V. I. K. I.

You're going to want Android Marshmallow. Google's latest version of Android may sound like a single headline feature followed by a list of tiny improvements, but they all add up to one important update — there's a reason Google is calling this release Android 6.0.  Marshmallow is going to make Android able to do a lot more for you, all while making key refinements across the OS that address longstanding issues. All in all, we're looking at a smarter, sleeker, and more useable Android. So yeah, you're going to want to update. Of course, as always, when you can update is going to depend on who made your phone. Nexus devices will be updated almost immediately, but phones from Samsung, Motorola, Sony, LG, and others are going to be on their own timelines, some fast, some slow, some nonexistent. Those phones may also get support for some features and not others, depending on how the device is customized. Google may be announcing Marshmallow's official releas...

Microsoft just announced a new query language called U-SQL to work with big data. The language was announced as a part of Microsoft’s new Azure Data Lake service. Azure Data Lake service is a new analytics service built on YARN that allows data scientists to analyze data. It works with Microsoft’s Azure HDInsight, a fully managed Hadoop, Spark, Storm and HBase service. U-SQL takes advantage of SQL query syntaxes. Visual Studio blog team wrote a blog ... on the reason U-SQL was developed and what are the advantages of U-SQL. “Taking the issues of both SQL-based and procedural languages into account, we designed U-SQL from the ground-up as an evolution of the declarative SQL language with native extensibility through user code written in C#. This unifies both paradigms, unifies structured, unstructured, and remote data processing, unifies the declarative and custom imperative coding experience, and unifies the experience around extending your language capabilities. U-SQL is bui...

It is no mystery at this point that Microsoft intends to announce the  Lumia 950  and  Lumia 950 XL  early next month in New York City. Today, some slides from an internal Microsoft presentation reveal the phones in all their glory. The images were posted by the Facebook page  Forever Nokia Latinoamérica , which earlier  leaked the Lumia 550 as well . Nothing new is exactly revealed as the specifications of both phones, and even their designs have been known for some time now. However, instead of just third-party renders we can get an indication of how Microsoft is going to present the phones to the public. Included in the images are some photos of the back of the phone and the Continuum dock codenamed 'Munchkin'. The specifications for both phones are repeated below: Lumia 950 Matte White or black polycarbonate body 5.2 inch WQHD (1440x2560) OLED display Snapdragon 808, 64-bit Hexa-core processor Iris scanner (near infra...

1. ASP.NET on OSX and Linux For the first time in the history of ASP.NET, you can run ASP.NET 5 applications on OSX and Linux. Let me repeat this. ASP.NET 5 apps can run on Windows, OSX, and Linux. This fact opens up ASP.NET to a whole new audience of developers and designers. The traditional audience for ASP.NET is professional developers working in a corporation. Corporate customers are welded to their Windows machines. Startups, in stark contrast, tend to use OSX/Linux. Whenever I attend a startup conference, the only machines that I see in the audience are Macbook Pros. These people are not the traditional users of ASP.NET. Furthermore, designers and front-end developers – at least when they are outside the corporate prison – also tend to use Macbook Pros. Whenever I attend a jQuery conference, I see Macbook Pros everywhere (the following picture is from the jQuery blog). Enabling ASP.NET 5 to run on Windows, OSX, and Linux changes everything. For the first time, all d...