, 2018)

ITPro SnapShot offers a short and snappy round-up on the week's industry-related announcements and news around the globe. Here's what happened in the last week.

There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends.

*

Google: Welcoming New Teammates From HTC to the Hardware Organization

Google expanded their hardware manufacturing program as the company closed their HTC acquisition which was first announced last September. HTC was already working with Google on the Pixel line of smartphones and now they will be Google employees instead of OEM partners.

In the acquisition Google also gains a non-exclusive license for HTC's intellectual properties.

Mark Your Calendar: Google Developer Day at GDC 2018

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) happens next month in San Francisco and Google is once again having their own Google Developer Day for Android game developers.

Attendees will hear a keynote which focuses on game development news and then three sessions will be given by different Google teams and partners who will share new tools, best-practices, and other game development related tips.

Google will also have a booth on the GDC show floor so that developers can stop by to ask questions, try out new platforms, and sit in on public talks about the latest game development innovations coming from the company.

General Availability: Azure Network Watcher in Microsoft Azure Government

Customers of Microsoft Azure's Government cloud services can now use Azure Network Watcher on their resources now that the feature has reached general availability for those users.

Azure's Network Watcher provides tools that allow administrators to monitor and diagnose any issues on their cloud resources. Data is also provided to allow customers to gain insights about network performance and health so decisions can be made about allocating resources to critical areas of these cloud services.

Announcing the General Availability of Azure Event Grid

Microsoft Azure also announced the general availability of their Azure Event Grid Service which provides managed routing service for event-based applications. The service enables applications and services to get all the events that they use and it works with events from not only Azure but also events generated by the application or service itself.

Events are sent to users by push which means less complicated code on the user side in addition to saving resources and ultimately reducing costs.

Windows Template Studio 1.7 Released Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 17083 Now Available

Microsoft launched two tools for Windows developers.

The first, Windows Template Studio, is a community supported open source plug-in for Visual Studio that provides a framework for building Universal Windows Platform apps by easily adding navigation, display, and interactive elements to your project. This update, which pushes it to version 1.7, provides support for the Visual Basic programming language and the Prism framework.

Secondly, the latest Windows Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Redstone 4, the next feature update for Windows 10 which is expected next month, has been released and supports Windows Insider builds from 17083 and higher. The SDK allows developers to take advantage of access to new features that are planned for Redstone 4 and work on incorporating them into their apps. That means those updated apps will be available almost immediately after the feature update is released. This provides great traction for developers and their app users get the benefit of using new features in the latest update for Windows 10.

Amazon Aurora Parallel Query is Available for Preview

If you are an Amazon Web Services customer working with very large data sets and queries into the storage service then this new preview will be of interest.

Parallel Query spreads the processing of those queries across Aurora and uses hundreds of nodes to retrieve and display the data. Of course that means faster and smoother responses to those workload intensive queries.

This preview is available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions and right now only works with the MYSQL compatible version of Amazon Aurora.

Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish