Indeed, gaming is changing beyond recognition. Cloud gaming is allowing players to stream games and could eventually allow gaming without hardware. Server power will provide performance for users, arguably negating the need for a console or gaming PC. Mixed and virtual reality will also play a part. Just this week, Google announced the ability for developers to create games in real-world environments through Google Maps. As for Microsoft, it has been more forward thinking than console rival Sony....

As part of the deal, Walmart will use Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud provider and use its solutions for critical applications and workloads. “Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365....

It is available for subscribers of Microsoft 365 and will help users leverage creative apps and services more easily. In fact, Microsoft describes the portal as “the ultimate creator launchpad” that allows users to develop graphic designs, presentations, imagery, videos, and other types of creative content. Furthermore, Microsoft says this is more than just a toy as it is catered to professional creators with templates and apps that will help designs....

TypeScript is growing in the development community because it give dev’s easy tools for scaling up projects written in JavaScript. This achieved as a compiler tool with security and check programs based on static arrays, strings, text, and numbers. TypeScript is an excellent choice for finding errors in JavaScript code. As mentioned, leading the way in TypeScript 3.4 is a new flag called Incremental. Daniel Rosenwasser, program manager for the service says the flag “tells TypeScript to save information about the project graph from the last compilation....

With the Live Player, developers can start iOS and Android creations quickly. All that is needed is an iOS or Android device and Visual Studio. This is part of Microsoft’s placement of the Xamarin SDKs within Visual Studio, an integration that happened last year. This allowed the SDKs to become open source. Since then, the company says it has been improve the experience with a focus on mobile developers. By using the Xamarin Live Player, developers move a lot of time-consuming processes....

In an effort to increase partner investment in the cloud, Microsoft has also announced improvements for existing programs. For example, the company debuted new features for its Microsoft Teams workplace collaboration tool. Furthermore, Teams is now available to Office 365 ProPlus users. Microsoft also confirmed Teams now has over 13 million daily active users, pointing to its continued success over rival Slack. In its Dynamics 365 division, Microsoft discusses new tools coming to the platform....

As we have seen this year, development of Microsoft Teams is gathering pace. As the communication app wars continue with the likes of Zoom and Slack, Microsoft has been proactive in ensuring Teams is evolving. Leading the features debuting in August was Spotlight Mode. Microsoft says this tool will arrive over the coming months and allows a meeting host to lock their video as a main view. In other words, the presenter can make their content the same view across all participants....

This decision does not affect Office applications on other Android platforms. In other words, users on smartphones will still get the Android Office applications. This is just for Chrome OS users, and it seems Microsoft is taking this decision to get more users to sign up for an account. That’s because to use Office apps on Outlook.com or Office.com requires users to a have a Microsoft Account (MSA) or a subscription for Office 365 (Microsoft 365)....

However, it seems the new Microsoft Edge experience may be up to no good on Windows 10. On Reddit, software developers are suggesting Microsoft is forcing Edge onto users and making it harder for them to use Firefox and Google’s Chrome. According to Redditor krankie, Microsoft is pushing Edge onto users through a pop-up windows that cannot be closed. “No option to get rid of the window, you cannot close Edge with the mouse and you cannot escape the modal window....

That means anyone can now access the “Surf Game” on their Microsoft Edge browser. As a refresher, the game is a riff on a classic title called SkiFree that was part of Entertainment Pack 3 for Windows way back in 1991. Now that the Microsoft Edge Easter egg game is available, users can visit edge://surf to play. If you don’t have an internet connection, Microsoft will send a link for you to play the game offline....

According to a report by the BBC, Public Health England (PHE) developers configured Microsoft Excel to import CSV files from lab tests into XLS files. All the CSV files came from private contractors who were hired to analyze swab tests for COVID-19. Developers for PHE configured Excel to automatically receive CSV files, but in the legacy XLS format. This is important because the older format as a limit of 65,000 rows of data....

According to the company, IT users can “access to exclusive virtual calls, focus groups, surveys, Teams discussions and private previews” regarding current Microsoft products and future services. Those participants will have a direct line to Windows engineers in Microsoft’s teams. If you are unfamiliar with the Windows Customer Connection Program, it is a platform for connecting Microsoft’s Windows engineering team with IT pros. The goal is to promote collaboration in the pursuit of creating better solutions for customers....

This bug would allow a threat actor to bypass the Gatekeeper security feature on Apple’s macOS. This is the mechanism that protects Mac machines by preventing untrusted apps from installing. However, the vulnerability found by Microsoft would allow an attacker to install a malicious app onto the system. Microsoft also developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) to show it could work if left unpatched. Called “Achilles”, the bug was disclosed to Apple through the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure....

Battery Limit is rolling out as part of a UEFI firmware update for the Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 4. It is welcome addition and somewhat unexpected. Let’s not forget the Pro 3 is three years old and the Pro 4 is two years old. Microsoft says the Battery Limit feature caps the amount of charging a lithium-ion pack will charge. Specifically, the feature stops the battery charging when it has reached 50 percent of its maximum capacity....

According to researcher Omer Tsarfari, the September issue lay in the way the Azure portal was parsing JavaScript that’s used in the Azure Portal’s Extension Manifest. An attacker with a HTTP server with the “urehubs” hostname and a signed root CA certificate could grab the access tokens of anyone who logged into the Azure portal. The researchers were able to exploit this bug in the wild to grab an Azure token from an external organization....

The new integration allows users to build a Flow across a team and let them place their input into a document library as metadata. This is ideal for users who want to share a new document through a team and see updates. In the blog post, Microsoft also answers a familiar question about how Microsoft Flow usage should be governed: “We recommend that Office 365 Admins review the data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities for Microsoft Flow....

Nvidia Inception is a virtual accelerator program that gives startups tools to access GPUs and AI for data science applications. As for Microsoft for Startups, it is an initiative that provides technical resources and free cloud solutions to Microsoft partner startups. With the integration of the two services will allow customers of both services to get benefits from the other. Among the tools available include market support, Nvidia GPU credits IN Azure, and technology resources....

Now, Microsoft has expanded the capabilities of Sketch2Code. Thanks to its ease of use, does the app put dev’s who work on bringing service from prototype to real products under threat? That’s probably a little hyperbolic, but there’s no doubt Sketch2Code streamlines development. Users can draw sketches and export them to a code translator that will convert sketches into source code. Microsoft Garage developed an artificial intelligence system to automate code translations from wire frame drawings....

“I’m really proud — I just learned yesterday that we were recognized as having the highest availability of any cloud over the course of 2016,” Greene said during the keynote. She added with a chuckle, “I think 2017 will be promising, too.” She was discussing data compiled by Gartner research division CloudHarmony. The firm found that Google Cloud suffered just 74 minutes of total outages during 2016. It is an impressive figure next to AWS with 108 minutes (a number already surpassed in 2017 incidentally) and Microsoft Azure with 270 minutes....

Kubernetes is a Google-incubated open source container orchestration system. It has grown in popularity and has been implemented by many providers for managing large container deployments. As well as rolling out support to all customers, Microsoft has also added a couple of new features. Now users can scale clusters up and down more easily. Another new addition gives the ability to manage high-availability setups with multiple masters. In an announcement post, Microsoft points out that Azure Container Service is now the first public cloud platform that provides a service across the three most popular open source orchestrators....