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Wednesday, the second day of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, was jam-packed with news about upcoming products, beta releases and more. If you didn’t tune into the live stream, here’s what you missed:

Internet Explorer 9

Arguably one of the bigger announcements from PDC, Steven Sinofsky gave attendees a first look at what’s coming in IE9 with a demo of an early build. The updated browser will support new web standards including HTML5 and CSS3 and will also have a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky admitted that JavaScript performance in IE8 was much slower than other browsers and it’s clear that addressing this problem was a key goal for the IE9 team. A post on the IE blog shows a chart comparing the script performance on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Although still a test build, IE9 has narrowed the gap considerably when it comes to speed:

The new browser will also include “hardware accelerated rendering” which means it will now render graphics and text using the graphics card instead of the CPU. For the end user, this means that online images, videos, animations, and web fonts will be displayed faster, more clearly, and will use less CPU in the process of doing so. This is one of the better features of IE9 as it takes advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite technologies to do something that today’s other browsers don’t – and it’s more useful than both Google's Native Client and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, said Dean Hachamovitch, IE’s GM.

Office 2010

At PDC, Office 2010 launched into beta along with SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps. Office has been given a new look with updated logos and icons, but the most exciting development is the Outlook Social Connector. With this tool, you can track conversations and stay up-to-date with everyone you communicate with via email without having to switch over to another program or website.

Likely inspired by the demands for more social inbox experiences provided by plugins like Xobni as well as third-party services like Gist, the Social Connector will also focus on social network and email integration. As with Xobni, the connector tracks your communication history with your email contacts, your upcoming meetings, and it helps you easily find attachments they may have sent. It also offers activity feeds for each person based on their actions on both business and consumer social networks, including SharePoint 2010’s new social features and Windows Live. 

The first consumer network to support the new feature is LinkedIn, the professional business networking site. With the LinkedIn integration, you’ll be able to track your connections, email them, send invites, and more.

The Social Connector is available now in the Office 2010 beta and the LinkedIn integration will go live early next year.

Silverlight 4

Another major announcement was the developer release of the Silverlight 4 public beta. The updated platform includes a number of new features like webcam and microphone support for sharing audio and video in Silverlight apps, performance improvements that allow it to run 200% faster than Silverlight 3, support for Google Chrome, Deep Zoom enhancements, multi-touch support, and the ability to bring data into the app via copy/paste or drag-and-drop. For example, you could now drag an Office document into a Silverlight application, if desired.

To show off the new capabilities, a Silverlight Facebook app was demonstrated (TechCrunch has the screenshots).  In the app, cycling through the photos was a much faster experience that what it would be in the browser.

Silverlight 4 is a developer release only so no end-user runtime is being provided at this time.

Pivot

Pivot is a new Microsoft Live Labs experience that lets you interact with “massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.” Essentially, it’s a visualization tool for organizing datasets to discover new patterns and insights. The tool, built in SeaDragon and powered by Silverlight, does the visualization over the web. In other words, it’s streaming the data, not caching it locally to your hard drive.

In Pivot, datasets are organized as collections which are displayed using thumbnail images. The collections consist of objects that share some common attributes. In Pivot, you can analyze all these objects in a broader context. For example, as the video explains on Pivot’s homepage, they used Pivot to look at all of social lending organization Kiva’s loans and sort them by loan type.

Another example of Pivot in action is Brandon Watson’s Crunchbase Viewer which allows you to sort through the massive amounts of data stored in the online database about internet startups.

In order to use Pivot, you need an invite. You can request one here.

The popular Twitter application from Seesmic is moving away from the Adobe AIR platform and over to Windows where it will use .NET and WPF technologies. The company also announced a Silverlight version is in the works for some sometime next year which will re-introduce the cross-platform capabilities previously offered via Adobe AIR.

Considering that some of the top Twitter applications currently use AIR (TweetDeck immediately comes to mind, for example), you may wonder why the company decided to make the switch. According to Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO, the app’s users have been asking for a native Windows client for some time. He also said that the new client will be faster and will use less memory than the AIR version.

Le Meur notes on his blog that the new app will also offer some great Windows-only features, including location-based updates and access to several languages in spell checker.

If you’re interested in trying the new version of Seesmic for Windows, you can sign up now to join Team Seesmic, the company’s exclusive band of beta testers. Team Seesmic members get early access to all the company’s releases and are kept up-to-date with emails about the new products and upgrades.

Thanks to a grant from Microsoft Research, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has launched a new website called Be a Martian. On the site, visitors can virtually “explore” Mars, zooming around the planet, looking at images from various Mars landers, explorers, and satellites from the 1960’s to present-day. But Be a Martian isn’t just an educational experience – it’s a crowd-sourced experiment that may end up helping NASA accomplish something important: process the massive volumes of image data they have collected about the red planet.

To encourage visitors to pitch in with data analysis, Be a Martian makes work a game. Multiple games, in fact. In one game, players line up images from the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter with a larger image from the Mars Global Surveyor, a process which could help NASA create more accurate 3D models of the planet. Another game has users counting craters. And everyone participating earns points and badges for playing, making the process even more fun.

The site uses Silverlight so it works in any major browser while still offering a visually impressive experience. On the backend, the NASA data is stored in “Dallas,” Microsoft’s newly launched project for serving up massive data stores which web developers can use to create information-rich sites. The Be a Martian website runs on Windows Azure, allowing the site to scale as needed. “The system dedicates an appropriate amount of processors to the application, whether it’s being used by 250, 250,000 or 2,500,000 people at the same time,” says Marc Mercuri, Microsoft’s director of business innovation for Developer Platform Evangelism (DPE).

Coinciding with the site’s launch are two Martian-themed contests, one for developers and one for non-programmers. Developers can enter the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge which asks them to use the NASA data, its media API and other components to build new applications for solving a set of problems defined by NASA scientists and engineers. Non-programmers have the Martian Film Fest which lets them build on their digital movie-making skills. More details about both contests is available on NASA’s website here. 

On Tuesday, Microsoft kicked off the 2009 Professional Developer Conference (PDC) with some big news about Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform announced a year ago at PDC 2008.

The biggest news to come out of the keynote was the announcement that Azure will launch into production on January 1st, but customers will get the first month of service free. However, prior to its public launch, a few companies are already using Azure now. During the keynote, some of them came on stage to discuss how. This group included some big names like WordPress, Domino’s Pizza, and the Cheezburger Network (yes, the blog empire built from LOLcats).

Matt Mullenwag of Automattic, the company behind the open-source blogging platform WordPress, showed off how Azure powers their service, taking away the stress related to massive traffic spikes. And yes, that was a downright geek-tastic way of demonstrating how Azure works with open source technologies. The recent release of the SDK’s for PHP, Ruby, Java and Eclipse further highlights how Windows Azure extends beyond Windows technologies.  

Similarly, the ICanHazCheezburger network is launching a new site on Azure called www.oddlyspecific.com. The site, devoted to funny signs, will also use Azure to help balance the massive traffic spikes common with its virally shared properties.

Another big name from outside the web world moving to Azure is Domino's Pizza who uses the platform to manage their ordering system. The company says it will be especially helpful on Super Bowl Sunday when ordering peaks.

Kelly Blue Book (KBB), will also be moving to Azure, allowing them to close a second data center kept online mainly for failover reasons. With Azure’s ability to provide extra computing power when necessary, the company says the extra data center will no longer be needed.

Even Vivek Kundra, the U.S. government’s CIO made an appearance to discuss open-development efforts, specifically a project code-named “Dallas” which is powered by Windows Azure and SQL Azure. This “data as a service” offering is an open marketplace for data. The data will be available for purchase at a site called “Pinpoint” and includes data from NASA, the AP, National Geographic, data.gov, and more. Kundra also said that he was looking forward to the “thousands of applications that are going to be created,” and after everything we heard about Azure’s power, we are too.

If you’re a Twilight fan, then you’re likely anxiously awaiting this week’s opening of New Moon, the latest movie to detail the events taking place in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-themed saga about a human/vampire romance. In the meantime, you can gear up for the big event with a exclusive online tour, courtesy of Bing, of all the locations mentioned in the book from the Cullen house to the high school to the hospital where Bella seems to spend a lot of time.

At The Virtual Twilight Tour website, you can pull up the various locations on the map then watch related videos that show the actual locations used in the filming. (For example, did you know that Bella Italia is a real restaurant?)

You can also watch exclusive videos like the featured video called “Land of Legends” which talks about the vampires of Forks, Washington or a clip from a “Stephanie Meyer Day” event. There are also links to online photo galleries from the new movie, actor photos, and Twilight rumors on MSN’s celebrity-themed Wonderwall site.

The new Twilight application uses Bing Maps Silverlight control for location context and integration of the video and audio elements, but most visitors won’t care about that part…they’re just there to see Edward, Bella, and everything else Twilight-related that they can get their hands on.

(via the Bing Maps blog)

Call me a sucker for a good design, but I love Dell’s new candy-colored mini computers. New for this year’s holiday season the computer manufacturer has just launched a line of desktop PCs with small form factors…and surprisingly, quite a lot of power too.  Called the Dell Inspiron Zino HD, these mini machines offer up to 8 GB of RAM, 1 TB of hard drive space, a 1.8GHz dual-core AMD Athlon Neo X2 6850e CPU, a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4330 GPU, a Blu-Ray drive, DVD burner, HDMI out, a 4-in-1 card reader, four USB 2.0 sockets, a pair of eSATA ports, Wi-Fi, and a wireless keyboard and mouse. The PCs start at $229, but if you trick them out with all the options, the price can end up being a lot more.

If you can wait to purchase, the line will soon feature a TV Tuner option as well, although that won’t be available at launch unfortunately.

The Zino PCs run Windows 7 and come with a wireless remote, too. You can learn more about the line on Dell’s website here.

On Wednesday, Zune HD owners got a nice surprise: new 3D games! According to a post on Zune Insider, there are now six new titles available, including Project Gotham Racing, Audiosurf Tilt, Vans SK8: Pool Service, Lucky Lanes Bowling, Piano, and Checkers. This addition brings the number of Zune games to a little over a dozen now. Best of all, the new games are entirely free.

If you want to see the games in action, Crunchgear has posted a video demonstrating some of the more interesting titles on their Zune HD device. And on the Mobility Site, they’ve reviewed a few of the new games including PGR, Lucky Lanes, and Audiosurf Tilt.

In order to download the new games to your device, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Connect your Zune HD to your computer and sign into the Zune software.
2. Click on Marketplace, Apps.
3. Select the game or app you want, then click Download.
4. Go to Collection, Apps, and drag the games and apps that you want to the Zune player icon to sync them.

Finally, to access games and apps on your Zune HD, on the home screen tap Apps, then tap the game or app you want.

You can learn more about each individual game by reading the descriptions provided here.

Windows Live, the social homepage that connects you to all your online activities including email, news, photos, social networks, and more, has just added 19 more “activity partners” to their line up. In case you’re unfamiliar, the activity partners are the websites you can add to your network feed – an always-updated source of information about what your friends are doing around the web. It’s sort of like Facebook’s News Feed except that it includes updates about what you’re doing on Windows Live as well as on other websites around the net including Facebook. Here, you can configure your page to get updates from social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, Yelp, and Pandora, and tons of others as well as from blogs and RSS feeds. You can pick which ones you want to see by editing your settings from your home.live.com homepage.

As of this week, you now have access to 19 more web activities partners, including, most notably, YouTube, CNET, and Break.com. The other sites being added are more country specific as you can see here in the list below:

• 4Travel (Japan)
• Azbuz (Turkey)
• Baby Kingdom (Hong Kong)
• Biip.no (Norway)
• BuscaPe (Brazil)
• L’internaute Copains (France)
• Doctissimo Community (France)
• IRC-Galleria (Finland)
• Libimseti.cz (Czech Republic)
• lokalisten.de(Germany)
• Multiply (US)
• MyVIP (Hungary)
• Neogen (Romania)
• PIXNET (Taiwan)
• Qype (Germany)
• Wat.tv (France)

Although many of those sites are only popular in their home countries, you don’t have to live in that country to add them to your network feed.

If you prefer to use MSN as your homepage, you can also add your Windows Live Network feed to that site now too, thanks to the new redesign of MSN.com available here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx.

According to a post from the Windows Mobile Developer blog, the Marketplace for Mobile now has a new home: the web. In addition to coming pre-installed on all Windows Phone handsets, you can now browse through all the available applications right from your PC in the new online Marketplace. But this new site doesn’t just display what applications are available – you can also download them right from the store itself.

To do so, you’ll need to configure your account settings including your billing preferences and device settings. These options are available from the “Account Settings” link at the top of the page. If you’re not able to select your device, it’s because you haven’t yet signed into the Windows Marketplace for Mobile from your Windows phone yet. You have to do that first.

Once set up, you can browse by category or search through all the available applications for your phone. The site also highlights the most popular apps, the new apps, and showcase apps, just as the Marketplace on your mobile handset does too. When you find an application you want to buy, it can then be delivered wirelessly to your device.

To check out the new online Marketplace, go to: marketplace.windowsphone.com

In addition to the newly announced Wolfram Alpha integration, the Bing Search Team is also launching a number of new features that live up to Bing’s promise of being a “decision” engine and not just a search engine. These features include improvements to their travel, weather, and shopping options as well as the “previews” feature which are the little sidebar pop-ups that appear when you hover your mouse over a search result. Combined, these improvements represent a major step forward for the new search engine, even leading some to dub the offering “Bing 2.0.”

Improved Travel Features

Travel is already one of Bing’s more useful capabilities thanks to an acquisition of a company called Farecast whose service helps travelers determine the best time to fly in order to get the best price. Now travel searches will be even easier. Once rolled out, you’ll be able to hover over the “Travel” link on the homepage to get a pop-up task-focused menu with options to “search flights,” “search hotels,” or “get airfare deals.” 

There will also be a new interactive Instant Answer where you can enter in your origin, destination, and dates into the boxes provided in order to find airfare deals courtesy of Bing Travel. Alongside travel booking-related results, information on the area you’re traveling to will also be made available including local attractions, points of interest, neighborhoods and other local information sources like newspaper web sites. There will even be high-resolution photo slideshows of your destination.

Improved Previews

While the previews feature itself is not new, it’s about to get a major update. The new previews will extract information from the associated web page. For example, a business listing’s preview may show an address and phone number. Another preview may extract a “contact us” email address. Previews will also now include a screenshot of that web page and popular links on the site. Previews for Facebook pages will show the person’s photo and links to message them or send a friend request.

New Event Searches

Another new feature is event searches. To use this, just type in the name of a city and then the word “events.” Bing will return a summary of events which you can filter by categories like performances, civic activities, music, and more. This will be an option for major cities only for now.

Shopping Improvements

Bing Shopping has also been improved to offer built-in sharing features. Each product listing will include a share feature that lets you send a link to that product over Facebook, Twitter, or via email. Not only can you use this to share your interest in a product, you could also quickly post it to these social services along with a question you hope your friends might know the answer to.

Better Answers for Health Conditions, Medications, and Hospitals

The search results for health conditions, medications, and hospitals have also been improved to provide more information and better organized results. There are one box answers as well as site-search boxes for querying within a hospital’s website.

And More…?

Believe it or not, these are just “some” of the new features coming to Bing. There are tons of other updates still in the works, according to the blog post about these changes.

You may not be seeing these results just yet – the rollout is expected to take a few weeks before it’s complete.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is now using the computational engine known as Wolfram Alpha to answer some of its users’ search queries. Wolfram Alpha is an entirely different sort of search engine than anything that Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo offers – it’s built on top of Mathematica, a program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields. As with Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha can handle math questions input into its search box, but it can also answer queries about physics and chemistry, nutritional information, weather, census data, financial information, and more. Although its scope is more limited than a traditional search engine, when asked a question it understands, it gives a real answer instead of just a list of linked search results.

Of course, the challenge for any newcomer to search is gaining awareness and then getting people to remember what the engine can be used for and when to use it. An often better solution, as it turns out, is to integrate a unique search engine’s content and capabilities into an already-established brand’s traditional search service. Microsoft did this once before with their acquisition of Powerset, the natural language processing engine that now powers Bing Reference. And now Bing is doing it again with Wolfram Alpha.

According to a post on the Bing Search Team’s blog, the new Wolfram Alpha integration will offer answers in the areas of nutrition, fitness, and math.

In the case of the nutrition/fitness questions, Bing users can query for nutritional information, calculate body mass index, and more. For example, when you search for a food item on Bing, you’ll be presented with a nutrition tab which, like a food label, displays the details about the nutritional info in that food item.

Another example is how a search for “bmi calculator” will pull up an actual calculation tool right at the top of the search results.

As far as math queries, Bing can now answer math questions – even highly complex ones. Might be a good way to check your homework problems before turning them in!

If you’re not seeing these same results, that’s because the rollout hasn’t reached you just yet – stay tuned. It’s being pushed out over the next few days to all users.

If you're looking for a drop in monitor that supports Windows 7 Multitouch applications, 3M has a kit for you. This 19" monitor may seem very pricey at $1499, but keep in mind this is huge for a capacitive display. Normally monitors this large will have an optical tracking system for the touchpoints, leaving you with 2-4 touch points at best. This capacitive glass-front display is good for a full 10-point multi-touch experience. Check the site for more details and videos of the monitor in action.

Today a new experiment comes out of Redmond in the form of a new toolbar for Internet Explorer that analyzes the web pages you are looking at and applies what it sees to your social networks. This means the proper nouns and contextual references in the sites you're looking at are matched up to the things your friends might be talking about. So if you're browsing a movie review, you may see what a friend wrote about that movie as an inline contextual update.

Emre Kiciman and CK Wang from Microsoft Research joined us at the Channel 9 studio to talk about the Social Web toolbar and how it works. You can download the Social Web Experience Toolbar for IE here.

The Microsoft Zune Team recently rolled out an update to the Zune HD firmware which brings several new features and improvements. If you aren’t seeing the updated firmware yet (version 4.3), Steve Clayton has a tip on how to force the update.

One of the key features of the new firmware upgrade is an improvement to the included web browser – it’s now faster and offers controls that let you switch between the mobile and desktop version of the website you’re viewing.

Also new is an auto-suggest feature for text input and support for upcoming 3D games and applications. That’s right – apps and games. In case you missed the news during the Zune HD launch, there are plans to release free applications for the Zune sometime this year (soon, we now hope) such as Twitter for Zune and Facebook for Zune. In addition, the device will also support some 3D games including "Project Gotham Racing: Ferrari Edition," "Vans Sk8: Pool Service" and "Audiosurf(TM) Tilt." The games can be added to via the Zune Marketplace accessible over a Wi-Fi connection or when connected to a PC running Zune software.

Other new features in the Zune HD 4.3 firmware are as follows:

• Larger landscape keyboard
• Keyboard option has been added in the settings section
• New toggle between seek and presets for the radio
• Updated artist bios with embedded links to other artists
• Other bug fixes, minor updates and improvements

You can see these features in action in this YouTube video.