Microsoft Security Essentials continues to win industry-backed, third-party security certifications. A good, comprehensive anti-virus is a must-have application in any Windows system. An anti-virus application that scans for up-to-date virus signatures, one that runs concurrently in the background for real-time protection, and also importantly, one that does not hog system-valuable resources during runtime is what a pro user desires whatever the cost. For years that personally has meant only one choice for me: using Kaspersky. Keeping up with yearly subscription costs of many anti-virus applications can be an expensive proposition, and its second-class citizen status on the Windows platform often means system performance degradation. In recent years, Microsoft has continued to improve Microsoft Security Essentials to the point where choosing anything else seems nonsensical.
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During its Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event, Microsoft introduced the Windows Server AppFabric Release Candidate and announced that final availability will follow in June.

The company also made available the first public beta for BizTalk Server 2010, which supports Windows Server AppFabric and is scheduled to release to manufacturing in the third quarter of 2010.
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At the Mix10 conference, the Windows Phone 7 teams had some very big announcements – a lot of it had been kept secret and first revealed to the public now. There is however still some details they keep secret. Some of these secrets are the user agents of Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 7, which they simply wouldn’t give us.

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Every so often I go to download some software for my Acer Windows PC and have to decide between a 32-bit and 64-bit version of the application. I’m running Windows Vista but when I look, it just says that I’m running “Home Premium”. How do I know if I’m running 32-bit or 64-bit Windows?

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When I left Microsoft about four years ago, I remember Steve Gillmor telling everyone that Office was dead.

I sort of went along with that, after all I was leaving Microsoft partially because I thought that Microsoft didn’t have an interesting product pipeline and wasn’t going to get the Internet for the second time. Only this time I didn’t sense Bill Gates screaming “turn toward the Internet.” For the most part I was right, at least until this year.

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Microsoft has possibly pulled a fast one on the European Commission (EC) in its wrestling match to see whether their Internet Explorer browser (IE) will be packaged in the new Windows 7 offering. The EC has contended that by including the browser in the operating system that competition is being squeezed out unfairly by Microsoft. Well, we may be seeing that EC stands for ‘Exceptionally Clueless’ considering how they may have stepped all over their own case against the software giant.

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So the next version of Windows will be known simply as “Windows 7.”

That’s according to a post by Mike Nash, Microsoft’s Corporate VP Windows Product Management.

Windows 7 is the planned successor operating system to Windows Vista and a product that Microsoft hopes will confound the Vista critics.

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Microsoft has provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Microsoft said the next release will focus on the five following areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).

The Microsoft announcement included an in-depth look at how Visual Studio Team Systems (VSTS) 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) will help democratize ALM with a unique solution that brings members of a development organization into the application development life cycle, and removes many of the previous barriers to integration. More details on the other focus areas will be released over the product development cycle.

“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.

“These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.”

Microsoft offers new blog to help people understand what is in Windows 7, the successor to Vista, and starting some excellent community outreach. For windows fanboys this is a must read, for everyone else, well tread at your own risk. These are for windows fanboys, so if you go in talking about Linux and how much it rocks, well you know what is going to happen here.

This is one of the better ideas coming out of Microsoft lately, as anything that brings in the outside audience into the development of the new operating system is going to be a good thing. In reality, they need to do this since Channel 9 has pretty much fallen off the radar of many people since Robert Scoble left the show, it just has not been the same without a public on the radar personality to help drive attention to the site. The Engineering Windows 7 blog should go a long way in helping raise awareness, as long as they keep it up. There are a lot of abandoned blogs across the MSDN/TechNet spaces, which makes it harder to know what is happening with a technology.

The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we’re opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project-picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility. Source: E7 Blog

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I haven’t seen it yet, but ZDNet’s Ed Bott has - the teaser image below on Microsoft’s home page that, when you click on it, takes you to a section on the website called Windows Vista: Look how far we’ve come.

I’ve been using Vista in one edition or another since April 2007 and did some of the early beta testing. Largely, I’m pleased with it, even in the face of some pretty bad experiences last year, resolved thanks to Dell a few months ago.

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