Archive for May, 2008

Microsoft PDC 2008 is coming!

PDC 2008 registrations are now open.You could expect a lot of fantastic announcements this year about Windows 7, Windows Mobile, Silverlight, Live Mesh…

Topics include software + services, Windows 7, a deep dive on Silverlight graphics pipelines, Windows Mobile, extensible BitmapEffects and Pixel Shaders in WPF, how we use Team Foundation Server for our huge Microsoft projects, a new technology that makes it easy to build business applications in Silverlight, how to develop for Live Mesh, and more.Show your PDC2008 spirit! Grab some of the blog bling and wallpaper.

Dates of the conference are: 27-30 October 2008
Pre-conference on 26 October 2008

Just register now for the conference and save $200

More info about PDC 2008 can be found here: http://www.microsoftpdc.com or you can take a look at Mike’s Blog

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 now scheduled for Q3

The next builds for Microsoft’s forthcoming Web browser generation may already be ready, but the company wants to give publishers some time to prepare, in case their Web sites end up looking somehow storm-damaged.

The next public preview of Microsoft’s upcoming Web browser will be available in the third quarter of this year, according to a public blog post from a senior account manager in New Zealand named Nick Mackechnie yesterday morning.

Source- Betanews

Microsoft Live@edu Delivers Exchange Labs to Students at No Cost

Microsoft Corp. is adding no-cost Microsoft Exchange Labs e-mail for students and alumni to its Live@edu online communication and collaboration applications tailored for educational institutions. Live@edu with Exchange Labs gives students and alumni access to a reliable and security-enhanced e-mail experience similar to what they may use in the workplace, while university IT administrators can benefit from additional security features and simplified deployment. By bringing proven technologies to current education systems, Microsoft is helping IT administrators build closely connected infrastructures and create exceptional experiences for students and educators.

Microsoft Exchange Labs Benefits IT Administrators, Students and Alumni Alike

Live@edu now offers institutions the option of giving their students and alumni an Exchange Labs inbox. Live@edu offers the following benefits to universities and students:

•Reliable communications. Universities can provide students with hosted e-mail, featuring up to 10 GB inboxes and 20 MB attachments. Students can also access their e-mail, contacts and calendar from Outlook Web Access and Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as from Web-enabled mobile phones, similar to what they may experience in the work force.

•Building blocks for collaboration. Additional Live@edu services that can be used for on-campus collaboration include shared calendars with free/busy lookup between students, student directories with administrative control to create distribution lists, and the ability to add faculty and staff who are using Exchange on-premise to student directories.

•Additional security. Live@edu with Exchange Labs also now allows message tracking to confirm urgent e-mail was delivered, and content filtering, which gives administrators the ability to block e-mail with objectionable content.

•Institution identity. Schools can deepen the relationship with students and alumni through an e-mail inbox with the school’s logo, a custom theme created by the institution and a school-branded e-mail address that students can keep after they graduate.

Source- Microsoft Press Release

Microsoft to showcase social bookmarking at TechEd

One of the new technologies that Microsoft is planning to showcase at its upcoming TechEd U.S. conference is its social-bookmarking tool.

John Martin, Lead Evangelist for Server & Tools Online — as he describes it, “the group that manages the global MSDN, TechNet, Codeplex, and Expression websites” — blogged on May 23 about his unit’s plans:

“Next week (the week of May 26), we will release a preview version of Social Bookmarks for both MSDN and TechNet and showcase it at TechEd North America the following week.”

Microsoft launched the initial beta of its social book-marking technology, codenamed “TagSpace,” in 2006. At that time, company officials described TagSpace this way:

“This is the stand-alone service piece, along the lines of del.icio.us or other third-party social bookmarking sites.” Ultimately, it will act as “a means for Microsoft.com to begin to aggregate a ‘folksonomy’ of terms that can be used to enrich and enliven Microsoft-related sites and community properties on the Web.”

For the first time this year, Microsoft will follow suit with its European TechEd scheduling, turning the annual U.S. TechEd show into a two-week affair. The first week, which commences the week of June 1, is aimed at developers; the second week is tailored to IT professionals.

Source: blogs.zdnet.com

Microsoft will Update Desktop Virtualization

Microsoft Friday said it will update its popular Desktop Optimization Pack with additional virtualization software now that its acquisition of Kidaro has been finalized. The Kidaro software lets users run multiple versions of Windows and applications concurrently without having to open multiple virtual machine sessions. Microsoft has rebranded the Kidaro software as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization and will release it in the first half of 2009.
"We will continue investing here because we know manageability is fundamental to broad corporate use of desktop virtualization," wrote Shanen Boettcher, GM of Windows product management, on the Vista Team Blog.
The Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, or MDOP, is designed to help IT administrators manage collections of Windows desktops. It includes Application Virtualization to stream applications from a centrally managed service; Asset Inventory Service, an inventory scanning tool; System Center Desktop Error Monitoring; Advanced Group Policy Management (APGM) for change management via group policy objects; and the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, which helps in recovering a crashed PC.
 

Source: PC World

Vista Makes Headway into Business

Almost a year and a half since its launch, Windows Vista may be ready to penetrate big business and win the hearts and minds of CIOs, according to some watchers. Microsoft accepts that Vista has only penetrated about five per cent of large business accounts (and even that figure might be optimistic, according to some analysts) but a combination of hardware readiness, enhancements to Vista itself and application compatibility reasons could see the heavily criticized OS finally crack large accounts. At a roundtable session with media, John Curran, UK head of the Windows group at Microsoft, said, "Adoption is accelerating, especially now we’ve got SP1 out."
Curran also defended Vista’s reputation, saying the product had passed 140 million license sales and was "the fastest-selling OS in history. We’re seeing momentum whether it’s consumer, enterprise or public sector. Some of the [negative] sentiment is from people who tried Vista in the very early days and the fundamental experience is very different today than at launch."
 

Source PC World

Windows 7 to add native support for Virtual Hard Disks

Out of what little we know of the next version of Windows, this feature might just be the most interesting yet. A team at Microsoft is hiring developers to work on adding native support in Windows 7 for Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) - Microsoft’s semi-proprietary specification for single-file virtual machine hard disks. This has rather interesting implications for IT administrators and even home users.
For example, having an VHD dedicated to gaming with optimized system configurations is entirely feasible then. A dynamic VHD would mean it would only take up as much room as it needs, you could move the file on many system and have the same experience, but best of all, you can still enjoy the maximum native performance at the same time being able to load it as a virtual machine to maintain and configure without rebooting.
Considering how much we don’t know about Windows 7, this is extremely promising.

View: istartedsomething

A new look for MSDN and TechNet

For over ten years now, both the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet (Microsoft’s online home for IT Professionals) have served their respective technical audiences with rich, deep and extensive technical guidance on using Microsoft platform and tools products.
Today, we released a new (updated) set of Tech & Dev Centers on MSDN & TechNet. This is the next step forward in enabling MSDN and TechNet to be a destination of choice for the community and by the community. With the new site redesign, the MSDN and TechNet Web sites will make it easier to discover and participate in these online communities and showcase the insights of the community experts as well as active technical professionals throughout the world.
One feature that you will find useful is that on our Developer and Technology Centers, you’ll increasingly see content from Microsoft experts as well as the community highlighted right on the home page of each Center. You’ll also see a greater emphasis on Forums which use a new Forums platform with recognition for Top Answers and easier ways to see thread previews, which questions have code associated with them, and which questions already have answers. This refresh covered 18 Tech and Dev centers and both of the MSDN and TechNet home pages in seven different languages.
 

News source: Somasegar’s WebLog
Homepage: MSDN | Technet