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
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The much discussed Mojave Experiment site got an update today with a features demo, additional videos and an FAQ. Despite the accusation that it makes customers appear dumb I think it does address a common situation I find – namely that people are forming views about Vista based on hearsay. This is the key for me. Check out www.mojaveexperiment.com
And finally the site gets the Silverlight treatment
Source- MSDN Blog
Starting this week, we will begin deployment of the latest version of WGA Notifications for Windows XP. In addition to the usual updates to validation that improve WGA’s ability to detect the latest stolen or fake product keys and other attempts to circumvent product activation, this release will also include a couple of other significant updates.
Simplifying the installation and making it easy to stay up-to-date
In this release we’re making it easier to install and stay up to date with the latest release of WGA Notifications. We’ve changed the installation experience and are again using the Windows Update install prompt we have used previously. There are a couple of reasons we’re doing this now. One is that in recent research, customers (particularly the ones using genuine software - or at least that think they are) have told us that they would prefer the simplest, shortest way of installing. Our research has clearly shown that customers value the ability of Windows to alert them when they may have software that is not genuine, but they also want the ability to stay up to date with the least effort required on their part. The other reason is that hundreds of millions of installs of WGA Notifications have already taken place, and most customers are already aware of what the program is and just want the fastest and most seamless way to install and stay up-to-date. For this reason, in this release we’ve also added the ability for future updates to WGA Notifications to have both the validation logic, as well as new forms of notifications, installed without additional steps. This will only be the case for those who install this latest version or future versions of WGA Notifications.
Source- MSDN Blog
Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing “off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person using it to know at which website you bank.
What if you want to delete your browsing history after the fact, but you don’t want to lose your preferences at websites that you use frequently?
With respect to privacy, IE8 gives users more choice about controlling what information they keep and exchange.
InPrivate Browsing
If you are using a shared PC, a borrowed laptop from a friend, or a public PC, sometimes you don’t want other people to know where you’ve been on the web. Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing makes that “over the shoulder” privacy easy by not storing history, cookies, temporary Internet files, or other data.
Using InPrivate Browsing is as easy as launching a new InPrivate Browsing window. When you’re done, just close the window and IE will take care of the rest.
Source- IE Blog
Report Builder 2.0 RC1 is now available on Microsoft Download Center. Use this link for download. RC1 delivers improvements in the following areas compared to RC0:
- Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions.
- Support for directly opening and editing reports stored on the report server.
- Support for using server resources such as shared data sources.
- A query designer for Microsoft SQL Server data sources.
- Enhancements to the Report Builder 2.0 ribbon.
Please direct your feedback to the main Reporting Services MSDN forum, or to http://connect.microsoft.com/.
Source- MSDN Blog
Shorten the sales cycle for you and your partners with the NEW 4.0 version of the Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM Trial Site*!
Previously in pilot, the Hosted CRM Trial Site is now widely available; powering FREE 60-day TRIALS for anyone who wants to evaluate the product prior to a purchase.
What’s DIFFERENT about the Hosted CRM Trial Site?
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The URL has changed! Whether you’re already using it or referring the site to someone, direct them to http://www.hostedmicrosoftcrmtrial.com. (The former URL for the site, http://www.solutiondemo.net/demodynamics, will be maintained for several months until it is officially retired in Q2.)
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The updated trial site leverages the multi-tenancy capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
Source- MSDN Blog
Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed. Tagging - and especially social bookmarking - are essential ingredients for making this happen.
Back in May, just before TechEd North America, we released a preview version of our new social bookmarking app for MSDN, for TechNet, and for Expression. Since then, thousands of technical professionals from around the world have begun using it to save their web favorites online, share them with others, see what other technical pros are favoriting, and connect with others.
We also got a lot of great feedback on the app itself (thank you!) and I’m happy to say that in early September, we plan on releasing a full version of the app - v 1.0. Here are some new things to look for:
- Subscribe to Tags or People: Find a tag you want to follow? Or a fellow bookmarker that bookmarks really good stuff? With the new app, it will be easy to get an RSS subscription for that tag or person (as in, click the orange button).
- Browse & Find Users: Search or browse to find people by their display name (e.g., mine is "johmar") and other criteria.
- Import Tools: Recognizing that a lot of people already have favorites saved in their browsers or in other social bookmarking sites, the new app will provide a tool for importing your favorites from Microsoft Internet Explorer and from Delicious.
- Bookmarking Widget: If you have your own blog or other website, our new bookmarking widget will make it easy for people to bookmark your pages directly to their social bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, or Expression. You’ll get traffic from Microsoft when your bookmarked page is published in "social feeds" on our global sites.
- Availability in 12 Languages: With the September release, the social bookmarking application will be available in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Source- Technet Blog
This is the official software development kit that allows developers to integrate tools, editors, designers, languages, and other features inside Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.
Key features in the Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 include:
- Significant reduction in size for Visual Studio Shell redistributable packages.
- Support for progress feedback in a chained installation.
- Visual Studio Shell development now supports normal user.
- New XML Tree Editor and TFS sample.
- DSL Print Preview
- Updated shell documentation.
For more information about Visual Studio Extensibility and the Visual Studio SDK, visit the VSX Dev Center at http://msdn.com/vsx.
Download here
Ankur Mittal | August 28, 2008
