According to the ASPCA there’s close to 150,000,000 cats and dogs in the USA. Add that to all the other kinds of feathered and furry friends and the number might be closer to a petabyte (it doesn’t bite!). If you think about it too hard, it’s a little odd that we invite members of other species to live in our homes and lick our faces. Nonetheless, weighing up the cost-benefit analysis, people seem to think cleaning up…

The email service we now know as Outlook.com is among the world’s oldest webmail services. Founded in the mid-1990’s under the original name Hotmail before being acquired by Microsoft, the service was rebranded as Outlook.com in 2013 and remains one of the world’s most popular providers (if not the most popular). Outlook.com is a free public service, and shouldn’t be confused with Microsoft’s other email…

The idea of wearable tech at work is hardly new - from call center headsets to wrist computers, companies have been innovating with the idea for decades. With benefits including improved productivity, time saved and increased contact with field workers, the motivation for businesses to invest in such tools are considerable. While there are concerns that this kind of technology encroaches on the freedom of employees as…

With Azure, it is very easy to host your web apps in the cloud. In the old days before the cloud, you would have had to set up a service, configure networking, and add the required libraries as well as various other tricky steps.

Initially, Microsoft’s service for hosting websites was called Azure Websites. In March 2015 however, Microsoft combined several services - amongst them Azure Websites - into the broad Azure…

We love podcasts. They have quickly become the preferred soundtrack to the life of the modern professional. Tedious daily commutes and repetitive workout sessions are being accompanied by the sounds of music, debates, stories and investigations. With topics ranging from Serial's immersive interpretation of the real-life crime investigation genre all the way to 99% Invisible's storytelling style series that takes its listener…

Vulnerability bounty programs are a new trend in the relationship between developers and software companies. Various organizations have begun inviting independent security researchers to test the vulnerability of their systems against the most common attacks from the hacking community. Bounty programs also gives an opportunity for would-be criminals to make a choice between right and wrong-doing. It’s kind of like …

Microsoft has taken another step towards making analysis of big data easier with the introduction of their U-SQL language, the new query language designed to run on the Azure Data Lake Store. Announced in September of this year, the Data Lake Store is a huge storage space for analyzing large quantities of unstructured data. The preview version of the Data Lake was released at the start of December, offering users a new…

Pop quiz: Which 15^th Century Italian created the first ever blueprints for the helicopter, the airplane, and the diving suit while also making a couple of rather famous paintings?

The description ‘jack of all trades’ is generally seen as a negative, yet this seems unfair when some of the world’s greatest minds have undeniably shown their fascination for a wide range of topics. Being specialized in one particular activity…

In this interview, we take a look back and a look ahead with Infragistics' Founder & CEO Dean Guida. Read on!

With 2015 in the rearview mirror, what are some of the highlights that stand out?

Our core strategy of keeping UX First has helped us focus on ensuring our customers deliver the best digital experience on any device. With over 1.5 million developers & designers in our community, our users built some…

Attention NJ-based developers: are you interested in learning more about .NET technologies and networking with local like-minded people? Come to Infragistics' headquarters in Cranbury, NJ on December 10th for the next Central New Jersey .NET User Group!

Whether you're interested in developing for .NET, Java, VB6/FoxPro/Access, or if you're just interested in technology, we want to see you there. And if you can make…

“Big data” is the common term for the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. Referring to it as ‘big’ data is perhaps somewhat of an understatement – IBM estimated that 2.5 exabytes (EB) of data was generated every day in 2012. Don’t know what an exabyte is? It’s 1 billion gigabytes of data: so that’s roughly 915,000,000,000 GB of data generated in…

One of the most exciting evolutions on the web today is the ever increasing number of publicly available APIs as exposed by companies and individuals. These APIs allow their owners to expose data from internal systems to the Internet so external developers can begin playing with them. Websites such as ProgrammableWeb list all those APIs, and the list is growing every day.

What all this means is that, instead of creating…

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces”

- Carl Sagan

 If Science…

To break up the usual code-filled technical blogs you see all day, we’ve got something a little different for you today. Our friend Remy Porter from The Daily WTF has written a guest post about the power of teamwork. You can read more of Remy’s work at The Daily WTF, and you can find him on Twitter too. Enjoy!

George didn’t exactly enjoy his job. He was a senior developer, doing software for a credit reporting…

Here’s a pop quiz. What do Elvis Presley, Winston Churchill and Barack Obama have in common?

1. They have kinda funny names
2. They are/were known for being ‘night owls’
3. They all like singing in the shower

That’s right – b. – they were all known to be night owls – according to this article anyway. Now, their sleeping patterns might not be the thing they’re most famous for…

On September 26th, Microsoft MVP and Infragistics Consultant Dhananjay Kumar is hosting Infragistics Day at C# Corner in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India! Any developer is welcome to attend for free, you just need to meet the following criteria: 

• You will need to bring your laptop.
• You must have Visual Studio 2012 (any edition) or higher version installed.
• Arrive by 10 AM. There will be no entry after 10 AM.
• It doesn…

As a web developer, there are plenty of languages and frameworks to choose from when you want to create an application. One of the most powerful frameworks is ASP.NET. ASP.NET is great for building standards-based web applications with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. It supports three different ways of creating extensive web applications:

• ASP.NET WebForms: Uses controls and an event-model for component based development…

Audio is a huge part of what makes interactive experiences so compelling. Well-placed sounds are critical for notifications, chimes, and of course audio and video communication applications. For visually impaired computer users, audio cues, speech synthesis, and speech recognition are critically important for a usable experience. Web Audio API is built to control audio on the Web, allowing developers to choose audio sources…

The following is a guest article authored by Karthikeyan (Karthik) Anbarasan. Karthik is a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Rockstar in India and also a Nokia Dev Champion! Today, he’s sharing with us some of his expertise in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a great introduction to get your feet wet and start understanding what IoT is all about, so I hope you enjoy!

Part 1: What is the Internet of Things…

Any good developer knows that the prototype is an essential part of the overall product development cycle even though its features and functionality are relatively limited. Saving time and money is the immediate benefit of using prototypes, whilst key insights and an awareness of the needs and expectations of development activity ahead will have unrivalled importance in the long term.

One way in which Prototyping is…

If you’ve been following our blog recently, you’ll know we posted a beginners guide to Indigo Studio not too long ago. If you haven’t already given it a look, we’d suggest that you start there, as today we’re looking at an add-on feature for Indigo Studio: IndigoDesigned.com. IndigoDesigned lets you share your prototypes from Indigo Studio and UI Libraries, acting as a dashboard for all your…

Have you ever spent days toiling over a problem, only for someone to come say “hey, there’s a tool which helps you do that in half the time”?

If you’ve never heard of Indigo Studio before, today’s post looks to help you understand what exactly it does, and what benefits it can provide you and your business. If you’re already acquainted with Indigo, don’t think this post isn’t for you. We’ve included…

Architects and software developers have a lot in common. Both must listen to client requirements, attempt to understand their vision, and then use their expertise to translate this into a feasible and functional structure (and hopefully one which looks attractive too!). Once approved, they work with project teams to bring this vision to life.

Besides the act of building, architects and developers will recognize a lot…

As we have seen in other posts this month on the blog, the history and techniques involved in wireframes and prototypes is a fascinating one. From pencil sketches to fully clickable (and even designed) mockups - prototyping has a wide range of uses:

• Visual - From simple sketch (low-fi) to fully styled (high-fi). Test the look and feel of an app.
• Functional. Static or interactive, test the features of app or website…

We’ve recently been looking a fair bit into the world of wireframes and prototypes and what they can do for the design and development process. However, we are yet to touch upon the history of this discipline, specifically the history of wireframes. In this post we will do just that.

Where did the term ‘wireframe’ come from?

The term wireframe actually predates its use in web design. Originally…