Between October 10 and November 30, Microsoft Ventures will receive applications for the sixth batch of its Accelerator program for technology startups in India. “Our Accelerator program reiterates India's strength as a potential hub for startups and as an ecosystem of global importance. Along with access to Microsoft technology, mentors and investors, we also provide opportunities to connect with customers, partners and world class entrepreneurs," said Microsoft Ventures Director, Ravi Narayan.

New Delhi – 24th September, 2014 – Microsoft India today launched ‘Women in Tech’, an initiative aimed at bringing in more women into the Indian IT industry. Through this program, Microsoft will attract and retain women talent in the industry. Along with partners, Microsoft will train and mentor one million girls and women in the next 12 months. These will include girl school students, young women students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) colleges, women IT professionals and women entrepreneurs. As part of the initiative, Microsoft launched a unique online platform which can be accessed at http://www.microsoftwomenintech.in/.

5 Programming Languages Marked for Death

As developers embrace new programming languages, older languages can go one of two ways: stay in use, despite fading popularity, or die out completely. We predict the following languages will likely die:

Perl

There was a time when everyone seemingly programmed in Perl. But for those of us who used the language regularly, there was something about it that didn’t seem right. One programmer I knew called it a “piecemeal” language, because it seemed as if the creators had just piled features on top of features without giving much thought as to how everything fit together.

Ruby

Just ten years ago, Ruby was all the rage. Invented in 1995, the unique language hit its stride by themid-aughts. People who use Ruby on a regular basis absolutely love it. But those of us who grew up with C-style languages tend to have a little trouble learning its ropes.

Visual Basic.NET

Ten years ago, I landed a job rewriting massive amounts of code for a company that shall go nameless, converting from VB6 to Visual basic.NET. I only lasted a couple months before I bailed: It was an excruciating task.

Then something interesting happened. The guy who headed up the creation of Borland Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, moved over to Microsoft and headed up the creation of a new language called C#. This language was very similar to Java. It took a while for people to start using it, but once they did, they loved it. C# soon became Microsoft’s flagship programming language. To this day, there are many, many C# jobs, and C# programmers command high salaries.

Adobe Flash and AIR

Technically these are platforms, not languages. I’m including them because, in order to use them, you need Adobe’s own version of EcmaScript, called ActionScript. ActionScript is a close cousin toJavaScript, which (love it or hate it) is one of the most popular languages today due to its implementation in all browsers. ActionScript adds a few details to EcmaScript (which is the official name of the standard, of which JavaScript is an implementation); you won’t really find ActionScript anywhere except for Adobe Flash.

Delphi’s Object Pascal

With sincere apologies to my fallen Delphi comrades, I must announce the death of Object Pascal. Okay, Delphi (the tool for developing Object Pascal) actually lives on, having moved between companies (it originated with Borland, and now sits with Embarcadero).