Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized the terms of a broad search and advertising agreement intended to help them compete more effectively with Google.The companies announced the agreement, which Microsoft's Bing search engine would power Yahoo's search results, and Yahoo would provide premium search-advertising services for both companies, in July.
Microsoft and Yahoo believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation," the partners said.
Microsoft has also prepared the tools to lay the groundwork for its "software-plus-services" strategy. The tools are designed to help developers write apps for local, on-premises deployment or on the Azure cloud, using the same code base for either environment, and in many cases, not having to change a line of code when moving from one platform to another.
Much of Ozzie's talk today centered around tools and back-end support. He noted that Azure developers could now use not only .Net tools, but also the Zend framework, MySQL, Java, PHP and Eclipse. It reflects quite a shift from Microsoft's old "not invented here" mentality of just a few years back.
Under the Azure platform, developers will be able to pick the datacenter of their choice, and the rest is handled by Microsoft. The database software, called SQL Azure, is "not just a veneer over SQL Server," but a true distributed database that handles all automation, replication and backup on the cloud, Ozzie said.
He then announced Microsoft Pinpoint, a catalog for developers and IT professionals to sell their services and apps. He offered few details except that it would launch next year.
Ozzie also introduced a new information service, Microsoft "Dallas," which will be available through Pinpoint and built completely on the Windows Azure platform. Dallas will enable developers and users to access premium commercial and reference datasets and content on any platform.
Microsoft has already lined up a variety of structured content datasets for Dallas, including the Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, NASA and the United Nations. Dallas is available effective today as a limited community technology preview (CTP) for developers.
Vivek Kundra, the federal government CIO, appeared by video to encourage more projects like Dallas and the "democratization of data." He discussed how the Department of Defense freed up the GPS satellite systems (in the 1980s), which spawned the commercial GPS market. Kundra urged the developers in the audience to look at the information at Data.gov to help drive innovation across the economy.
Next up was Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's server and tools business, who went into further detail on the company's roadmap and outlined more coming products.
"The cloud is more than just about infrastructure. It's also about an app model," he told the audience. Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, would have been impossible to do from a personnel standpoint under the old model because it would require so much human intervention, Muglia explained.
Microsoft built something called Auto Pilot to monitor the servers. If something goes down, such as a server, it's taken offline until someone can take a look at what's wrong and relaunch it.
As such, the cloud requires new app management tools. Muglia announced "Project Sydney," which would provide a secure connection between local servers and the Azure cloud services. It will come out next year.
He also unveiled Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, a set of integrated, high-level application services to easily deploy and manage applications across both local servers and the cloud.
The AppFabric technology combines hosting and caching technologies with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control (formerly referred to as .NET Services). Together, these technologies will allow for the same application services either locally or in the cloud, and from the same code base.
Muglia today also introduced Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure, enabling customers to more easily support a virtualized infrastructure across both on-premises and cloud computing.
Finally, Muglia announced that Windows Identity Foundation has gone final, and will be available for download. Muglia also previewed a new release of ASP.NET MVC2 beta, a framework the company offers to support AJAX developers building Web applications.
If you're just getting used to Windows 7, then it may be time to pull out the diary and pencil in a date in 2012 for the upgrade to its successor, unsurprisingly codenamed Windows 8. The news that the next version of Microsoft's flagship operating system will arrive in 2012 comes from the Microsoft Kitchen fansite, which has obtained a roadmap showing the Redmond giant's plans. Windows Server? Apparently, Windows 8 will fit with Microsoft's plans to keep significant OS releases four years apart. The previous major release seems to be not Windows 7, but Windows Server 2008, we're supposed to believe. While the roadmap is almost certainly the genuine article, the fact that Windows Vista doesn't even appear on the diagram suggests it's aimed at the enterprise IT buyers and has a point to make in making Microsoft look reliable and punctual with its OS releases.
Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.
The SDK comes complete with samples and tools to develop Facebook applications in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and WinForms. It also features the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples.
There are currently other libraries available that allow Facebook developers to develop with other technologies, such as JavaScript, PHP, ActionScript, and the iPhone. There are a variety of others as well, which can be seen here, but these are the ones that Facebook officially provides support for.
Microsoft, as you may remember, invested $240 million in Facebook back in October 2007. Many called this move more of a strategic play to keep Google and Yahoo from getting a stake in the company. The release of this SDK is a part of Facebook and Microsoft's ongoing partnership.
If you're interested in taking a look, you can download the SDK here.
Microsoft Reader is an microsoft publisher reader.Microsoft Reader is a practical application created by Microsoft that will allow you to read electronic books or Books, in a simple and efficient way.
Microsoft wants you to know that even as you read this article, "people around the world are hunting for vulnerabilities in software applications." To help thwart such efforts, Microsoft this week announced a new mitigation security utility for application developers and IT professionals. The Enhanced Mitigation Evaluation Toolkit (EMET), currently at Version 1.0.2, is conceived as an "extensible framework" that will include future mitigation technologies as they are released, according to a Microsoft blog.. This EMET release contains just four mitigations: dynamic data execution prevention, heap spray allocation, NULL page allocation and structured exception handing. EMET users can opt into these mitigations for their applications by using the command line in the utility. Users don't have to have to recompile their applications after using the tool, according to the blog. EMET is the latest component in Microsoft's overall Security Development Lifecycle strategy. It allows developers to write security into applications at a more granular or "command-line" level. Thus, instead of securing an entire application, programmers can code security parameters into a single process. Security mavens like the idea of going deep into the anatomy of an application rather than just relying on anti-virus software or operating system security functions. For instance, Phil Lieberman, president of Lieberman Software, called EMET "a good value-add for Microsoft ISVs [independent software vendors]." EMET allows Windows enterprise pros to "harden their applications for free," which is "always a good price," Lieberman said. "This adds an extra post-production step that allows ISVs to make it much harder for hackers to exploit their applications," he added. "The extra post-production step hardens the rules for memory usage (finer grained protection) and also strengthens the exception mechanisms." As hackers begin to focus more on specific applications, developers have begun to pay more attention to embedded security. EMET is worth a try in the face of server attacks, automated bugs, browser attacks and stack-buffer overflow exploits, according to Andrew Storms. "Every third-party partner, application developer or part time coder should at least consider checking out the new EMET from Microsoft," said Storms, director of security at nCircle. "The toolkit makes it even easier to utilize the newest security enhancement mitigations built into the newer Microsoft operating systems." EMET Version 1.0.2 can be accessed at the Microsoft Download Center here.
Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft’s equivalen to the Apple’s iPhone App Store, opened for business officially on October 6 with 246 applications. Yes, that is nowhere near the more than 85,000 apps in the App Store. But Microsoft officials claimed not to be discouraged by the disparity. At Microsoft’s consumer-focused open-house showcase in New York City today, company officials noted that the company has 753 independent software vendors working on Windows Mobile ports. Robbie Bach, the President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Unit, told press and analysts that he was upbeat about Microsoft’s progress. “Apple had less than 100 applications when it first launched its marketplace,” Bach said. (I did a quick search and found a story claimingthat number was actually closer to 500, when Apple launched its store in 2008.) Bach also claimed it was “kind of goofy” to focus on the absolute numbers of applications in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile store, since the real measure of success is how many of those applications get used. Bach told press and analysts who attended a private roundtable that there are more than 20,000 applications available for Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 phones — and even if the applications focused on specific business verticals and IT tasks are subtracted, there are still “tens of thousands” of Windows Mobile apps out there. The newly launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile currently only works with Windows Mobile 6.5 phones, which launched today. Microsoft officials have said that the Marketplace will also be accessible to Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 phones before the end of the year. But that doesn’t mean the current crop of Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 apps get an automatic berth in the Windows Marketplace; they still need to go through the certification and evaluation process. Windows Live services are going to be available via the Marketplace. Windows Live Hotmail will be included with all Windows Mobile phones, but the some other Windows Live services will be available preloaded on select phones, since “operators are trying to monetize this space separately,” as Aaron Woodman, Director of Product Management for Windows Mobile told me today. (Note: Corrected my misunderstandings here.) Microsoft also officially “turned on” the commercial version of its My Phone premium service for Windows Mobile users on October 6. (My Phone is the service formerly codenamed Skybox.) The final version of the service includes several new capabilities that were not part of the beta service. These are: Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1 or 6.5 users can access these services, which Microsoft considers to be a “premium pack” for free until Nov. 30, 2009. seven-day access to the premium package will be available for purchase for $4.99.
Microsoft has released Windows XP Mode to manufacturing on October 1, company officials said, and it will be generally available on Microsoft.com on October 22, the launch day for Windows 7. XP Mode is a Microsoft virtualization technology aimed primarily at small/mid-size business users (SMBs), and is designed to allow them to run legacy Windows XP applications on Windows 7. Microsoft made a near-final release candidate build of XP Mode available to testers in August. The final version of XP Mode will be available to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate users. It will be downloadable from the Microsoft Web site and also available directly from certain PC makers “based on their manufacturing cycle,” according to a Microsoft spokesperson. Windows 7 users don’t have to have a Software Assurance license from Microsoft in order to get XP Mode. Microsoft is positioning XP Mode as a “last-mile compatibility solution” that is designed for use when Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit and other means don’t result in older apps working on Windows 7.
Windows 7's taskbar lets you pin any running program to the taskbar for easy future access, but it treats folders like second-class sub-items of the Explorer icon. Create a fake "program" to pin individual folder shortcuts to your taskbar.
Microsoft has launched a program that gives Web development professionals the chance to get free software and technical support to help them get new businesses off the ground. Web development companies with less than 10 employees can apply for the new WebsiteSpark program, which was unveiled at the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam Thursday. The program is similar to Microsoft's BizSpark program launched last year, which provides software and other resources to startups, and the DreamSpark program, which does the same for students. Eddie Amos, general manager for Microsoft's developer platform and tools group, said the company added WebsiteSpark because it realized there was a "hole" in the enablement programs where Web professionals are concerned. The programs also provide a way for Microsoft to get young companies and developers using its software in their businesses. In the Web development and Web design space many companies already use products from Adobe and other Microsoft competitors. Through WebsiteSpark -- which companies can apply for online -- Microsoft will provide three licenses for Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, two licenses for Expression Web 3 and one license for Expression Studio 3. Qualifying companies also receive four processor licenses for production use of both Windows Web Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Web Edition. The program also includes two technical-support incidents per company, access to community support through connections with other Microsoft partners and unlimited access to technical managed newsgroups on the Microsoft Developer Network. Cyrus Massoumi, whose company ZocDoc has been a part of Microsoft's BizSpark program, said getting free software and support has been a great benefit. ZocDoc provides a Web site through which people can book doctors' appointments. "The program enables us to work with Microsoft’s latest technologies without worrying about cost, and the savings for our data center are significant," said Massoumi, ZocDoc's CEO and founder. In addition to unveiling WebsiteSpark, Microsoft Thursday also updated its Web Platform Installer software, which simplifies the installation of Microsoft Web development software to make it easier to build Web applications
My previous post described how to add information to and otherwise customize Windows' Welcome screen. But maybe you just want to get your PC going without having to log into an account. You can bypass Windows' log-on screen by changing settings in the Windows Registry, as described in a tutorial on the Computer Performance site, but I find it much simpler to use a free Windows-tweaking utility to do the same thing.
The program I used to customize the Windows Welcome screen tweakNow power pack is the same tool I used to disable the log-on screen on my Vista laptop. Click Windows Secret in the utility's left pane and choose User Accounts. Click "Enable auto log-on," select the account you want to log into automatically, enter the account's password and domain name (if necessary), and click Save. The next time you start the PC, Windows will start and open that account automatically.
TweakNow PowerPack 2009 works with XP, Vista, and windows7, but I tested it only with Vista. I didn't need to download the program to my XP test machine because that system already has tweak UI, Microsoft's free XP-reconfiguration utility that lacks a Vista version.
To set XP to start a specific account without requiring a log-on, open Tweak UI and click Logon > Autologon in the left pane, check "Log on automatically at system startup" in the right window, enter the account's user name and domain (if necessary), and click the Set Password button.
Why bypassing the Windows log-on is dangerous
Setting Windows to open an administrator account automatically is risky, period. Even starting a standard account without requiring a password is dangerous, though less so. There are many very good reasons why Windows accounts are password-protected, and far fewer good reasons for doing without passwords.
That's why I recommend against allowing automatic log-ons in general. But far be it from me to tell you how to use your PC, so if you want to save a few seconds each time you start your system—and you're not worried about somebody doing serious mischief after gaining easy access to your account—it's okay by me.
Microsoft announced yesterday that it is offering Windows 7 to college students for $30, one-quarter the price that everyone else will pay.
This got me thinking about a couple things:
First: Those damn college kids. It's all keg parties, classes that don't start until 11 am, copious vacation time, hope in the future, and more keg parties. Now they get Windows 7 for the cost of a large pizza and a case of Bud Light. Youth is wasted on the young.
Second, the discount for scholars magnifies how overpriced Windows 7 is for the rest of us. In its necessary effort to appeal to the young and try to curb the momentum of Apple's strong-selling $29 Snow Leopard, Microsoft also shined a glaring light on Windows 7's hefty price tag of $120 for the Home Premium version.
Pirates have cracked Windows 7's product activation just a week after the operating system made RTM and a week before it's slated to reach users, Microsoft confirmed today.
The product key posted on the Web purportedly comes from Lenovo, one of Microsoft's major OEM partners, and allows users to activate downloaded copies of Windows 7 Ultimate RTM .
The company can't keep hackers from exploiting file format bugs, a security analyst said.
"What's been happening is that Office has lots of vulnerabilities," said John Pescatore, Gartner's primary security analyst. "For the past 18 months, hackers have been fuzzing Office file formats," he said, referring to the practice of "fuzzing," a tactic that relies on automated tools that drop random data into applications to see if, and where, breakdowns occur.
In a rare move, Microsoft on Friday said it would be releasing security updates on Tuesday--outside of its monthly patch cycle--for a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer and a moderate vulnerability in Visual Studio.
The two security bulletins will address one overall issue and are being released separately "to provide the broadest protections possible to customers," Microsoft said in a statement.
The vulnerabilities affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and Visual C++ 2005 and 2008, according to the security bulletin advance notification.
Microsoft on Tuesday confirmed that it does plan to offer a "family pack" for Windows 7 that can be used on up to three PCs.
The software maker acknowledged the move as part of a blog entry Tuesday afternoon. However, it still isn't saying how much it will charge for the family pack, which allows three installations of the home premium version of Windows 7.
The move was hardly a surprise, after Microsoft included references to the family pack as part of licensing terms in a test version of Windows 7 that leaked onto the Internet.
Windows users have been calling for a family pack since before Windows Vista, and Apple has offered a family pack for Mac OS X since 2002. With Vista, Microsoft had a promotion for a time that allowed those who bought a copy of the Ultimate edition to buy up to three copies of Home Premium at a discount. Apple's family pack covers up to five machines.
Microsoft fielded a beta of Popfly back in 2007, at the height of the Web 2.0 mashup craze. Popfly was designed to allow non-professional programmers and hobbyists to build mash-ups, gadgets, Web sites and applications using pre-built “blocks.” There were tens of these Web-programming blocks from which Popfly users could choose, including Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Virtual Earth and news service blocks. A note on the Popfly beta site confirms the service will be shut down next month: “Thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately, on August 24th, 2009, the Popfly service will be discontinued, all resources will be taken down, and access to your Popfly account, including games and mashups, will cease.” In a July 16 note from the Popfly team on its blog, Microsoft officials are advising those who still interested in “express(ing) your creativity and pursuing a path to software development” to check out other Microsoft tools and products, like Microsoft XNA, Microsoft Kodu and Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer.
Build an original, consumer-oriented client application prototype that runs natively on Windows 7 (for example Win32, WPF, MFC or WinForms – not an Air application or just a gadget) and addresses one or more of the following topic categories: The application must use at least one of the following Windows 7 technology features; however, judging will give more weight to entries that take advantage of more than one of these features: So if you have being following my blog you have some advantage. The contest has several stages and few rules you need to be aware of: For the complete contest rules and legal notice, please refer to the “RULES” section on the Code7 Contest Web site - https://www.code7contest.com/. So, what are you waiting for? Get going and start working on your Windows 7 application!Code7 is a special coding contest for developers. It is a great opportunity to show the world your creativity and coding powers. It is a way for you to cash in on your knowledge and skills.To enter, you must:
Need the Download? Product Key? Start here
Welcome to Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) testing. We're on our way to Windows 7, and if you like trying out pre-release software, now's your chance. You get to see what's coming, and we get to see if our changes and fixes from the Beta testing are working correctly.
How do you test the software? You put it on your PC, and then do what you'd normally do. Your PC will automatically and anonymously send our engineers the information they need to verify the fixes and changes they made based on the Windows 7 Beta tests.
'Browse-and-own' bug lets hackers hijack Windows XP; temp fix available
For the second time in six weeks, Microsoft today confirmed that hackers are exploiting an unpatched bug in DirectX, this time by attacking Internet Explorer (IE).
The company's security team issued an advisory Monday around 1 p.m. ET acknowledging reports of in-the-wild attacks and providing more information about who is vulnerable.
Earlier today, security researchers at a pair of Danish firms had announced that thousands of legitimate Web sites hacked over the weekend were conducting drive by attacks on IE users with an exploit of a critical unpatched vulnerability in Windows' DirectShow, part of DirectX.
"A browse-and-get-owned attack vector exists," Chengyun Chu, of the Microsoft Security Response Center's engineering team, said in a blog postthis afternoon. "A user needs to be lured to navigate to a malicious Web site or a compromised legitimate Web site to be affected ... [but] no further user interaction is needed."
Users running IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are vulnerable to the drive-bys attacks, Microsoft said. Vista and Server 2008 are not at risk, however, nor are people running IE8, Microsoft's newest browser.
Although Microsoft promised it would patch the bug, a company spokesman declined to say whether that patch would be ready by July 14, the next regularly-scheduled security update release day.
To protect at-risk PCs in the meantime, the company urged users to set 45 "kill bits" in the flawed ActiveX control that contains the vulnerability. That ActiveX control, Microsoft admitted, wasn't intended to be used by IE. "We identified that none of the ActiveX Control Objects hosted by msvidctl.dll are meant to be used in IE," said Chu. "Therefore, we recommend to kill-bit all of these controls as a defense-in-depth practice. The side effect is minimal."
Setting ActiveX kill bits can be dangerous, as it involves editing the Windows registry. "If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system," Microsoft warned in its advisory. "Use Registry Editor at your own risk."
An easier way to set the kill bits is to run a custom downloadable automated tool that Microsoft's crafted. The company offered a similar tool as a workaround for the other diect show bug it acknowledged in late May.
The new tool can be downloaded from Microsoft's support site.
Users running a non-Microsoft browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome, are safe from attack.
