Vista News

Beta is here! This means we are getting closer to release, which means it is time you start building your Windows Phone applications ASAP. Just in case you are asking, here is a great resource to help you get started building great Windows Phone applications. As part of our efforts to help developers jumpstart their development of Windows Phone applications, we released a refresh of the Windows Phone Training to meet the changes in the Windows Phone Beta tools release. You can download a local copy of the training kit, or you can go to the online version on Channel 9. More information about the new tools can be found here This release of the WP training kit includes all the labs from the previous release (updated to the Beta...

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager to get the new version out to everyone. I’d like to give a bit more detail about why it takes time to do the rollout. In the last post, I explained that we go slowly at first in order to give our engineers an opportunity to study the operational characteristics of the new software in all the different environments. That’s true of every release. But there is another reason why this particular release can only move so fast. In order...

The new Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now available for download! MAP 5.0 is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments. This Solution Accelerator performs an inventory of heterogeneous server environments and provides you with usage information for servers in the Core CAL Suite and SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 discovery and assessment for consolidation, Windows 2000 Server migration assessment, and a readiness assessment for the most widely used Microsoft technologies—now including Office 2010. What’s new in MAP 5.0? Heterogeneous server environment inventory - Know...

When you want to get in touch with someone, where do you look? There are lots of places that people store their contact data - the address book for their email account, their Instant Message buddy list, Facebook, LinkedIn, their phone…. When you find that person you want to reach out to, is their information up to date? What about their email address? If they have more than one email address, which do you use? Are they online? Maybe you should send them an SMS or Facebook message. My oh my, there are lots of ways to keep in touch! Managing contacts just isn’t something people want to spend their time doing. Well, maybe some people… but I gather most of you would like an address book that is: Up to date Reflective of...

This weeks post is from Carl Luberti, a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Internet Explorer team. To start, I wanted to address that Internet Explorer 8 has over 1300 Group Policy entries that can be configured, which is great for keeping your environment managed and safe. That can also create some challenges in wrapping your head around all of the possibilities, so I wanted to begin with a list of 10 entries that are usually the most asked-about control locations for IE8 from a support perspective. Hopefully, this will give a bit of a "jumping off" point to managing Internet Explorer with Group Policy. It's one of the most powerful features of using Internet Explorer 8 in an Active Directory domain, so I want to make this...

Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for july 13, 2010 Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for july 13 2010 Published: july 13 2010 Note: There may be latency issues due to replication, if the page does not display keep refreshing Note: Security Center - Bulletins Advisories Tools Guidance Resources and Microsoft Security | Computer Security | Malicious Software are authoritative in all matters concerning Microsoft Security Bulletins! ANY e-mail, web board or newsgroup posting (including this one) should be verified by visiting these sites for official information. Microsoft never sends security or other updates as attachments. These updates must be downloaded from the microsoft.com download center or Windows Update. See the...

Today, we announced at our annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) the availability of the public beta for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1). As Gavriella Schuster and I have mentioned in previous blogs, SP1 for Windows 7 does not contain any new features specific to Windows 7. However, the new features in SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 benefit Windows 7 by providing a richer Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) experience. For Windows 7, SP1 is simply a combination of updates already available through Windows Update and additional hotfixes based on feedback by our customers and partners. For more information on Windows 7 SP1 and new features for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, I recommend reading this blog post...

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Are you running a 64-bit edition of Windows 7? There is a high likelihood you are. As of June 2010, we see that 46% of all PCs worldwide running Windows 7 are running a 64-bit edition of Windows 7. That is, nearly half of all PCs running Windows 7 are running 64-bit. Compared to Windows Vista at 3 and a half years after launch, only 11% of PCs running Windows Vista worldwide are running 64-bit. With Windows 7, running a 64-bit OS is becoming the norm. A primary benefit of 64-bit Windows is the increase in addressable memory. This makes more “bits” available to Windows (the OS), which means more information can be “addressed” at once. 32-bit architectures have a memory ceiling of 4GB while the 64-bit...

Over the past few months, we have talked quite a bit about the MDT 2010 Beta (Your Adding Office 2010 to MDT 2010 Environment Questions Answered!, Your Building a LiteTouch Bootable USB Image Questions Answered!, and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1 - Now in Beta Release!) We are very pleased to announce the the RTM of MDT 2010 Update 1 is now available. If you’re making the move to Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and/or Office 2010, you need tools and guidance to help you through the process. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010, a free Solution Accelerator, is designed to fill that need. The latest MDT 2010 Update 1 release, now available for download, offers something for everyone: For System Center...

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta, we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick tour of some of the high points. Making it easy to share photos via the cloud Given all of the talk about sharing on the web, you might be surprised to hear that fully half of all content sharing is done through email. Attaching photos to an email message is convenient, but it actually isn’t a great way to share because of limits on the number and size of email attachments. A lot of people try to deal with these limits by shrinking...

I wanted to talk about a new user safety feature we just introduced in Wave 4: SmartScreen for URLs This safety feature is another step Windows Live is taking to protect you from socially engineered attacks and account abuse. This abuse is an industry-wide problem, and we've seen a significant uptick in these types of attacks within the context of social networks over the past couple years (details in Microsoft SIR V8, p.119). Social networking targeted scams now account for over half of the phishing attacks that SmartScreen filter blocks in Internet Explorer 8. This trend makes sense; internet users are particularly vulnerable within their social networks because messages appear to come from their friends and contacts. There is...

more.. Thenextweb article: App Store, Hacked. (Updated: iTunes Accounts too.)

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Now that the new generation of Windows Live web services has been released, some of you have asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces within the broader context of Windows Live and show how Spaces has had, and continues to have, a big influence on our overall direction. Our fight against spam Like many sites, Spaces, too, struggles with the never-ending battle against spam. Improving in this area was a big priority for us, in both Spaces and Hotmail. Our efforts here are already showing signs of success. For example, during the heaviest period of attacks on Spaces, a spam-tracking website called Uribl attributed 1500...

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...

Following up on the release of Internet Explorer Platform Preview 3 last week, Lionel Menchaca Dell’s chief blogger took it for a spin. In this guest post, Lionel shares his impressions. Microsoft’s release of the latest Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview brings a new level of hardware acceleration to the web. I took some time to play around with IE9 trying several of the demos on the IE Test Drive site. In a word, I’d say I’m “impressed.” In a lot of ways, people tend to relegate web browsing to the low-end of computing hardware spectrum along with activities like e-mail and other basic productivity apps. I think that could very well change with the hardware acceleration in Internet Explorer 9. Hardware acceleration in...

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Last week Omar Shahine blogged about our new privacy features in Windows Live, where we’ve made some improvements that we hope you will appreciate and find both powerful and easy to use. We also recently announced Windows Live Messenger Connect, an exciting new feature set that enables you to easily connect to Windows Live from third party applications and lets you take your Windows Live experience and data, with your consent and at your discretion. Additionally, we also announced the new Messenger (try it now), which provides the most complete picture of what your friends are doing across your social networks and other sharing sites, including comprehensive integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. We believe that you should...