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News

• Toshiba hopes to charm developers with kits for building wearables

  Toshiba is hoping developers will use its application processors to build wearable devices, and has launched hardware and software development kits to help make it happen.

• Red Hat broadens programming language support

  Potentially making work easier for system administrators, Red Hat has updated its development packages to support running multiple versions of the same programming language on its flagship enterprise operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• Microsoft makes debugging PHP less painful with new Azure tool

  Microsoft is equipping its Azure cloud service with a tool to debug PHP-based Web applications that are running on the platform.

• MIT's Picture language could be worth a thousand lines of code

  Now that machine-learning algorithms are moving into mainstream computing, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is preparing a way to make it easier to use the technique in everyday programming.

• Embarcadero moves RAD Studio beyond Windows

  Software development is moving beyond the desktop computer. With this in mind, Embarcadero has strengthened its flagship Windows RAD Studio IDE (integrated development environment) to better help build mobile apps and software for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

• Etsy borrows some HipHop help from Facebook

  After borrowing Facebook open source code for running PHP programs more efficiently, Etsy won't need to grow its data center footprint this year, saving it from a significant expense.

• Instagram gives Apple Watch developers a hand

  With the Apple Watch set for release on April 24, third-party application developers are rushing to write extensions that can run on the device. Now Instagram is sharing some code it wrote for its own app to help others.

• Microsoft consolidates enterprise editions of Visual Studio

  For the next version of its Visual Studio, Microsoft has consolidated the enterprise versions of the integrated development environment (IDE) software into a single product so it can be more easily managed by large organizations.

• Meteor JavaScript framework hits Windows

  Until now, developers who wanted to build Web and mobile apps via the Meteor JavaScript framework had to do so via either Mac or Linux clients. That changes today with the release of Meteor 1.1, which features support for Windows clients as well as the MongoDB 3.0 database.

• Facebook speeds iPhone app dev wih React Native

  For Web developers, making the jump to building full-fledged smartphone apps can be daunting. Facebook could ease the transition with a newly open-sourced framework its engineers developed to build apps for Apple devices.

• Microsoft to simplify Azure migration with bigger VM drives

  Microsoft has increased by a factor of eight the maximum size of OS drives that can run on its Azure cloud, hoping to get enterprises to migrate more workloads.

• Facebook's iOS UI development framework goes open source

  Facebook has open-sourced ComponentKit, its React-inspired framework for iOS,

• Google refocuses Dart as a JavaScript helper

  Backing down on ambitions to create a commercial grade Web programming language, Google is shifting work on its Dart programming language to make it an optimization aid for the pervasively popular JavaScript, which Dart was originally designed to supplant.

• Microsoft hopes to drum up developer interest in Windows 10 with Visual Studio preview

  Microsoft needs apps for Windows 10 to make it a success, but developers need tools to make them. With Microsoft's first technical preview of Visual Studio 2015, they'll be able to get started.

• Facebook engineering tool mimics dodgy network connectivity

  While developers may enjoy robust wireless connections, those using their apps may not always be as well connected. As a result, such users may quickly get frustrated when an app crashes or slows to a crawl from a dodgy connection unanticipated by the developer.