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As more businesses adopt microservice architectures for their applications, more developers have had to grapple with the concepts of orchestration and choreography. Although these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are key differences between these two architectural patterns.Orchestration is a centralized approach to making all control decisions about interactions between services. Here a central orchestrator service coordinates all of the other services that execute a business transaction or workflow. By contrast, a choreography is a decentralized approach to coordinating this workflow, where each service determines its own behavior based on the messages it receives from other services.This article will cover the core concepts of orchestration and choreography in microservices architectures and discuss how you might use each in your microservices-based applications. We’ll also simulate microservices orchestration and choreography in code examples provided below.

Image: Eva-Katalin/Getty ImagesMicrosoft is retiring the Yammer brand and moving its apps and features to Microsoft Viva Engage, which is part of its employee-experience platform for a hybrid work world. It's also rolling out new premium Viva features. Over the past few years, Microsoft has been building out the Viva brand with Yammer-based apps. Last summer, it launched Engage for Viva, an app based on the Yammer Communities app for Teams. Also: More powerful than ChatGPT': Microsoft unveils new AI-improved Bing and Edge browserThe Viva employee experience suite, which runs on top of Teams, includes Viva Engage, Viva Learn, Viva Topics, Viva Connections, and Viva Goals. Viva Connections was also based on Yammer, which continued to run as Yammer apps alongside the Viva apps. Now, Microsoft will retire the Yammer brand and fold all of it into Viva Engage in a move designed to reduce confusion about overlapping functionalities. ZDNET Recommends The best video chat apps These apps make it easy to chat with loved ones and coworkers.

As much as enterprise IT evolves, we’re left running old hardware and software for many reasons. Perhaps there’s a regulatory requirement to keep data for as long as possible; perhaps there’s a dependency on code that remains reliable and supported even after decades. Whatever the reason, we may need to work with that system and that data as part of a newer platform.One platform that’s not going away is the mainframe, especially in government and finance. A lot of critical data and software runs on those systems, and they’re not as outdated as we might think, running hypervisors and multiple operating systems—including up-to-date Linux distributions.We now have a lot of options for building applications that work with those legacy systems, including technologies like the latest .NET releases. We’re not limited to the familiar .NET languages either, as the underlying runtime and compilers are accessible by a mix of commercial and open source language implementations, including some designed for working with mainframe data.

Microsoft is previewing a Visual Studio IDE extension to upgrade older .NET-based applications to the latest versions of the .NET software development platform.Downloadable from the Visual Studio Marketplace and called .NET Upgrade Assistant, the extension works with .NET Framework or .NET Core web and desktop apps to move apps to .NET 6, introduced in November 2021, or .NET 7, from November 2022. Migrations from 2020’s .NET 5 release also are possible.In a February 15 blog post, Microsoft’s Olia Gavrysh, program manager for .NET, explained that upgrading applications, particularly from .NET Framework, has been a complicated process; now, developers using the extension will be able to upgrade by right-clicking on a project in Solution Explorer and choosing Upgrade.

Microsoft's February Patch Tuesday brings fixes for 75 flaws, and among them are fixes for three vulnerabilities for which exploits already exist. The three zero days affect Microsoft Publisher, the Windows Common Log File System Driver, and the Windows Graphics Component.

The Microsoft Publisher flaw, CVE-2023-21715, is a security feature bypass vulnerability with an "important" severity rating from Microsoft. An attacker could bypass Office macro policies used to block untrusted or malicious files. Normally, Office alerts users that a file is untrusted before allowing it to run.

A major part of Microsoft’s “cloud-first” .NET 7 release in November, ASP.NET Core 7 brings powerful new tools to the web development framework to help developers create modern web applications. Built on top of the .NET Core runtime, ASP.NET Core 7 has everything you need to build cutting-edge web user interfaces and robust back-end services on Windows, Linux, and macOS alike.This article discusses the biggest highlights in ASP.NET Core 7, and includes some code examples to get you started with the new features. To work with the code examples provided in this article, you should have Visual Studio 2022 installed in your computer. If you don’t have a copy, you can download Visual Studio 2022 here.Now let’s dive into the best new features in ASP.NET Core 7.

Microsoft’s latest strategy for its .NET languages—C#, F#, and Visual Basic—emphasizes attributes including performance and interoperability, with the company remaining in charge of governance. The company posted the latest overviews of plans for the three languages on February 6.

Big changes will not be found in the updated strategy, but Microsoft said it was committed to full support for all three languages and to open source, backward compatibility, and aggressive language evolution for C# and F#. For C#, Microsoft’s object-oriented language with capabilities such as type safety and generics, the strategy calls for continuing to evolve the language while remaining “state of the art.”

Microsoft is holding an event at its Redmond, Wash. headquarters on Tuesday, during which the tech giant is expected to reveal its latest innovations using the ChatGPT chatbot.

The most anticipated news revolves around how Microsoft may be using ChatGPT to enhance the Bing search engine. Last week, Bing users noticed that the regular search bar was replaced with a box and a prompt: "Ask me anything." The updated version of Bing, which was up only temporarily, reportedly delivered standard search results, as well as a tab to start a natural-language conversation. Bing's ChatGPT integration just appeared for me.

Microsoft has rolled out the January 2023 release of its Visual Studio Code programming editor. Published February 2, VS Code 1.75 lets developers create profiles to configure extensions and settings, and offers easier multi-view resizing.Previously a preview feature, profiles become generally available in VS Code 1.75. A profile can include extensions, settings, UI state, keyboard shortcuts, user snippets, and tasks, allowing users to customize VS Code for different development scenarios such as data science, documentation, and writing or for multiple languages such as Java or Python. VS Code setups based on workflows such as “demo” or “work” also can be saved as profiles.Developers can open multiple workspaces with different profiles applied at the same time, Microsoft said. However, profiles currently do not work in remote scenarios such as GitHub Codespaces.

Microsoft’s Azure-hosted OpenAI language models are now generally available, and it’s surprisingly simple to use them in your code. Modern machine learning and AI research have moved rapidly from the lab to our IDEs, with tools like Azure’s Cognitive Services providing API-based access to pretrained models.

There are many different approaches to delivering AI services, with one of the more promising methods for working with language being a technique called generative pretraining or GPT, which handles large amounts of text.