Archive for August, 2008
Visual Studio Team System Web Access 2008 SP1 Power Tool
Team System Web Access is a free download that will be incorporated into a future release of Visual Studio Team System. You may install it with licensed installations of Team Foundation Server. You must be a licensed user of Team Foundation Server to use Team System Web Access.
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Updated VPC Images Now Available
Hey there, just a short post to let you know that new VPC images are ready for download. You can access them from the tools section on the Internet Explorer Developer Center, too.
Source- IEBlog
Popfly Game Creator Now in Beta
Here are some features we just released as part of the Game Creator Beta:
Features for everyone:
* New profile pages, with easier ways to view people’s projects, friends, recent activity, and more
* View anyone’s favorite projects
* Earn badges by creating compelling content, being a good game player, making friends, or just being lucky!
* Lots of performance improvements and bug fixes
Features for game creators of all skill levels:
* Undo support for actor appearance editing
* Insert images and videos directly into your actor or scene …………………
Source- Popfly Team Blog
The F# September 2008 CTP is now available!
I’m very pleased to announce the availability of the F# September 2008 CTP Release, launched via the new MSDN F# Developer Center. This release represents an important step in the evolution of the F# language as we progress it towards a fully supported language for the .NET platform. A huge thank you to both the F# team and the community members who’ve helped us trial earlier versions of this release and given us so much excellent feedback.
F# is a simple, type-safe, efficient, scalable language for the .NET platform that supports both functional and object-oriented programming. One of the key things about F# is that it spans the spectrum from interactive, explorative scripting to component and large-scale software development. In this release we’ve made major improvements to the language, libraries and tools across this spectrum.
Ø Scripting now has added support, both in the language, compiler and Visual Studio. From simple touches such as “File -> New File -> F# Script” to the improved F# Interactive Tool Window and the new, MSBuild-based resolution rules for assembly references, our aim here is to put nothing between you and your ability to explore a problem space with F#.
Ø The new and improved F# Project system enables large-scale, tool-based software development with F#. Teams can now develop large applications and libraries using standard Visual Studio techniques. This also makes F# easier to approach for developers familiar with Visual Studio.
Ø The new F# Language Service gives more intuitive and reliable intellisense, type tips and smoother background compilation, all essential tools to assist in writing correct software
Source- MSDN Blog
Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit v2.0 Released
The Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit contains functionality to help administer and manage Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0.
Microsoft Buys European Comparison Shopping Site for $486M
Microsoft has agreed to buy comparison shopping business Ciao in a deal worth around US$486 million, and plans to integrate the service into its Live Search sites, it announced Friday.
The deal is a sign that Microsoft’s commercial search ambitions extend to Europe, where Ciao is present in seven countries. Microsoft launched a comparison shopping and search reward site, Live Search cashback, for U.S. surfers in May this year. The company said it expects to use Ciao to boost its MSN e-commerce services, in addition to incorporating Ciao’s services into its Live Search sites.
Source- PCWorld
Windows 7 — Approach to System Performance
The dialog has been wide ranging—folks consistently want performance to improve (of course). As with many topics we will discuss, performance, as absolute and measurable as it might seem, also has a lot of subtlety. There are many elements and many tradeoffs involved in achieving performance that meets everyone’s expectations. We know that even meeting expectations, folks will want even more out of their Windows PCs (and that’s expected). We’ve re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area in Windows 7 (and IE 8). This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams (Fundamentals). For this post, I just wanted to frame the discussion as we dig into the topic of performance in subsequent posts. Folks might find this post on IE8 performance relevant along with the beta 2 release of IE 8.
Performance is made up of many different elements. We could be talking about response time to a specific request. It might mean how much RAM is “typical” or what CPU customers need. We could be talking about the clock time to launch a program. It could mean boot or standby/resume. It could mean watching CPU activity or disk I/O activity (or lack disk activity). It could mean battery life. It might even mean something as mundane as typical disk footprint after installation. All of these are measures of performance. All of these are systematically tracked during the course of development. We track performance by running a known set of scenarios (there are thousands of these) and developers can run specific scenarios based on exercising more depth or breadth.
Source- Engineering Windows 7 blog
120 GB Zune Confirmed
Not much to see here, but I just got word from Zune team member Cesar Menendez (of Zune Insider fame) that the 120 GB Zune we saw in the FCC docs is official:
"You’ve probably all seen about 120GB @the FCC- and just wanted to send you a note to confirm that is indeed part of the plan. There’s definitely more details coming in the way of new software and hardware, pricing etc."
Source: www.zunethoughts.com
