With Xamarin version 2.0, Visual Studio developers can build C# apps to run on Apple devices

For some time Microsoft didn't offer a solution for processing big data in cloud environments. SQL Server is good for storage, but its ability to analyze terabytes of data is limited. Hadoop, which was designed for this purpose, is written in Java and was not available to .Net developers. So, Microsoft launched the Hadoop on Windows Azure service to make it possible to distribute the load and speed up big data computations.

In a wide-ranging study of software quality released Thursday, enterprise Java applications were found to have a greater incidence of performance issues, although this can likely be explained away by variations in developer experience and Java nuances, the producer of the study said.

Microsoft introduced this week technology for C++ developers to leverage GPUs (graphics processing units) for parallel programming.

Novell is porting Moonlight, an open source version of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application plug-in software, to Google's Android mobile platform, a Novell official acknowledged on Tuesday afternoon.

Mobile and cloud computing are beginning to change the way that developers work at enterprise-level and smaller businesses, according to a report released this week by Forrester Research.