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This is one of those posts I never thought I’d write. Visual Studio Online has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year. It is the de facto solution I use in the majority of my projects because it is free to set up, features free build minutes every month, and even five free licenses to develop against. That is a very low cost to entry considering you can provide unlimited stakeholder access to manage your full application lifecycle from requirements and sprint planning down to deployments.

“Mobile First, Cloud First:” we’ve heard Ballmer say it, and now it’s become the rallying call behind new CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft is going where the customers are, and that means opening up their massive infrastructure to support new tools. They want Azure to become the backend of choice for any mobile or online application. When it comes time for your next infrastructure refresh, consider investigating the cloud again.

With Microsoft’s announcement and release of Windows Server 2016 (official name) Technical Preview 2, they have also released Nano Server. Ever since the early announcement of Nano Server I’ve been very anxious to try it out. One thing is for sure….it’s not easy to get going. And I hope that changes once 2016 is RTM’ed.

It’s no surprise with the growing trends around mobility that there is a resurgence of “rouge IT”. Rouge IT essentially means employees or teams adopting apps, tools, or solutions that directly contradict what corporate IT has provided. It’s been recently stated that 41% of employees insist the tools their company provides does not meet their needs. Let’s think back just 5 years ago when corporate provided apps were really all employees had. Think back before the expansion of the app marketplace and now carrying miniature super computers in our pockets. Now let’s fast forward and it is easy to count the free apps that augment our work activities.

The company I work for is full of people who share the passion for learning as much as they can as early as possible. With that said, there has been a number of us running Windows 10 since late last year. In late January a few of us took the plunge to not only “play with it” but run it on our primary production device. For me this is my Surface Pro 3. It is a combination of a tablet and a laptop in one. If you haven’t tried it out, you should. I am not a “promote all things Microsoft” but on this one they got it right.

My family, friends and coworkers know that I have been a big proponent (often call fan boy) of many of Microsoft’s products. I’ve been a Windows mobile user sense my days with a Motorola Q and have been with the MS phone platform ever sense then.

Responsive Single Page Applications (SPA) are gaining momentum to become the standard for enterprise web development. The most popular framework for delivering these applications is AngularJS. Introduced by Google several years ago, Angular is now in stable version 1.4 and 2.0 is on the horizon. Please download, print, and keep this handy next to your keyboard. Don’t hesitate to share this blog post with anyone else you know who may be using Angular with TypeScript today.

As we all know details matter… in SCCM this can be painfully true. And today I find yet another little item that bears this out.

Microsoft pushed out an update that converts/upgrades Lync to “Skype for Business”.

This video beautifully displays some of the mishaps that can occur when most meetings are left unorganized. Unproductive meetings can leave participants feeling dazed and confused or worse off compared to when they initially entered the meeting. Meetings can be a pain or gain to your team’s effectiveness and as a company we are piloting different ways to redefine meeting standards, to ensure we are enabling the most productive use of our time.

Single Page Applications (SPA) have gained tremendous popularity over the past few years and have prompted the creation of several frameworks to support their development. Unlike traditional web applications, most of the heavy lifting for SPA happens on the client side in your web browser. These applications rely on hundreds of lines of JavaScript coupled with asynchronous web service calls to provide a desktop-like experience that is accessible from virtually any device.

I was working with a client recently who wanted to take advantage of Microsoft Azure’s Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) service. This service can do a great number of things, but in particular they wanted to be able to integrate in MFA with their Cisco ASA VPN solution in order to help with PCI compliance. This design involves setting up a MFAS server onsite and then integrating it via RADIUS to be part of the Authentication chain. The service is pretty robust and most clients would choose to use their phone to receive the phone call, text message or even run the Authenticator App from Microsoft (Android, iPhone and Windows Stores) in order to provide that second factor in the authentication process.