Vista News
All the latest Windows Vista and Tech news.
In this post, David Ragones of NVIDIA guest blogs about Internet Explorer Platform Preview 3.
Today, Microsoft hosted an incredible demo day in San Francisco celebrating the release of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3.
The PC has always been the richest platform for experiencing the most immersive software – for example compare playing the latest DirectX 11 games like Metro 2033 in 3D vs. the typical game on a smartphone. Developers for the PC have long had the advantage of powerful CPUs and GPUs to deliver the highest performance and most visual applications.
But on the web, popular browsers have long enabled developers to create basic user experiences with simple interaction and interfaces that have improved somewhat...
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, Dutch, 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.
[update: oops! Dutch will be available also!]
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.
Connecting Windows 7 to the cloud
We’ve designed Essentials...
Keeping up with our commitment to developers to release updates to the Internet Explorer Platform Preview approximately every 8 weeks, today we released Internet Explorer Platform Preview 3 at an event in San Francisco. Together with representatives from top web sites, OEMs and silicon companies we showed what it looks like when you marry powerful hardware with top web site developers on a browser architected for the next generation of web experiences.
The Internet Explorer Platform Preview allows developers to test the new Internet Explorer 9 web development and design capabilities including our new JavaScript engine – codename Chakra – as well as our support for standards like HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1 and DOM.
At our event...
For over ten years now, instant messaging applications have shared a common user interface pattern – a slim window with your contact list in it that you can keep docked on the side of your screen. This makes it easy to keep the window open without taking up too much screen space. Because really, all you’ve ever needed from instant messaging is a list of friends, which allows you to launch popup conversation windows.
With the new Windows Live Messenger, we are expanding that paradigm and introducing what we call “full view” – an expanded mode of Messenger that allows you to access rich media and updates from your social networks, MSN, and more. This view doesn't replace the more traditional “compact view” of your contacts. Rather, it...
We’re now mobile! No more worrying that you’ll miss that important dinner with friends or forget your daughter’s soccer game. Now you can access and manage your Windows Live Calendar from any web-enabled mobile phone. You can browse upcoming events and see when you’re free so you can quickly add new events.
You can also check your schedule by day, week, or month; get previews of event details; set reminders; and add charms like these:
We’ve also made it easy to access on your phone all the calendars you already use. Now, whether you’re on the web, in Outlook, in the Windows Live Mail software, or on your smart phone, you can manage the shared calendar that you use to coordinate your family, see...
A few months ago I authored a post that sets the context for some of the privacy discussion that’s currently happening, and how we think about privacy in Windows Live.
This post describes the new privacy features in Windows Live, including a new way to differentiate between sharing with your close friends and with your acquaintances, and more control over how you share with your Facebook and MySpace friends. Sometime after this post, Ori Amiga will discuss the Messenger Connect experience, which empowers you to take your Windows Live data to other sites and applications and the privacy principles that guided our work in that area.
More...
Hi everyone, I’m Angus Logan (@anguslogan), the Senior Technical Product Manager for Messenger Connect. As we lead up to the launch of Messenger Connect, I want to start a conversation with app developers and marketers. We are consolidating a few of our Windows Live developer related blogs into one place… here!
We hope this blog will complement the Inside Windows Live blog, which Chris Jones describes as “dedicated to software engineers, web industry insiders, and to our most passionate Windows Live customers, those who want to dig a little deeper into how we build our services and how they’re used worldwide”.
The posts will include but are not be limited to:
Code tips and tricks - code-a-plenty from JavaScript to RESTful...
I recently talked about the Windows Summit 2010 and today I want to give everyone a quick update on the event and some new content that went live earlier today. If you have not yet heard, the Windows Summit 2010 is an online event for hardware and software designers, developers, engineers and testers who want to build great products on Windows 7.
Over the last few weeks we have launched the first two of the three content tracks:
The Devices track launched on May 25 and focused on how to differentiate your devices from the rest of the market by taking advantage of Windows 7.
On June 2, the Systems track launched and focused on helping you learn how to leverage Windows 7 features and technologies to create the best...
Hello again! Today, we are very excited to announce the DirectCompute Lecture Series. This video series is intended to provide you with information, tips and insights into developing DirectCompute applications. A component of DirectX, DirectCompute is Microsoft’s GPGPU programming solution that enables you to utilize the GPU for general purpose computing on Windows.
GPUs are useful for purposes other than graphics. As such, the need for APIs to harness their potential has grown rapidly over the last several years. At Microsoft, we have developed DirectCompute in response to this need. Because it can run on all DirectX 11 hardware and most DirectX 10.1 hardware, you can safely use DirectCompute for core application functionality...
If you’ve been using the Office Web Apps since our release last week and saw some of the changes to the new Hotmail that we began rolling out this week, you’ll realize why, like everyone here on the Windows Live team, I love the web.
I especially love how web apps like SkyDrive and Hotmail let me work and play anywhere and communicate and share with anyone. But I also love all the great things I can do with apps on my PC, like fusing multiple photos together in Windows Live Photo Gallery, or editing video clips in PowerPoint 2010.
Some would have you believe that you should abandon the apps on your PC to take advantage of the web, that you must live in a world of compromise where you can’t use the best tools for the job, that...