But even in a world where just about any smartphone can work well for any business or consumer user, some handsets still stand out.

That’s where the latest Samsung Galaxy S10+ Android smartphone fits in. Yes, users can buy a cheaper or a more expensive phone, but the Galaxy S10+ is packed with features and capabilities that to me make it the best Galaxy phone I’ve ever used so far.

Previously, I’ve used the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Galaxy S7, the Galaxy S7+ and the Galaxy S8+ for various stretches of time. Things sure have progressed since that early S4 handset. I’ve liked each Samsung Galaxy phone more than its previous version, but the new S10+ takes the progress of the product line to a much higher level.

Up to 1TB of Storage

For this review, I tested Samsung’s S10+ base model handset, which includes 128GB of  built-in storage. Priced at $1,000 for 128GB, $1,250 for 512GB and $1,600 for a version with 1TB of internal storage, the S10+ has a spectacular, bright, clear and impressive 6.4-inch Wide Quad HD+ Dynamic AMOLED Infinity-O display, which is larger than the 6.2-inch display in the previous S9+ phone.

That display is a knock-out, providing a huge hand-held palette for any use. Videos look great, web searches have lots of room for maneuvering, and the controls are easy and intuitive to handle.

Here are some of the things I love about the new S10+ phone:

• The new triple lens rear main camera is the best camera yet in a Samsung phone. Included are a 16-megapixel ultra-wide lens, a 12MP dual pixel wide-angle lens and a 12MP telephoto lens.

• By swiping the three icons on the camera screen–one icon for each lens–you can change the focal length of your lenses in a flash, turning a close-up into a regular image or a zoom shot on a whim, just by swiping the icons. That means faster photos, quicker composition decisions and better results.

• Image quality is excellent, and there are plenty of built-in tools for photo editing and manipulation. Buy lots of built-in storage, because you will be likely taking a lot of photos with this phone. Oh, and with the built-in microSD slot for additional photo and other storage, it will accept cards up to 512GB when you need even more room for your content.

• The front cameras are a pair of 10MP and 8MP front auto-focus units.

Samsung Phones Continue to Improve with Each Edition

As expected, the latest cameras are far better than those on the earlier Galaxy S4, S7 and S8 models, but there is still one glaring and ongoing shortcoming: I still don’t think it has the best low-light capabilities. I used to take photos at Bruce Springsteen concerts with my old Apple iPhone and was always impressed with the superior low-light capabilities. I still long for Samsung to match or exceed that performance.

I also like that the lock screen of the S10+ stays locked when in my pants pocket. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but on previous versions of the Galaxy S series phones, particularly with the S8+ I have been using for more than a year, jostling of the handset in my pocket would allow the lock screen to easily be unlocked. That mean that more jostling would cause the phone to act on its own, accidentally opening apps such as the Settings tab and allowing my phone to change brightness settings and more without my knowing it was happening. That was annoying and a pain when I had to restore the screen brightness to something that could be seen in daylight.

With the new S10+, this never happens because the screen lock appears to not be as sensitive to pocket jostling and requires a more dedicated touch to activate. Thanks, Samsung.

Fast-Charging Taken a Step Further

Fast charging is something available in most top-of-the-line smartphones today, but Samsung took that feature a step further in the S10+ by allowing users to charge another device directly through their S10+ handset, giving other devices a boost if their power is running low. When I first heard of this feature, I was skeptical, thinking it would just drain the 4,100mAh battery in the S10+ battery prematurely.

Instead, Samsung was right. This is convenient if you need to keep a rechargeable accessory alive for a few extra hours without having to plug it into a wall. And the S10+ only permits other devices to take a charge for only so long, preserving its battery power for its own use. I think this is a clever innovation, even if I won’t use it often myself.

As always, I am impressed by the build quality of the S10+, which has given me no issues or problems during testing. The phone’s battery charges quickly and the charge truly lasts all day even under hard use with GPS, email, social media posts and more. And when needed, fast charging gives you a nice long jolt in 15 minutes that adds many hours of use to get through the day or night.

Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ does everything I need it to do when working, traveling or being out on the town at night. I rate this phone very highly and I think it is a worthy handset to represent Samsung in 2019, as the company celebrates the 10^th anniversary of its first Galaxy smartphone.

The post Smartphone Review: Living With the Samsung Galaxy S10+ appeared first on eWEEK.

The advisor service, which was announced by Jared Spataro, a Microsoft 365 corporate vice president, in a recent post on the Microsoft 365 Blog, aims to provide streamlined management tools that will simplify the steps needed to set security policies inside companies for employees, apps, devices and data.

“Securing your users has never been more important, or more difficult,” wrote Spataro. “For many, it’s become a scramble to simply stay ahead of the latest threats. And all too often the complexity and variety of the security solutions themselves only adds to your burden.”

Security Policy Advisor, which is now in public preview, is the first in what will be a series of security tools to help bolster the apps in Microsoft’s Office 365 ProPlus subscription office suite offerings, wrote Spataro. “Security Policy Advisor is a service that offers an easier, more effective way to manage your security policies. It provides custom policy recommendations, supported with rich data insights into how these policies would impact your group’s use of features in Office—allowing you to make decisions with full information.”

Built to use information that’s already available within a company, Security Policy Advisor analyzes how individuals use Office and then recommends specific policies to boost a company’s security profile, wrote Spataro.

“Even better, for each recommendation, you can see how people would be impacted, giving you greater confidence in choosing policies that are right for your environment,” he wrote. “It may recommend, for example, disabling VBA macros in Word or macros in Excel files from the web—providing relevant threat intelligence (if available) and identifying just how frequently individuals in your group use those features and would be impacted by the policy.”

The security policies can be applied with one click at the app, feature or group level and can be easily changed as employees, groups and other workplace organizations change, wrote Spataro.

“Security Policy Advisor actively monitors policy impact on your employees, highlighting areas worth your attention or suggesting changes if needed,” he wrote. “If you’ve enabled individuals to override specific policies, you’ll see how this is used. With cloud-based management, you can update or even roll back at the push of a button.”

Enterprises that are using Group Policy Objects (GPOs) within a Microsoft Management Console Group Policy Editor can continue to use them with the new Security Policy Advisor because they can run in parallel with any changes made with the Office cloud policy service, wrote Spataro. “Existing policies are retained and, if there are any conflicts, policies you apply via Office cloud policy service will always take precedence.”

Taking the Guesswork Out of Configuring Security Policies

A key benefit of the Security Policy Advisor service is that it can help take the guesswork out of configuring security policies for users within organizations.

“In the past, the burden fell to you alone to determine if a particular policy would help or hurt a specific group,” wrote Spataro. “Setting macro policies, for example, involved numerous group policy objects (GPOs), each with multiple settings, detailed yet always too generic security baseline studies and cumbersome deployment. And in the end, you still had to wait for frustrated support calls to know the user impact.”

The Security Policy Advisor will roll out fully in the coming weeks, according to Microsoft.

In a related announcement, Microsoft also unveiled the availability of its new Office cloud policy service, which is a cloud-based tool that allows enterprises to define policies for Office 365 ProPlus and assign them to users via Azure Active Directory groups. Those policies, once they are configured, are automatically enforced as individuals sign in.

The Office cloud policy service allows companies to extend their reach to managed and unmanaged devices without requiring any on-premises infrastructure or modern device management services.

The post Microsoft Adds Office 365 Security Policy Advisor Service appeared first on eWEEK.

“Data loss is non-negotiable,” Mark Kashman, a senior product manager on the SharePoint team, wrote in a recent post on the SharePoint Community Blog. “As innovation in the cloud drives business value, it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals and site admins who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer, and secure their organizations’ and teams’ content. And it is important that you are empowered to recover from accidental deletions or version issues at the speed business productivity requires.”

With that in mind, Microsoft has begun to roll out Files Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams as a new Microsoft 365 feature, wrote Kashman, after announcing it at the company’s Ignite 2018 developer’s conference last year. Files Restore is available for SharePoint document libraries and is built to protect shared files in SharePoint, Teams, Outlook groups and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups. It uses the same recovery capabilities that protect personal files in Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business service.

Files Restore is a self-service recovery capability that allows site administrators to restore document libraries from any point in time during the last 30 days and rewind changes using activity data to find the exact moment to revert to, according to Microsoft.

Users who accidentally lose a file can restore a SharePoint document library, which is the same storage mechanism behind the Files tab in Microsoft Teams, to a previous time, wrote Kashman.

“Site owners will see a new ‘Restore this library’ option within the library settings panel,” he wrote. “This can be used as a self-service to restore the files and folders in the library you suspect have been compromised by end-user deletion, file corruption, or malware infection—to any point in the past 30 days.”

How to Restore Files

To restore a file, users can select a date preset or use the slider to find a date within unusual activity in the chart, and then they can select the changes they want to undo. Go to the gear icon in the upper right > select Restore this library > select a date range, select your files > and then click Restore, wrote Kashman.

“We’ve built Microsoft 365 with global scale, exceptional reliability, and support for compliance across industries and geographies on top of intelligent security that keeps your service and content protected and private,” he wrote. Also included are granular and dynamic controls so users can manage access, distribution and recovery of sensitive content and information.

If a large number of needed SharePoint or Teams files get deleted, overwritten, corrupted or infected by malware, users can also restore their entire document library to a previous time, the post continued. “Files Restore helps Office 365 subscribers undo all the actions that occurred on both files and folders within the last 30 days.”

The new Files Restore feature is being gradually rolled out in April to organizations that participate in Microsoft’s Targeted Release organizations, while the full worldwide rollout will be completed to all full production Office 365 customers by the end of May.

The post Microsoft Rolling Out File Restore Feature for SharePoint Users appeared first on eWEEK.

The latest version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) was unveiled by Dinakar Nethi, senior program manager for Azure Data, in an April 24 post on the SQL Server Blog.

“When I joined the SQL Tools team as a PM [program manager] back in October 2018, my top priority was to release SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18,” he wrote. “I expected a fair amount of work but didn’t realize how complicated the process would be. Six months later, having passed several internal checks such as accessibility, privacy, security, compliance, etc. among many others, and after 5 previews, I am very excited to share that SSMS 18 is now generally available.”

Ultimately, the delays were necessary, he wrote, because the team wanted to ship a product that was better than the version it was replacing.

SMSS is an integrated environment for managing any SQL infrastructure. It can be used to access, configure, manage, administer and develop all components of SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse using a single comprehensive utility that combines a broad group of graphical tools with a number of rich script editors to provide access to SQL Server for developers and database administrators of all skill levels.

Improvements Include Smaller Download Size

Among the improvements in SSMS 18 are a smaller download size that’s about half that of the SSMS download that preceded it, an updated Visual Studio 2017 isolated shell that unlocks all the available accessibility fixes as well as the latest security fixes that went into Visual Studio, and the new ability to install SMSS in a custom folder. That capability has been a long standing request from users and can now be accomplished in any folder from both command line and the setup UI, wrote Nethi.

Other new capabilities include the ability to install SMSS 18 in a language other than the language of the machine’s operating system. That means that users can now, for example, install SSMS German on a French Windows using the Tools | Options | International Settings menu.

In addition, the new SSMS 18 ships with the MS Object Linking and Embedding Database (OLEDB) driver and is the first release of SSMS that will be fully aware of SQL Server 2019 (compatibility level 150).

Improved Azure SQL Database support is also included, as well as SLO/Edition/MaxSize database properties now gaining support for custom names, making it easier to support future editions of Azure SQL Databases, wrote Nethi.

SSMS/Azure Data Studio integration has arrived in the latest version, providing an integrated tool that can be launched from either application.

Other new features include the ability to launch Azure Data Studio from Tools or Object Explorer, along with a series of general updates such as a new firewall rule dialog that allows users to specify a rule name instead of automatically generating one on behalf of the user, according to Nethi.

More information on the latest features in SSMS 18 can be found in the release notes for the application, he wrote.

SSMS 18 can be downloaded immediately from Microsoft.

The post SQL Server Management Studio 180 Review for 2021 appeared first on eWEEK.

The company announced the delay on April 22 in an email to journalists, saying that by putting off the launch, Samsung will be able to further investigate the problems.

“We recently unveiled a completely new mobile category: a smartphone using multiple new technologies and materials to create a display that is flexible enough to fold,” Samsung said in its statement. “We are encouraged by the excitement around the Galaxy Fold.

“While many reviewers shared with us the vast potential they see, some also showed us how the device needs further improvements that could ensure the best possible user experience,” the statement continued. “To fully evaluate this feedback and run further internal tests, we have decided to delay the release of the Galaxy Fold. We plan to announce the release date in the coming weeks.”

The company said that initial findings from the inspection of reported issues on the displays of affected phones showed that they could be associated with impacts on the top and bottom exposed areas of the hinge, according to Samsung. “There was also an instance where substances found inside the device affected the display performance.”

Samsung Strengthening Display Protection

In light of the issues that have surfaced so far, Samsung said the company will “take measures to strengthen the display protection” while also enhancing the guidance on care and use of the display including an included protective layer on the screen that some testers removed because they thought it was there only to protect the device in shipping.

“We value the trust our customers place in us and they are always our top priority,” the statement continued. “Samsung is committed to working closely with customers and partners to move the industry forward. We want to thank them for their patience and understanding.”

The Galaxy Fold, unveiled in February by Samsung, is the company’s long-rumored folding smartphone, with a 4.6-inch HD+ Super AMOLED display (21:9 aspect ratio) on its front and a large interior display that unfolds into a tablet-like 7.3-inch QXGA+ Dynamic AMOLED interior screen (4.2:3 aspect ratio). The Fold introduces the company’s first phone that can unfold to give users much more screen real estate in a form factor that is easier to carry in a packet or a hand. But starting at $1,980—or twice the price of a typical flagship handset—the Galaxy Fold will not be a smartphone for every buyer.

Two weeks ago, the company responded to the first reports of trouble with the Fold phones being used by reviewers. The original reports involved issues with the main display on the samples that had been distributed, the company said.

In response to the  reports, Samsung announced that it would thoroughly inspect the damaged units in person to determine the causes of the problems.

“Separately, a few reviewers reported having removed the top layer of the display causing damage to the screen,” the company said at the time. “The main display on the Galaxy Fold features a top protective layer, which is part of the display structure designed to protect the screen from unintended scratches. Removing the protective layer or adding adhesives to the main display may cause damage. We will ensure this information is clearly delivered to our customers.”

Past Phone Problems

This is not the first time that Samsung has had serious problems with a new smartphone in its infancy.

In late August of 2017, the company had released its then-new flagship Galaxy Note7 smartphone, which was quickly followed by reports about battery fires and explosions in the devices. Samsung addressed those initial reports by investigating the devices that had fires and starting its own global recall, and then in September 2016 cooperated with U.S. regulators at the Consumer Product Safety Commission when the agency issued a government recall of a million of the handsets due to at least 100 reports of fires and explosions from consumers. In early October 2016, Samsung cut its losses, announcing the end of its Note7 flagship smartphone model
after new reports came in of battery fires and explosions in replacement Note7s that were supposedly free of the defects in the original models.

Several IT analysts told eWEEK that Samsung is doing the right thing by delaying the release of the new Galaxy Fold model phones until it figures out what is happening.

“On the one hand, this is unfortunate for Samsung—more so because it is bad news again for a flagship device” after the Note7 problems, said Tuong Nguyen, an analyst with Gartner. “On the other hand, it’s a much more minor issued compared to the Note7 issue. Moreover, the Fold isn’t publicly available yet, which makes is a smaller disaster than it could have been.”

Nguyen said that the world will have to now wait to see what Samsung determines about the new phones. “Given Samsung’s knowledge, history and ability to deliver hardware, the foldable technology itself may not be ready for prime time,” he said.

Avi Greengart, the principal analyst with Techsponential, said the company is making the right move.

“It’s not an easy decision to delay a launch, but after the bad publicity of review units failing, it is smart to pause and ensure that consumer experiences with the phone are universally positive,” said Greengart.

Another analyst, Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, called it a positive move by Samsung to delay the launch so the company can check final shipping units for any potential issues before they are delivered to consumers.

“I had my Galaxy Fold for 5 days and have not encountered any of the issues a handful of reviewers were experiencing,” wrote Moorhead. “While many of the issues were caused by [reviewers] peeling off a permanent, protective layer, two to three had not removed it and still had issues.”

Moorhead said that if Samsung finds that other Fold devices waiting for shipment don’t have these issues or if the company adopts a “very aggressive no questions asked replacement program,” then he doesn’t see the problems stunting growth in the nascent foldable smartphone category. “Smartphone sales numbers are declining and the industry needs a winner with the category,” said Moorhead.

In addition to its dual 7.3-inch and 4.6-inch displays, the Galaxy Fold features a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 octa-core processor, 12GB of LPDDR4x RAM, 512GB of on-board storage and a 4,380mAh battery with fast charging and wireless charging capabilities. The Fold does not have a microSD slot for additional storage.

The Fold also features the same cameras as the new Galaxy S10+ and S10 smartphones, including a new three-lens rear main camera set with a 16-megapixel ultra-wide lens, a 12MP dual pixel wide-angle lens and a 12MP telephoto lens. On the front are a pair of 10MP and 8MP auto-focus cameras.

The Galaxy Fold phone was scheduled to be available in the United States through AT&T and T-Mobile starting in the second quarter of 2019. A new shipping time will likely be announced in the future.

The post Samsung Delays Release of Galaxy Fold Smartphone Due to Screen Issues appeared first on eWEEK.

The Apache Hadoop 3.0 news was announced by Arindam Chatterjee, the principal group program manager for Azure HDInsight, in an April 15 post on the Microsoft Azure Blog.

“With the general availability of Apache Hadoop 3.0 on Azure HDInsight, we are building upon existing capabilities with a number of key enhancements that further improve performance and security and deepen support for the rich ecosystem of big data analytics applications,” wrote Chatterjee.

Azure HDInsight, a managed open-source analytics service for enterprises, works in conjunction with a variety of open-source frameworks, including Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Hive, LLAP, Apache Kafka, Apache Storm and R. Azure HDInsight allows users to quickly process large stores of data for analysis.

Azure HDInsight services are available in 30 public regions and Azure Government Clouds in the United States and Germany, allowing users to perform a variety of analyses on mission-critical data in a wide range of business segments.

Several important new features in Apache Hadoop 3.0 will help users get the most out their Azure HDInsight analyses, wrote Chatterjee, including the inclusion of Apache Hive 3.0 which will allow developers to build traditional database applications on massive data lakes. “This is particularly important for enterprises who need to build GDPR/privacy compliant big data applications,” he wrote.

Also new to Apache Hadoop 3.0 is a Hive Warehouse Connector for Apache Spark, which allows developers to move data integrations from the metastore layer to the query engine layer, enabling higher and more reliable performance, wrote Chatterjee.

In addition, Apache HBase 2.0 and Apache Phoenix 5.0 have received a number of performance, stability and integration improvements, such as Phoenix 5.0 bringing more visibility into queries with query log by introducing a new system table that captures information about queries that are being run against the cluster.

Upgraded Security, Compliance Features

Enterprise-grade security and compliance features are also upgraded in the new version, which is a critical requirement for customers building big data applications that store or process sensitive data in the cloud, wrote Chatterjee.

Among the security improvements are Enterprise Security Package (ESP) support for Apache HBase, which allows users to authenticate to their HDInsight HBase clusters using their corporate domain credentials, while being subject to rich, fine-grained access policies, he continued. Also included in the latest Apache Hadoop is Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support for Apache Kafka, which allows customers to now bring their own encryption keys into the Azure Key Vault and use them to encrypt the Azure Managed Disks storing their Apache Kafka messages.

“We look forward to seeing what innovations you will bring to your users and customers with Azure HDInsight,” wrote Chatterjee. “Read the developer guide and follow the quick start guide to learn more about implementing open source analytics pipelines on Azure HDInsight.”

Azure HDInsight supports an expanding application ecosystem with a variety of popular big data applications available on Azure Marketplace for tasks such as interactive analytics to application migration.

The post Azure HDInsight Analytics Platform Now Supports Apache Hadoop 3.0 appeared first on eWEEK.

Using the premium  plan, enterprise customers will be able to use pre-warmed instances to run their apps with no delay after being idle, while also being able to run on more powerful instances and connect to VNETs, all with automatic scaling in response to load, according to Microsoft.

Azure Functions Premium, which is the company’s latest Functions hosting model, enables a suite of long requested scaling and connectivity options without compromising on event-based scale, wrote Alex Karcher, program manager for Azure Functions, in a recent post on the Azure Blog.

The premium plan, which is in preview, allows users to configure up to four D-series processor cores and 14GB of memory for each instance, compared to only one A-series core and 1.5GB of memory under the standard Azure Consumption plan. The D-series instances are substantially more powerful than the A-series instances available to functions using the Consumption plan, allowing users to run much more CPU or memory intensive workloads in individual tasks, according to Karcher.

New Scaling Controls Enabled

While both plans have event-driven scaling, the premium plan allows users to set minimum and maximum instances for scale controls, while the consumption plan provides no scale controls.

The ability to set maximum instances has been one of the most highly requested features and allows users to limit the maximum scale out of a user’s Premium plan, wrote Karcher. “Restricting max scale out can protect downstream resources from being overwhelmed by your functions and allows you to predict your maximum possible bill each month.”

Minimum instances can also now be specified in the Premium plan to allow users to pre-scale applications ahead of predicted demand. “If you suspect an email campaign, sale or any time gated event will cause your app to scale faster than it can replenish pre-warmed instances, you can increase your minimum instances to pre-load capacity.”

In addition, the Premium plan allows dynamic scaling functions to connect to an Azure Virtual Network (VNET) and allows users to securely access resources in a private network, wrote Karcher. “This feature was previously only available by running Functions in an App Service Plan or App Service Environment and is now available in a dynamically scaling model by using the Premium plan.”

No Start Delays

The premium plans also now means that users will have no warmup or cold start delays when calling a serverless application for the first time, he wrote. Premium plan users will utilize pre-warmed instances, while consumption plan users require app loading after apps are inactive.

Cold start delays have traditionally been one of the most common problems faced by serverless developers, he explained.

“In the Premium plan, we offer you the ability to specify a number of pre-warmed instances that are kept warm with your code ready to execute,” Karcher said. “When your application needs to scale, it first uses a pre-warmed instance with no cold start. Your app immediately pre-warms another instance in the background to replenish the buffer of pre-warmed instances. This model allows you to avoid any delay on the execution for the first request to an idle app, and also at each scaling point.”

During the preview of the new services, only one pre-warmed instance will be available per site, but that number is expected to rise over the next few weeks, he added.

The post Microsoft Launches Azure Premium Plans for Serverless Workloads appeared first on eWEEK.

The latest version of Visual Studio 2019, which is available immediately for download, has received updates including improvements to the template selection screen to make it easier to start a new project, as well as improvements to the code debugging experience, wrote John Montgomery, corporate vice president of Visual Studio, in an April 2 post on the Visual Studio Blog.

Other improvements over the previous Visual Studio 2017 version include easier processes to clone a Git repo and a new code clean-up command to identify and then fix code warnings and suggestions.

“While you’re coding, you’ll notice that Visual Studio 2019 improves code navigation and adds many refactorings, as well as a document health indicator and one-click code clean-up to apply multiple refactoring rules,” wrote Montgomery. “There are also improvements to the debugging experience, including data breakpoints for .NET Core apps that help you break only on value changes you’re looking for. It also includes get AI-assisted code completion with Visual Studio IntelliCode.”

Many of the changes and improvements were made as a result of feedback from users who tested preview versions of the new application.

Visual Studio can be used to build a wide range of apps, from cross-platform C++ applications to .NET mobile apps for Android and iOS written using Xamarin to cloud-native applications using Azure services, wrote Montgomery. “The goal with Visual Studio 2019 is to support these projects from development, through testing, debugging, and even deployment, all while minimizing the need for you to switch between different applications, portals, and websites.”

Also included in the new version of the IDE is Visual Studio Live Share, which is a tool that enables real-time collaborative development with teammates using the tools developers are most comfortable using. With Visual Studio Live Share, developers can share their code with others and collaboratively edit and debug, without needing to clone repos or set up environments.

Visual Studio Live Share, which is now generally available, according to a related post by Jon Chu, program manager for Visual Studio Live Share, has gained a myriad of improvements through user feedback received during its preview release. The improvements include the addition of a read-only mode, support for additional languages like C++ and Python and giving guests the ability to start debugging sessions, wrote Chu.

“Live Share can be used while pair programming, conducting code reviews, giving lectures and presenting to students and colleagues, or even mob programming during hackathons,” he wrote. “Live Share complements the many diverse ways you work—whether it be together while co-located in the same office, remotely from home or in different countries on opposite sides of the world.”

Visual Studio 2019 for Mac

The latest version of Visual Studio 2019 for Mac includes improvements for developers who focus on improving the core of the .NET IDE on the Mac, wrote Unni Ravindranathan, principal group program manager for Visual Studio for Mac, in a related April 2 post.

“Visual Studio 2019 for Mac focuses on improving the core of the IDE, setting a foundation for us to bring new capabilities to you more rapidly with future updates,” wrote Ravindranathan, including an all-new C# editor that is built on a shared core with Visual Studio on Windows and with native macOS UI.

“Not only does this provide an enhanced experience with smooth editing and navigation, but the new editor also has all the powerful IntelliSense/code-completion and quick fix suggestions you expect from a Visual Studio editor,” he wrote.

Also added is a new getting started experience, support for running multiple instances of the IDE, support for bidirectional text, multi-caret and word wrapping, as well as new detection capabilities for updates to Azure Functions templates as they are available. The debugging experience for Unity projects has also been improved by sharing the debugger used by Visual Studio Tools for Unity on Windows.

The most recent Visual Studio 2019 for Mac preview version was released in March.

The post Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio 2019 for Mac appeared first on eWEEK.

“There is a gap between what people want to do and the reality of what is going on in their organizations today and the reality of whether their organization is ready,” Mitra Azizirad, corporate vice president for AI marketing at Microsoft, said in a recent post on the Microsoft Blog. “Developing a strategy for AI extends beyond the business issues. It goes all the way to the leadership, behaviors and capabilities required to instill an AI-ready culture in your organization.”

The recently launched Microsoft AI Business School was created as an online master class series that aims to empower business leaders in the use and promise of AI inside their companies, the post continued. For many business leaders, AI has been a buzzword and concept they hear about, but they often don’t know where to start to find out more information or how to figure out how they can use it inside their operations, while meeting security, privacy and regulatory requirements.

The AI Business School course materials include brief written case studies and guides as well as videos of lectures, perspectives and talks that can be viewed as students find time, the post states. Also included are short introductory videos that provide an overview of the AI technologies driving change across a wide range of industries. Overall, the content focuses on managing the impact of AI on company strategy, culture and responsibility, according to the post.

“This [online] school is a deep dive into how you develop a strategy and identify blockers before they happen in the implementation of AI in your organization,” said Azizirad. The AI Business School isn’t meant to train business leaders on the technology of AI but is instead designed to prepare them to lead their organizations on a journey of AI transformation, she said.

The AI business school joins other Microsoft AI educational initiatives, including the developer-focused AI School and the Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence, according to the post.

An important part of the course is its focus on how business data can be shared inside companies across departments and business functions, the post states.

“You need to start out with an open approach to how the data of an organization is going to be used, which is the foundation of AI, to get the results that you are banking on,” Azizirad said. “In the case of AI and in the case of culture, the people closest to the business problem you are trying to solve really need to be involved,” she said.

The new Microsoft AI Business School is a place where business leaders can start to gain specific, practical knowledge that can define, guide and implement their corporate AI strategies, using personal experiences and information from industry leaders who are using it now.

The post Microsoft’s Free Online AI Business School to Educate on Power of AI appeared first on eWEEK.

The new tools, Azure Custom Vision and an Anomaly Detector service, were unveiled in a March 26 post on the Azure Blog by Anand Raman, the Azure AI platform product manager at Microsoft.

Azure Custom Vision, which is now in general availability from Microsoft, provides automated machine learning to quickly and accurately identify objects within images, wrote Raman, while Anomaly Detector is a new cognitive service that lets developers detect unusual patterns or rare events in their data that could translate to identifying problems like credit card fraud. Anomaly Detector is now available in a preview version.

“Powered by machine learning, Custom Vision makes it easy and fast for developers to build, deploy, and improve custom image classifiers to quickly recognize content in imagery,” wrote Raman. “Developers can train their own classifier to recognize what matters most in their scenarios or export these custom classifiers to run them offline and in real time on iOS (in CoreML), Android (in TensorFlow) and many other devices on the edge.”

Improvements in the newly released version of Custom Vision include higher quality models using a new machine learning back end for improved performance, especially on challenging datasets and fine-grained classification, as well as simpler integration of computer vision capabilities into applications with 3.0 REST APIs and SDKs, wrote Raman. “The end to end pipeline is designed to support the iterative improvement of models, so you can quickly train a model, prototype in real world conditions and use the resulting data to improve the model which gets models to production quality faster.”

In addition, the exported models are optimized for the constraints of mobile devices, providing high throughput while still maintaining high accuracy, while now also allowing developers to export classifiers to support Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for Raspberry Pi 3 and the Vision AI Dev Kit.

Anomaly Detector

The preview version of Anomaly Detector is used today by more than 200 teams across Azure and other core Microsoft products to boost the reliability of their systems by detecting irregularities in real time and accelerating troubleshooting, wrote Raman. “Through a single API, developers can easily embed anomaly detection capabilities into their applications to ensure high data accuracy and automatically [report] incidents as soon as they happen.”

Common use case scenarios include identifying business incidents and text errors, monitoring internet of things (IoT) device traffic, detecting fraud, responding to changing markets and more, he wrote. “For instance, content providers can use Anomaly Detector to automatically scan video performance data specific to a customer’s key performance indicators (KPIs), helping to identify problems in an instant. Alternatively, video streaming platforms can apply Anomaly Detector across millions of video data sets to track metrics. A missed second in video performance can translate to significant revenue loss for content providers that monetize on their platform.”

Both new services are part of Microsoft’s work to continue to improve Azure AI to help developers and data scientists deploy, manage and secure AI functions directly into their applications, wrote Raman. That work includes leveraging machine learning to build and train predictive models to improve business productivity with Azure Machine Learning; applying an AI-powered search experience and indexing technologies to glean insights with Azure Search; and building applications that integrate prebuilt and custom AI capabilities like vision, speech, language, search and knowledge, he added.

“Today’s milestones illustrate our commitment to make the Azure AI platform suitable for every business scenario, with enterprise-grade tools that simplify application development and industry leading security and compliance for protecting customers’ data,” wrote Raman.

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