Reactions to story from All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

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  News to know: Spam king dead; Microsofts cloud; Dell;

  http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9432
  129 days ago in Between the Lines | ZDNet.com · Authority: 2,525

  News to know: Spam king dead; Microsofts cloud; Dell; Posted by Larry Dignan @ 2:10 am Categories: General, News to know Tags: Larry Dignan In Focus » See more posts on: News to know Notable headlines: Ryan Naraine: Escapee Spam King dead in apparent
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  Windows 7: preview of final user interface and ’studenty’ features

  http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=571
  34 days ago in iGeneration | ZDNet.com · Authority: 104

  It’s a difficult and strange time for many in the IT industry. It seems most people from home consumers to students, IT professionals and governments have rejected Windows Vista, and many have their reservations about Windows 7. Will it be another disaster like Vista? Or will it be something we can finally use without it crashing every few hours? I personally have no problem with Vista, besides a couple of flaws here and there. My colleagues have been reporting like no other on the events, sights and sounds of the PDC, and now restrictions and embargoes have been lifted, I point you gratuitously in the direction of screenshot galleries and the breaking news coming out of the PDC. This is the new Start menu and taskbar taken from the Reviewers Documentation, from Windows 7 build 6933, which is being demoed at the PDC in LA. It’s important to note, the Windows 7 build which is being given away today does have this user interface, but cannot be turned on unless you’re on the Microsoft corporate network - in a “phoning home” scenario, so a bit useless to ordinary peeps like me and you. It will also be an older version than the one being demoed by Sinofsky. Now, as I’m not at the PDC and don’t have a copy, but I’m sure it can be hacked by somebody out there. My slant on Windows 7 is this; there are some things which we students need to look out for - things that will either make our current careers seem like chalk-on-slate jobs, and some which will benefit us as consumers and users. The new user interface: the new interface is rumoured, and from what I’ve seen, will be similar to Vista in terms of the glass. The glass will remain for a while to come yet, probably through to Windows 8, because of the effort that went into it. It’s not going to appear too different to Vista, in terms of layout and usability either. Suffice to say, the new user interface will be simpler, better laid out, shinier and a little gentler. It’s going to start appealing to the user a little more; more things where you want them, when you want them, more content on your computer which you can easily go back to, and better customisation of where you want these things to appear. Folders, icons, pinning things to places, the ability to rearrange your applications in your taskbar - that sort of thing. The multi-touch features will come through also, because the Ribbon which has been implemented seems quite vital in making this work. Although no direct proof of this, I’d say this logical, estimated guess could well be a rather accurate forecast. With the menus in applications given now, in the breadcrumb “File, Edit, View” menu, opening those options on a tablet device isn’t easy. Having the Ribbon there with thicker, chunkier buttons, which also happen to save space in applications which have more options you can throw a stick at, will also enable touch screen users a better hands-on experience. Were they thinking about user functionality in Windows 7 when they were developing Office 2007? Tablet and multi-touch: sure, we’ve already heard of the multi-touch being brought to laptops, surfaces and devices which support it; but there will be multi-Tablet as well and natural gesture recognition, allowing “flicking of the newspaper pages” in electronic documents. Not sure if these will be revealed tomorrow, but will find out soon enough and update if that’s the case. Windows Azure: pronounced “as you’re” (thanks to Tim Sneath, Microsoft) who pointed that out). It’ll be a platform between .NET in the cloud, SQL in the cloud, SharePoint and Dynamics in the cloud, the Live Services such as Mesh in the cloud, and Windows 7 which’ll run on the desktop. It’s not limited to Windows 7, but you can all but guarantee it’ll play a huge part in the new operating system. Mary-Jo has all of this de-confused for those who can’t get their head around it all. Could this be the “Windows Vista and Windows Live integration” we had when Vista first rolled out? Regardless, this will be a powerful platform for students to develop on to, and free as far as I can see. Most people won’t even be aware of Azure as such - as Ed Bott puts it, “it should just allow apps to work”, but as the developer behind it, you’ll see the bare naked lot of it. Printing over the Interwebs: there has been a time for everyone where you’re hitting the deadline by minutes to spare. There’s an age old saying: “If it wasn’t for the last minute, we wouldn’t get anything done.” It’s true though. Windows 7 will come with Internet printing, which is exactly that - printing over the Internet. You can be in the luxury of your depressing student house within minutes to spare to get your essay into the hands of your professor. Instead of throwing on some clothes, hailing a taxi, bombing it up to campus, you’ll be able to print directly to your professor’s desk - in theory. Security will be a big issue, using usernames and passwords on the print server to authenticate who you are. But if you’re connected to a virtual private network, or even have access to your work or university network, this will be easy enough to do. It’ll work just as if you were really there, except you won’t have to be. Any drivers that need to be installed will be installed for you, and the print server will notify you once the print has completed. This is genius. A new .NET: the next version, .NET Framework 4.0, will appear in Windows 7, and it’s going to be the most powerful framework for developers to date. There will be two kinds of .NET to look out for: .NET in the cloud, codenamed “Zurich”, and will be the main underlying platform for running Azure; and there’s the .NET Framework 4.0 which will run on local client machines for application building. For students at university and those who are close to entering the industry, this will be a very important set of tools to develop with. With new expanded built-in activities with PowerShell, databasing and messaging, seamless integration between Workflow Foundation and Windows Communications Foundation, entire applications being built in XAML, and Parallel Extensions, these skills could be vital to your career. But there will be more and more over the coming weeks - this is just a mere glimpse of stuff after the first day of many at the PDC. By this time tomorrow, Mary-Jo and Ed will both have screenshot galleries up no doubt; Long and Paul and the rest of the Live Blog lot will have stuff up. With a beta only around the corner, we’ll just have to wait and see. But for the time being, students are close to getting some pretty damn cool stuff with a better opportunity to take advantage of these things. Please, let me know what you think. Although transparency of the entire Windows 7 development process has been somewhat desired, with some of the things in store already confirmed, it seems Microsoft do listen after all.
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  Microsoft Professional Developers Conference - PDC 2008

  http://www.devang-gandhi.net/blog/microsoft-pdc-2008/
  38 days ago in Devang Gandhi - technology, internet and the world · Authority: 1

  Microsoft Professional Developers Conference - PDC 2008 Posted by Devang Gandhi on October 23rd, 2008 Microsoft PDC 2008 is here. This year, it is in Los Angeles, CA at the Los Angeles Convention Center, October 27-30. If interested, you can register for the conference here. What exactly is the PDC? PDC is the technical conference organized by Microsoft for developers and architects. It gives professional developers the opportunity to meet Microsofties, get the first scoop on forthcoming products and provide valuable feedback about how they feel about Microsoft’s products. Who should attend? If you are a developer or an architect using Microsoft technologies, this will be an event where you can find out new tools and services that can make you more efficient in your job or improve the design of your solution. If you are in a decision making position in your company on technological strategy then this event becomes all the more important to keep your self updated on the latest product offerings. Why should I attend?  Keynote presentations from the likes of Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), Rick Rashid (Senior VP, Microsoft Research), Bob Muglia (Senior VP, Server and Tools). Compete list of speakers. About a 160 technical PDC sessions on various topics. Hands-on labs for those who like to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with straight-out-of-the-oven code. Get to know the best practices and useful tips from the insiders. Interact with the experts and the Microsoft staff in the lounges and get all your questions answered. Make sure to ask all your how-to questions about Vista. If you haven’t already switched to Vista, this is a good time. Check out the detailed agenda. PDC highlights Windows 7. Check out windows 7 news. Cloud Computing Platform Oslo - Model-driven development platform Visual Studio 2010 and .net framework 4.0 Share: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Tech No Comments »
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  What comes after S+S? A truly unified client-cloud platform

  http://www.r2x2.com/blog/?p=332
  66 days ago in R2X2 - News for real nerds.. · Authority: 4

  Source: Mary Jo Foley Many consider Software + Services (S+S) to be Microsoft’s way of keeping its PC-software money-making machine afloat while the cloud-computing waves come rushing in. But that view ignores the reality that it actually doe makes sense to run some applications and/or pieces of applications locally, and others off-premise in remote datacenters, according to Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie. Mundie keynoted the Technology Review Emerging Technology conference in Cambridge on September 25. Mundie presented a more technical and in-depth version of a talk I heard him give at the company’s Financial Analyst Meeting in late July. In that talk, a transcript of which is available on Microsoft’s Web site, Mundie showed off proof-of-concept demos of a variety of technologies that show off the natural-user interface and multicore computing power that Microsoft officials believe will be at the center of the computing universe in the coming years. While Mundie’s talk was fun, it was my conversation afterward with him that gave me more food for thought. Mundie’s job is to help the company prioritize where it is investing time, people and resources to be successful in the period three to 20 years out. Mundie’s current priority No. 1 is to help the Softies, customers and partners understand the changes necessary to program and use computing resources in the form of a composite platform — i.e., the cloud and the client as a single unit. This composite platform is more than “just” S+S, Mundie said. Currently, in the Microsoft world, services are more of an adjunct to locally installed software. (Think Windows Live Messenger or Office Live Workspace as examples.) In the not-so-distant future, Microsoft will be providing a programming model and tools that will allow developers to build applications that are designed, from the get-go, to span the client and the cloud. (Mundie wouldn’t spill the beans on announcements Microsoft is teeing up for its Professional Developers Conference in late October. But Microsoft officials are slated to detail “Zurich” cloud programming services, the Live Mesh software development kit and the first Microsoft-developed Live Mesh applications that will be designed to straddle the client and the cloud at the conference.) “There will be a set of things that are done on the client, and another in the cloud. At the PDC show, we’ll show some of the necessary pieces,” Mundie said. Mundie acknowledged that Microsoft “is still figuring all these things out as we go along.” He said the company has been slowly and quietly delivering technology elements that are part of this composite platform framework over the past few years. He pointed to the concurrency and coordination (CCR) and decentralized software services (DSS) runtimes that are currently embedded in the Microsoft Robotics Toolkit as an example of one such technology. Robotics — and the automated front-desk receptionist application that Mundie demonstrated again this week — are examples of how Microsoft is introducing to market distributed and concurrent computing technologies required by composite client/cloud scenarios without disrupting the existing legacy base, Mundie said. Another example of the kind of composite application/scenario that will mix client/cloud resources is the “first life” immersive navigation experience that Mundie demonstrated to Wall Street analysts in July and the EmTech audience today. I know there are a lot of doubters out there who’ve pooh-poohed Microsoft’s S+S strategy. I actually thought it made a lot of sense, in terms of helping Microsoft preserve its software legacy and its users, their software base. I’ve noticed more and more vendors — Cisco, VMware, Google and others — increasingly adding on-premise software elements to their “all cloud/all the time” line ups. It wasn’t until today, though — when Mundie went deeper about how offering more offline software capabilities on phones and PCs would help users (especially ones in emerging markets and with “occasional” connectivity) to use services even without constant Internet access — that I felt that mixing the cloud and the client was more than just a rationalization strategy for Microsoft. What about you? Do you think unifying the cloud and client is more than just a way for Microsoft to try to hold onto the past? Do you agree there are some applications that don’t make sense to run as “cloud only”?
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  VMware’s Datacenter OS: Windows isn’t the competition

  http://zonepc.co.uk/2008/09/16/vmware%e2%80%99s-datacenter-o...
  76 days ago in Zone PC - PC, Windows and Microsoft News and Updates · Authority: 1

  Microsoft archrival VMware announced this week a set of future technologies called the “Virtual Datacenter OS” that some are comparing with Windows Server 2008. But Windows Server 2008 and its integrated Hyper-V hypervisor aren’t what Microsoft is going to be pitting against VMware, Google and Amazon in the brave, new datacenter-centric world. Instead, Microsoft’s soon-to-be-unveiled “Zurich” foundational services and its “RedDog” system services are what the Redmondians will be fielding against its cloud competitors. My ZDNet blogging colleague Paula Rooney has a good overview of the various pieces that comprise VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS. Look at this architectural diagram of VMware’s proposed offering: Compare it to Microsoft’s: Not so different, are they? (VMware, like Microsoft, is talking about spanning both “on-premise” and “cloud” datacenters. Not too surprising when you remember from where VMware CEO Paul Maritz hails….) Microsoft is expected to detail at least the mid-tier — the Zurich services — at its Professional Developers Conference in late October. I’m hearing most of Microsoft’s Zurich deliverables are slated to be released in final form by mid-2009. At the base level, down at the substrate which Microsoft previously has described as its “Global Foundation Services” layer is where I’m betting RedDog will fit in. These are services like provisioning, networking, security, management, and operations. (Virtualization fits in here, as well, in the context of helping users migrate between the cloud and on-premise and vice versa.) RedDog has been described as the horizontal “cloud OS” that Microsoft is building to power datacenters. At the next level, “Zurich” — which Microsoft also has described as the Live Platform services layer — Microsoft will deliver federated identity, data synchronization, workflow and “relay services.” I’ve been hearing a bit more lately about Relay, which I believe Microsoft also has called “Overlay” services. Overlay is a peer-to-peer network that will help bridge distributed, parallel systems. Supposedly, Overlay will help Microsoft do everything from load balancing and replication of application states across the network of machines, to providing a discovery framework for Web services to make use of presence and federation services. Elements of the overlay network are expected to be part of .Net 4.0, the next version of Microsoft’s .Net Framework. Bottom line: Don’t think Windows Server 2008 is the be-all/end-all of Microsoft’s datacenter OS story. There is lots more that the company still won’t discuss publicly, but is known to be happening in the background.
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  Oslo and Live Mesh: Will the two platforms ever meet?

  http://zonepc.co.uk/2008/09/10/oslo-and-live-mesh-will-the-t...
  82 days ago in Zone PC - PC, Windows and Microsoft News and Updates · Authority: 1

  As the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) inches closer, Microsoft is making public more details about two of the new platforms that will be the big news. One of these is Live Mesh, a software development kit (SDK) for which is expected to be one of the major deliverables that developers will get to start dabbling with around the time of the PDC. The other is Oslo, Microsoft’s modeling platform, pieces of which will be available to testers in Community Technology Preview (CTP) form around the same time. Live Mesh is definitely a consumer-focused platform, while Oslo is aimed primarily at business-focused developers and customers. But the pair share a number of commonalities, too. Both Live Mesh and Oslo purport to be all about Software+Services. Both are expected to take advantages of advances in distributed/parallel computing. And both seem to build on top of a set of building block services — things like federated identity, connectivity/messaging, storage, etc. I’ve been assuming that the building block services behind Live Mesh were the same ones as those underlying Oslo. The building-block services layer in Oslo is known as “Zurich.” John Shewchuk, a Technical Fellow in Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, is the point person on Zurich. Shewchuk is giving a talk at the PDC, entitled “A Lap Around Building Block Services.” From the description of his talk, it sounds as if my asumption may not be off-base. From the description of Shewchuk’s PDC session: “From consumer-targeted applications and social networking web sites to enterprise class applications and services, the building block services make it easy for you to give your applications and services the most compelling experiences and features.” Does this mean that Red Dog, the base layer of Microsoft’s cloud/datacenter operating system, also is part of both  the Live Mesh and Oslo platforms? Based on a slide Microsoft provided during its introduction of Live Mesh, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Live Mesh “cloud infrastructure services” and “storage infrastructure” components also figure into the Oslo picture somehow. I guess we won’t know for sure how and if the Live Mesh and Oslo platforms will meet until late October. Until then, new tidbits about Microsoft’s next-generation platforms will continue to trickle out. Here are a few recent ones for your reading pleasure: Oslo: Microsoft joins OMG and officially backs UML, BPMN More on Microsoft’s forthcoming D modeling language Microsoft architect Don Box: What is Oslo? Microsoft product unit manager Doug Purdy: Another definition of Oslo Microsoft renames next rev of BizTalk; older versions will work with new Oslo components Wenlong Dong: .Net 4.0: An early preview of what to expect Live Mesh: Microsoft preps a stable of Live Mesh apps Microsoft demos to-do list app for Live Mesh
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  Ozzie foreshadows ‘Zurich,’ Microsoft’s elastic cloud

  http://www.tekorama.com/ozzie-foreshadows-%e2%80%98zurich%e2...
  127 days ago in Tekorama · Authority: 4

  Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie foreshadowed a couple of still-to-be-released Microsoft’s cloud-developer services during his speech at the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) on July 24. Ozzie was careful to avoid codenames or ship dates during his talk for Wall Street analysts and media in Redmond. But it was pretty clear Ozzie was alluding to Microsoft’s plans for its alternatives to Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud and similar offerings. View Full Article: Mary Jo Foley's Blog

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