Pedro Hernandez

Still sticking with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1? Time is quickly running out for users wishing to upgrade to Windows 10 at no cost, provided they use the operating system’s assistive technologies. Officially, the last day that users were able to grab a free Windows 10 upgrade was July 29. Users seeking to install Windows […]

Time is running out for businesses preparing for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR rules will not only have a big impact on how organizations conduct business in Europe, but also on how they manage and secure their IT systems, cloud services and storage architectures. Microsoft wants to lend a hand with […]

Microsoft already supplies templates that brands can use to gauge their popularity on Twitter and Facebook using Power BI, the company’s cloud-based business intelligence and analytics platform. Now, it has added another influential website to the mix. The new Brand Management and Targeting on Reddit template, developed using APIs from social data specialist SocialGist, allows […]

Businesses that host applications on Azure instances now have at their disposal a new tool that improves security. Microsoft launched a public beta of its new Adaptive Application Controls for Windows virtual machines running on the company’s Azure cloud-computing platform on Dec. 21. The service allows users to apply whitelisting techniques to their server instances, […]

It’s right in the name. Visual Studio, the popular integrated development environment from Microsoft, uses a graphical interface and various visual tools to create a canvas that helps professional coders turn their ideas into working applications. However, not everyone is blessed with good eyesight, in which case the IDE’s oftentimes graphically dense interface can quickly […]

Microsoft Photosynth was first introduced in 2008, allowing users to stitch together 3D panoramas called “synths” from their still photos. The service was shut down in February, but now the software maker has brought back some of the underlying technology as a new feature in the Microsoft Pix app for iOS. Pix is a free […]

Microsoft is lowering the cost of using its high-performance unlimited container option in the Azure Cosmos DB service. Cosmos DB, formerly called Azure DocumentDB, is the software giant’s globe-spanning distributed cloud database with NoSQL support. Users create fixed or unlimited Azure Cosmos DB containers, or sets of logical resources, based on their application needs. Until […]

Members of the Windows Insider early-access program are getting at first look at Timeline, an upcoming Windows 10 feature that allows users to resume tasks that were forgotten or had gone neglected during the course of a busy day. In Windows 10 build 17063, Timeline allows users to scroll to an earlier point in time, […]

Microsoft has released three new fleet management APIs for Bing Maps that developers can use to create applications for transportation companies and other vehicle fleet managers that value precise travel guidance and tracking. Typically, taking a wrong turn in a passenger car is an inconvenience that can be remedied at the next intersection or highway […]

After a yearlong beta period, Apache Kafka on Azure HDInsight is now ready to take on production workloads with Microsoft’s rollout of the solution. Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform that is becoming increasingly pivotal to monetizing the wealth of information generated by the internet of things (IoT) for many enterprises. Azure HDInsight is […]