A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that today, May 18, will be the release date for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, for MSDN subscribers. The general public will get their first shot at both new technologies on Wednesday.
Though last September's preview edition showed the addition of new tools for application architecture modeling -- moving deep into IBM territory there -- as well as for development team management, it was all being shown under the auspices of the old VS 2008 front end. Soon after the preview edition was released, the company revealed that it was scrapping that more traditional front end in favor of a design based on the Windows Presentation Foundation platform.
Microsoft will launch an invitation-only SharePoint Server 2010 beta test in July with a select group of customers and then follow the program up with a public testing phase ahead of the Office 2010 release in the first half of next year.
Earlier this week at its annual TechEd conference, Microsoft said the Office 2010 beta slated for July will not include the SharePoint Server 2010 beta.
The SharePoint 2010 beta/technology preview will be invitation-only and will focus on a number of its enterprise customers and target specific enterprise deployment scenarios.
Pirated copies labeled as the Technical Preview of Microsoft's Office 2010 have leaked to the Internet, according to searches on popular file-sharing sites.
Office 2010 joined the also-still-unfinished Windows 7 on BitTorrent Saturday. Searches on the Mininova.org as well as the Pirate Bay tracking site revealed leaked copies of both the 32- and 64-bit editions of the application suite. Commenters on the sites confirmed that the posted versions are tagged Technical Preview, claimed that they worked, but noted that they are unstable.
Microsoft Office Groove 2007 will get a name change next year that's more in tune with the SharePoint side of things.
The client product will be known as "SharePoint Workspace 2010" and will be added, along with OneNote, to the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 product, according to a Microsoft announcement published on Wednesday.
Groove is a collaboration and document-sharing client application, with optional server support, that is designed for small teams of two to 30 people. The client application is currently available as part of the Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition. Groove originally was the brainchild of Ray Ozzie, who now serves as Microsoft's chief software architect.
From the "Yeah, Microsoft does release open source code" files:
Microsoft has been getting cozy with PHP last few years and is now getting expanding the relationship. Today Microsoft announced a new open source Software Developer Kit for PHP on Microsoft's cloud services platform Windows Azure.
The idea is to make it easier for PHP developer to hook into Azure. Microsoft is also aiming to make it easier for PHP developers to work with Silverlight and IE 8 with code samples and tools.
PHP for Silverlight is a code sample and tutorial on Microsoft's CodePlex site, which explains and gives examples of how to integrate Silverlight controls in PHP.
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It's Windows 7's new AppLocker feature, which he calls "SRP [software restriction policy on steroids.
"Think of it as a firewall but at the kernel level: When enabled in a network environment, by default, AppLocker disables any application from running that isn't recognized as part of Windows. That, by itself, isn't something anyone would want; so using group policy or using Local Security Policy at the client level a user or admin can program exceptions to this default rule. Those exceptions can monitor the operating system for metadata pertaining to running applications, enabling selected software to run even after it's been upgraded.
Looking to give its Surface table top device more functionality, Microsoft today released its first service pack with a new SDK that the company says will give developers more flexibility in adding more features.
The SDK that comes with the Surface developer unit, which costs about $15,000, has a set of APIs, samples and tools, as well as Visual Studio project templates that support both XNA and WPF user interface frameworks.
Among the new features for developers in SP1 are extended identity tag resources, extensions to the API which include a WPF library and menu controls, and a stress-testing tool.
Microsoft has restructured its .NET Micro Framework team and plans to eventually open up the .NET MF source code for community development.
The restructuring consists of moving the .NET MF team over to the developer division of Microsoft's Server and Tools Division, according to a team blog announcement. The move will align the .NET MF team "with the rest of the .NET groups and tools in building the uniform programming model from the sensors to servers," the blog explained.
The .NET MF is used for small devices such as Microsoft Smart Watches and TV set-top boxes using a Motorola processor.
The second community technology preview of Microsoft's System Center Service Manager, the company's newest application in its System Center suite, is now available for a virtual test drive, according to a Microsoft announcement last week.
System Center is a line of products that helps organizations with desktop, laptop, server, mobile device configuration and operations management, according to company materials. A Microsoft spokesperson noted by e-mail that Service Manager will provide a service desk capability as part of System Center.
Microsoft has set up a repository in which government agencies may upload and store their public-facing datasets so that they can be reused by other parties.
Agency developers can upload their data to the Open Government Data Initiative through Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud computing offering.
Potential users can then access the resulting datasets via a Web page or an RSS feed. They can also query a large dataset on the Web page by formulating an ADO.NET Data Services query.