Microsoft Solutions Upcoming Name ReBranding Changes

Microsoft is going through a marketing rebranding process in order to showcase its new clean and modern look, as it can be seen from the recent changes and the upcoming releases.

In this post we have collected relevant changes to the naming of Microsoft offerings, on the left side of the list it can be seen the original name and on the right it can be seen the new branding names.
Metro design => Modern design
Metro style apps => Windows 8 apps / Windows Store apps

Office 2013 => Office Next
Office 2010 Home and Business => Office 365 Home Premium
Office 365 Plan E3 => Office 365 ProPlus
Office.com => Office Store
SharePoint Workspace => SkyDrive Pro

Windows on ARM => Windows RT
Windows Live ID/Passport => Microsoft Account
Hotmail => Outlook.com
Windows Live SkyDrive => SkyDrive
Windows Live Mail => Windows Mail Desktop
Windows Live Essentials => Windows Essentials

AppFabric Service Bus => Windows Azure Service Bus
SQL Azure => Windows Azure SQL Database
Windows Small Business Server/ Windows Small Business Server Essentials => Windows Server 2012 Essentials
Silverlight => XAML

Microsoft adCenter => Bing Ads
Microsoft Search Marketplace => Yahoo! Bing Network

Microsoft Entity Framework is Now Open Source

Following on the pattern of making open source software highly available on Microsoft solutions, the company has now made another step towards supporting open source frameworks by opening its very own Entity Framework that works by helping data manipulation. It first started last year when Microsoft made available quite a few development related tools such as NuGet among relevant libraries linked to ASP.Net programming. Furthermore also last year it sponsored Node.js development projects as well as large data analytics Apache Hadoop for Windows. And as another huge step it is also making Linux available on Azure its cloud computing flagship platform.

The way entity framework is structured within Microsoft is at its Open Technologies, in this context earlier this year projects can be developed using Open Technologies. The source code for Entity is on Codeplex, where codeplex is the Microsoft equivalent to GitHub.

These steps are very much welcome by Microsoft, and it seems it is trying to catch and attract development talent that use those technologies, nevertheless the next challenge by Microsoft may be to consider other parts of its well established traditional technologies that it owns.