Weekly Roundup: .NET, jQuery, HTML

In the .NET, jQuery and HTML ecosystems, 2015 has been a year of exciting announcements. Among the various releases, teasers and previews, it’s been impossible to ignore the trend in Virtual developments (whether of the Machine or Reality kind). Some of these offerings still seem a little futuristic, and a little out of reach for the large majority of customers. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to catch a glimpse of what VR and VMs might look like in future and we can’t wait to see how these early developments will evolve over the coming months and years.

In this week’s roundup we’ll be looking in more depth at these Virtual developments, and also at Microsoft’s announcements about its new browser, Spartan. As usual, get back to us with your thought on these developments in the comments section below, we’d love to hear your take on events.

Mozilla adds VR support directly to Firefox Nightly builds

Over the last few months, the Mozilla Foundation has been working on a number of exciting projects to turn Virtual Reality on the web into an accessible reality. Until recently, VR developments lagged behind Firefox and VR fans had to wait to download a separate build when wanting to experience the medium. However, from now on WebVR will be developed in conjunction with other Firefox improvements, meaning Firefox Nightly builds will always be compatible with the latest VR technology.
Most users at present will approach WebVR with the Oculus Rift headset and this will still require an add-on and require users to open a non-e10s browser window. That said, it’s hardly a complicated process for those hoping to experience VR and Mozilla expect these minor hitches to be smoothed out in the near future.

"Beam me up Scotty": Holographics from Microsoft

This week Microsoft took the tech world by storm with the announcement of HoloLens, a headset which allows users to lay images over the world they see. Running on Windows 10, the headset promises a new way of interacting with technology and combining these with our real world experience.
For developers, this sets the next frontier of design; no longer will users interact with code and platforms through a mobile or desktop interface, but they’ll directly live the experience. This may be a real game-changer in the development world and bring unusual challenges as well as awesome opportunities.

Azure Updates: bigger, better, bolder

It’s been an exciting month for Microsoft with numerous updates and developments. It might be a little less sexy than HoloLens, but the updates they recently announced to the Azure Cloud are impressive. Now generally available, their G-series Virtual Machines offer the highest amount of SSD on any virtual machine in the public cloud, state of the art server processors and flash based storage.
What this means for the development community is faster deployment of applications, especially for resource intensive enterprise work involving big data and relational database servers.  

Famo.us joins jQuery Foundation

Famo.us got a lot of kudos for developing a 3D layout engine as well as a physics animation engine written for HTML5. With a free, Open Source platform, they allow users to build cross platform web Apps. The engine is complex and must take into account the additional physics involved in 3D.
They recently announced that they would join the jQuery Foundation - the people behind the popular jQuery JavaScript library. The main aim of the move is to make access to their engines easier and for developers to begin using the machines’ to begin building impressive, next generation jQuery widgets. Steve Newcomb, founder of Famo.us, is inspired by the challenge of building web Apps which can finally move beyond the constraints of the old-school layout engines which were just designed for simple text.
Offering Famo.us layout engines on jQuery will allow designers to build much more advanced web Apps, widgets and parts and bring web-layout into the twenty-first century.

Internet Explorer is dead, long live Spartan 

Last week, Microsoft announced that come the release of Windows 10, Internet Explorer would no longer be their default web browser. Replacing the long standing, sometimes loved, sometimes hated Internet Explorer is more than a rebranding exercise however. Spartan will be entirely built on HTML5 and offers a real break from the twenty years plus of Internet Explorer. Spartan will offer a cleaner, lighter, more modern interface, offline reading list, voice recognition and much, much more.

Many developers are skeptical of Internet Explorer, despite real improvements in its latest incarnations. Microsoft are hoping to bring back the critical mass to their browser with a fresh start however and we can’t wait to see how it will be adopted by the community.

Virtually everyone is going virtual

We all remember the science-fiction films that got us fascinated by technology in the first place - from Back to the Future to Star Trek. This week’s announcements bring back a bit of that childish amazement those films gave us. It’s early days but we’re certainly looking forward to see how things will evolve!