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Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
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Amid slow sales, Microsoft has decided to halt work on its Kin phone, focusing instead on its Windows Phone 7 effort, CNET has learned.
The phone will not ship in Europe, as planned, and the company is shifting the team's workers to focus on Windows Phone 7, the Microsoft smartphone operating system due out later this year. Andy Lees, who heads up the company's cell phone efforts announced the move to Microsoft workers earlier on Wednesday, according to a source close to the company.
Microsoft confirmed the move in a statement to CNET.
"We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned," the company said. "Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones."
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In just 5 days, over one million people downloaded the Windows Live Messenger app for iPhone that launched last week! This early momentum is fantastic, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from many of you. We look forward to updating the iPhone app shortly to address a few issues that users have pointed out, and continuing to improve the experience.
While Messenger for iPhone is relatively new, for many connecting with Messenger friends on your mobile phone is not new. In addition to the more than one million iPhone Messenger users, there are over 24 million people who connect with Messenger friends from other mobile phones through a client application, their phone’s browser, or SMS. Along with Messenger Connect, Messenger IM in Hotmail, and the coming integration with Xbox LIVE, the new iPhone app is just one more way that we are bringing Messenger to you across the web and on your phone.
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We are happy to announce that Hulu will be coming to Xbox LIVE as part of their Hulu Plus experience. In the announcement today, Hulu announced a preview of their Plus service, along with a series of partners of which Xbox LIVE is one of them. We’re working hard on creating customized experience for Xbox LIVE members, which means that Hulu Plus will be coming to Xbox 360 in early 2011. We are taking the time to ensure that the Hulu Plus experience for Xbox 360 is the best on TV and like our other entertainment experiences it will not be a port, but rather a custom experience that leverages the Xbox LIVE community features.
Hulu Plus will be available for US Xbox LIVE Gold Members only.
There is a lot of excitement about the new Hotmail, and we are certainly eager to get the latest release into the hands of all our customers. Several of you have asked, “When will the new Hotmail come to my country?” As we mentioned in our earlier announcement, we don’t roll out by country (or by language, or anything else like that). We have a mix of customers from around the world in each cluster, and we roll out all languages simultaneously. So, unfortunately, there is no way of predicting exactly when your account will get the new Hotmail.
Two weeks ago, we started the Hotmail rollout with a single cluster. Right now, a few million customers have the new Hotmail – less than 1% of our customer base. We roll out new software slowly at first in order to give our engineers a chance to study the new software running at scale with real customers.
When we roll out new software, we typically find a few things that we want to tweak before going out more broadly. Most of these things are actually invisible to our customers – they usually have to do with our ability to monitor the site or make the rollout itself go more smoothly.
Microsoft is preparing to launch a new Office 2010 SKU, known as Office Small Business Basics 2010, that will be targeted primarily at users in selected emerging markets.
The Smart-max.de site has a screen shot mentioning the coming suite (and are the ones who alerted me to it). The new Small Business Basics SKU includes Word, Excel, Outlook and OneNote,a ccording to the Smart-max folks.
I asked Microsoft for more details about the Office Small Business Basics SKU (a k a, stock-keeping unit, or, in other words, a specific bundle) and received back a no comment. I’m betting the Softies are planning to use the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference as the announcement venue for the new SKU.
We have been working on a new flavor of IIS 7.x that is optimized for developer scenarios that we are calling “IIS Express”. We think it combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server with the full power of IIS. Specifically:
IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk. It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.
VS 2010 Integration
We are enabling IIS Express so that it can be easily used with Visual Studio 2010. You’ll be able to configure VS 2010 to use it instead of the ASP.NET Web Server as the default web-server on ASP.NET Projects. Like the ASP.NET Development Server today, you won’t need to register a site or virtual directory to use IIS Express. It will support the same usage-model as the ASP.NET Development Server today – just with more feature support.
When you press F5 to run an ASP.NET project, Visual Studio can automatically launch IIS Express and use it to run/debug the application (no extra configuration required). Like the ASP.NET Web Server, IIS Express will show up in your task-bar tray when running:
Micrsosoft released a Microsoft Security Essentials Update through Windows Update.
The noted KB2254596 does not exist yet….The KB number seems low to me as we are around 97xxx I
Update Mary Jo Foley points to Microsoft Knowledge Base article 975959. She also has a Microsoft startement:
“This (MSE) release is a part of the standard update cycle and includes only minor updates and fixes. This update contains some minor enhancements and compatibility fixes to facilitate a seamless upgrade experience to future versions of Microsoft Security Essentials.” Microsoft pushes new version of Security Essentials to existing users ZDNet
“This (MSE) release is a part of the standard update cycle and includes only minor updates and fixes. This update contains some minor enhancements and compatibility fixes to facilitate a seamless upgrade experience to future versions of Microsoft Security Essentials.”
Microsoft pushes new version of Security Essentials to existing users ZDNet
Network Monitor 3.4 is a protocol analyzer. It allows you to capture network traffic, view and analyze it. Version 3.4 is an update and replaces Network Monitor 3.4. Network Monitor 3.x is a complete overhaul of the previous Network Monitor 2.x version.
Download details Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4
The Active Directory Migration Tool version 3.2 (ADMT v3.2) provides an integrated toolset to facilitate migration and restructuring tasks in an Active Directory Domain Services infrastructure.
The Active Directory Migration Tool version 3.2 (ADMT v3.2) simplifies the process of migrating objects and restructuring tasks in an Active Directory® Domain Service (AD DS) environment. You can use ADMT v3.2 to migrate users, groups, service accounts, and computers between AD DS domains in different forests (inter-forest migration) or between AD DS domains in the same forest (intra-forest migration). ADMT can also perform security translation (to migrate local user profiles) when performing inter-forest migrations.
This is the download page for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer. It works with SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 BPA is a diagnostic tool that performs the following functions:
This white paper is intended as a guide for capacity planning of RD Virtualization Host in Windows Server 2008 R2.
The Remote Desktop Virtualization Host (RD Virtualization Host) role service lets multiple concurrent users run Windows®-based applications on a remote virtual machine running Windows client operating systems. This white paper is intended as a guide for capacity planning of RD Virtualization Host in Windows Server 2008 R2. It describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations.
Download details RD Virtualization Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2
Microsoft® Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) introduces new features and functionality to Forefront TMG 2010 Standard and Enterprise Editions.
The service pack includes the following new features and feature improvements: New Reports • The new User Activity report displays the sites and site categories accessed by any user. • All Forefront TMG reports have a new look and feel. Enhancements to URL Filtering • You can now allow users to override the access restriction on sites blocked by URL filtering. This allows for a more flexible web access policy, in that users can decide for themselves whether to access a blocked site. This is especially useful for websites that have been incorrectly categorized. • You can now override the categorization of a URL on the enterprise level; the override is then effective for each enterprise-joined array. • Denial notification pages can now be customized for your organization's needs. Enhanced Branch Office Support • Collocation of Forefront TMG and a domain controller on the same server, which can help reduce the total cost of ownership at branch offices. • When installed on a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2, SP1 simplifies the deployment of BranchCache at the branch office, using Forefront TMG as the Hosted Cache server. Support for publishing SharePoint 2010 • Forefront TMG SP1 supports secure publishing of SharePoint 2010. To read the release notes, see the Forefront TMG Release Notes (SP1).
Tomorrow, hot on the heels of the Hotmail roll-out, the new Windows Live Essentials becomes available for public beta testing. Windows Live Essentials beta requires Windows Vista or Windows 7, and is available in English, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, or Spanish. As soon as the beta goes live tomorrow (we’ll update this blog post when it does), you'll be able to get it from here.
As previously announced, this release of Essentials is focused on two things: connecting Windows 7 to the cloud services you already use, and making everyday tasks simpler, so that you can do more on your PC.
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Xbox 360 makes family time, quality time. Only Xbox LIVE delivers a world of games, movies, social entertainment and starting this November, live sports, allowing you to share them with the people you care about, around the world. This November, the new Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack will offer up to four individual Xbox LIVE Gold memberships for only US$99.99 – the price of two regular Xbox LIVE Gold subscriptions. Now as you prepare for the launch of Kinect for Xbox 360, which makes YOU the controller, consider giving your family premium Gold experience and access to the biggest names in entertainment.
An Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack includes: * Up to four individual Xbox LIVE Gold memberships for the price of two – (US) $99.99. * Family Center – a single, easy to use, destination for Family Settings and account management, accessible on the Xbox dashboard and on Xbox.com. * The primary account member has the ability to purchase and dispense Microsoft Points to other Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack members. * Activity monitoring reports viewable on Xbox.com to help encourage discussions about safer more balanced gaming and entertainment habits. * Simplified billing that applies all purchase charges to the primary account holder's billing account and the ability to authorize purchases, helping to manage the family's entertainment budget. * Exclusive family content and discounts.
Press Release via Engadget
The Xbox 360 Kinect Sensor is up for preorder at the Microsoft store for $149.
Pre-orders are covered by our Pre-Order Price Guarantee and can be reviewed, updated, or canceled at any time before pre-order items are released. Please see our Pre-Order Policy for more information.