Microsoft appears to be keeping pace with its development schedule for the Visual Studio 2010 development suite. The software titan today made the offering available to MSDN subscribers as a release candidate, with plans to offer general availability in April.
Subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN technical service can start downloading the "release candidate," or RC, of the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, company executives announced.
That apparently keeps Visual Studio 2010 on track for an April 12 release, as the company had said in January.
Microsoft is aiming to make Web viewing of the Winter Olympics a lot more like watching the events on TV. While Beijing brought the first widespread use of the Internet to deliver live video of the Games, the Vancouver Olympics--which starts February 12--will offer a range of new options, including TiVo-like features like pausing, rewinding, and replaying during a live broadcast. In addition, broadcaster NBC is using the adaptive streaming capability of Silverlight (Microsoft's rival to Adobe's Flash) to allow those with a good connection to get the Games in up to 720p high-definition quality.
It is not uncommon for Microsoft to launch a "technology guarantee" program ahead of a new version of Office or Windows, offering buyers of a product late in one cycle an upgrade to the new version once it comes out. So it's not a shocker that Microsoft has one planned for Office 2010.
That said, Microsoft wasn't quite ready to tell the world about the program. Nonetheless, an employee briefly posted details of the planned upgrade offer on a blog. It was quickly pulled down, but the cat is out of the bag.
According to the now-removed posting, the program will kick off March 5, meaning people who purchase Office 2007 between March 5 and September 30 can get a free upgrade to a comparable version of Office 2010. Users will be able to download Office 2010 as soon as it is made broadly available. Customers can also order a DVD, for a small fee.
Researchers often find themselves in the unfortunate position of going begging for resources to do their work, sometimes to the detriment of the work itself. While there are plenty of grants out there and lots of supercomputers available to do work, it's still not enough for some. So Microsoft is lending a helping hand ? and datacenter. Datamation has the story.
The same week that Microsoft began charging most users of its newly commercialized Windows Azure cloud computing platform, the company also said that it is giving free access to qualified scientific researchers.
Microsoft executive Mike Nash, currently the corporate vice president for Windows Platform Strategy, is apparently preparing to leave the company. A widely circulated statement from a Microsoft spokesperson said Nash will depart "in a couple weeks."
Nash spent 19 years at Microsoft, where he held a number of positions related to Windows and security. During a 2008 class action lawsuit filed against Microsoft over whether "Vista Capable" PCs could truly run that operating system, the plaintiffs' attorneys highlighted an internal e-mail from Nash that supposedly read: "I personally got burnt ... Are we seeing this from customers? ... I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine." Microsoft argued in court that Nash's e-mail had been taken out of context along with others.
Remember the CueCat--the quirky bar code reader that was going to connect magazine readers with digital material?
Well, apparently Microsoft does too. And while the CueCat meowed into obscurity, the software maker thinks that the idea made sense--that is, using a digital scanner to link printed materials with online content.
You can think of Microsoft Tag as CueCat 2.0, though this time, it doesn't require a special device. Instead, Microsoft tags use a cell phone camera for scanning the bar code, and the digital content can pop up right there on the phone.
Windows 7 hit another milestone this past weekend, with the operating system accounting for 1 in 10 computers accessing the Web, according to Net Applications.
Market share for a new Windows release often peaks on a weekend day, when consumer use is highest, then trends down again when the work week begins. Nonetheless, Windows 7 use has been trending quickly upward.
In less than a month on the market, Windows 7 had reached the 4 percent milestone--a level it took Windows Vista some seven months to reach. Windows 7 was launched on October 22.
Microsoft has provided some early testers with a near-final "release candidate" version of Office 2010 as the software maker works to make the suite broadly available in June.
"Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the technology adoption program (TAP)," a Microsoft representative told CNET. "This is one of Microsoft's planned milestones in the engineering process; however (we) do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly."
A beta version of Office 2010 was released in November and had been downloaded 2 million times, as of last month.
Late yesterday afternoon, right on schedule, Microsoft announced the "general availability" of Windows Azure, its cloud-based hosting service for .NET applications. With a release like this, "GA" is somewhat peculiar, especially since the service has actually been in operation for several months. But it does mean that a ribbon has been cut, and from now on, new accounts are being signed up as commercial licenses. Old accounts are being given the warning to either convert or jump ship.
The new Sony Ericsson Aspen smartphone made its debut on Feb. 2, which is of note because it's running the Windows Mobile 6.5.3 operating system.
Now here's my question: at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, Microsoft is slated to debut something as-yet-unseen, something that various Microsoft executives have described as a sort of paradigm shift. Many in the blogosphere have interpreted this to mean that the company will debut Windows Mobile 7, perhaps running on a Microsoft-branded smartphone.