Microsoft Codename “Dallas” CTP3 Now Live

Microsoft has made the third Community Technology Preview of Codename “Dallas” available to early adopters for testing.
 
It was Bob Muglia, Microsoft President, Server and Tools Business who announced back in July, while delivering the keynote address to the Worldwide Partner Conference that the Redmond company would offer customers the chance to test drive a new release of Dallas within 30 days. With the CTP3 Build of Dallas now live, the software giant has certainly managed to keep its promise.

“This new community technology preview brings with it a number of exciting improvements, rounding out the “Dallas” experience and making it easier to develop applications using data from “Dallas” subscriptions,” revealed Microsoft’s Zane Adam.

“CTP3 brings with it a number of small incremental changes as well as larger, highly-requested new features,” Adam added.

Customers that are not yet familiar with Microsoft Codename "Dallas," need to know that the moniker is used as a label for what the software giant describes as a new service set up to enable both developers and IT professionals to simplify the interaction with Windows Azure premium data subscriptions.

Essentially, Dallas is designed to streamline the tasks associated with the discovery, purchase, and management of premium data subscriptions associated with Microsoft’s Cloud platform. Customers need to think about Dallas as an information marketplace.

Early adopters already testing Dallas, will undoubtedly notice that Microsoft will not move to kill access to the CTP2 versions of the services, despite the advent of CTP3.

However, the release of Dallas CTP3 means that testers will need to update their current applications in order to keep up the pace with the evolution of Microsoft’s Cloud offering.

Essentially, the Redmond giant noted that customers will have to update the authentication scheme tailored to version CTP2 of these services to use Basic Authentication.

“Please note that although these CTP2 services will remain accessible for a period of time after a service is migrated to OData, it will eventually be TURNED OFF,” Microsoft’s Elisa Flasko noted.

“If you are writing an application against a service that already has an OData endpoint, WE RECOMMEND that you use the OData endpoint,” Flasko added.

According to Adam, the new features debuted with codename Dallas CTP3 are

“•Basic Authentication to authenticate users of Dallas data offerings

•Flexible querying of OData content, as announced earlier this year at MIX, beyond simple web services

•Support for Add Service Reference in Visual Studio

•New content providers and data.”

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