Developing apps for multiple mobile platforms is one of great challenges in software development. Technologists want similar performance across all platforms and device form factors, and they want to take advantage of the unique features that the leading mobile OSes – iOS, Android, and Windows – have to offer.  From an efficiency and cost perspective, cross platform development seems like the way to go; however, as the former head of the Windows division at Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky, points out in a recent podcast, the cross platform approach is fraught with challenges. There isn’t such a thing as a 100 percent cross platform app.  You can get close, but the last 20 percent of any mobile project is always custom to the OS and devices you’re building for.  So the real question is, when do you decide whether to go cross platform? Here are the questions you should ask:

There is no doubt about it: Microsoft has become a Cloud leader. According to research from Pacific Crest Securities, Microsoft’s 2014 cloud revenues are on track to reach $4.4 billion. Microsoft is nipping at the heels of Amazon AWS’s estimated $5 billion in revenues and is within shouting distance of another market leader, IBM. Four years ago, Microsoft generated no revenues from Cloud services. Today, Microsoft has Cloud services that not only offer basic computing and storage, but a variety of cloud-based applications and services that are world-class. The Microsoft Cloud brings four, major advantages:

One of the toughest choices an IT organization must make is whether to refactor an existing application or rebuild from scratch. The economic stakes are high; time to market is always critical; and the end-user community usually wants something new by tomorrow – at the latest. IT teams begin looking at the refactor-versus-rebuild decision when the application: Lacks key functionality because it hasn’t evolved with the business (e.g., mobility or cloud integration) Performs poorly Becomes hard to maintain and upgrade. In addition, the technologies once used to create the application may have become obsolete and no longer align with best practices for software development. Even worse, they may no longer be supported by the vendors that created them. Here are six key factors you need to consider as you decide whether to refactor or rebuild your application.

Two VIAcode software products have been officially nominated in the Best of TechEd (BOTE) North America Product Awards in the “Systems Management and Operations” category.  This award competition, produced by Windows IT Pro, recognizes the innovative products and services showcased at Microsoft TechEd North America 2014.  This specific award category acknowledges those tools or services that significantly improve the efficiency of IT operations.

Microsoft’s Metro design principles are rapidly becoming an industry standard on touch-enabled devices, including PCs, tablets, and smartphones phones. The technology is incredibly powerful, even for small screens. The intuitive UI topography and large fonts are replacing complicated menus and extensive descriptions.

This is a compilation of useful links over SCOM from the standpoint of my consulting expirience. It always appears to be convenient to have such list in touch.

Heads up: some issue I faced during recent CSM monitoring implementation. Working on remediation with Microsoft. Still, beware.

In this article I will demonstrate how to configure CSM monitoring working with non-IE browsers. Note: this is not officially supported but I see some people having success with it.

A quick visual guide on deploying a stand-alone Certificate Authority (CA) server for your test lab. This will come handy if you are looking to monitor guest servers deployed in DMZ, Amazon EC2 or anywhere else beyond your domain.