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The first public testing milestone of Office 2010 is now available for download, with Microsoft imposing no limitations on the number of users that can grab the bits, or on the period of availability. Office 2010 Beta Build 14.0.4536.1000 is offered in both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) flavors and can be used until October 2010, when the product is set to expire. Microsoft slaps expiration dates on all its pre-release and trial software, allowing testers to run the software for free in exchange for their feedback. This is the case of the various editions of Office 2010 Beta, which were launched at the Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles. “At PDC we announced the availability of the public betas of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers. If you’d like to be one of the millions of people who try, test and give feedback on the latest and greatest, you can download the betas,” revealed a member of the Office 2010 team.As far as testing Builds go, this particular release of Office 2010 is the second milestone offered to early adopters. In mid-2009, Microsoft made available for download the Technical Preview of Office 2010, but only to a limited pool of testers. As I’ve already sa...

According to information available from Microsoft, the next iteration of the Windows client and server operating system is at a maximum of three years away. The Redmond-based company revealed that it expects to deliver the next major release of Windows approximately in 2012. Of course, “approximately” is the key, as it offers the software giant a little elbow room. Microsoft has so far failed to commit to a specific timetable for the delivery of codename Windows 8, but customers looking forward to it should know that it will drop within two to three years. In the graphics included with this article, courtesy of MSFTKitchen, the Redmond-based company seems to be clearly eyeing 2012 for the release of Windows 8. For the time being, still under a month since Windows 7 hit store shelves, it is, of course, much too early for Microsoft to start the discussion of its successor. But expect it to provide an actual delivery deadline extremely late in the development process of Windows 8, considering the Windows 7 experience.After all, Steven Sinofsky continues to be at the lead of the Windows project, only now with much more power, from the role of President, Windows and Windows Live Division. Most likely, Microsoft will attempt to continue building and delivering Windows client and server releases at the same...

With Internet Explorer 9 early in the making, Microsoft revealed at the Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles that it had identified a total of three pillars for IE’s evolution: standards and interoperability, hardware acceleration, and JavaScript performance.At the bottom of this article, you will be able to find three videos embedded, each dealing with one of IE9’s development focuses. The videos feature the General Manager of Internet Explorer but also additional members of the IE team, actively involved in building the next generation of Microsoft’s proprietary browser. “At the PDC, in addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperable standards, we showed how IE and Windows will make the power of PC hardware available to web developers in the browser. Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don’t do today. Web site developers will see performance gains and other benefits without having to re-write their sites,” revealed Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer.Although the Redmond-based company did deliver a taste of IE9, it did not offer the actual bits for the browser. Now, it could have done so, since Intern...

At just approximately a month after the general availability deadline of Windows 7, the operating system enjoys strong support from hardware and software companies worldwide. In fact, there are approximately 9,000 products that now feature the “Compatible with Windows 7” logo, Microsoft revealed at the Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles earlier this week. In this regard, Windows 7 is definitely not a repeat of Windows Vista, as the readiness level of the ecosystem of hardware and software products reveals. “The ecosystem around Windows is really amazing. Think about the install base - there are more than one billion users who use Windows. Those users want great applications and there are 3 million programmers building applications around the world and 90 percent of those developers target Windows. You could also look at our telemetry from the beta cycle which shows more than 800,000 unique applications (which includes multiple versions, 32/64 bit & languages) running on Windows 7 during the beta timeframe,” explained vice president of the Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) Group, Mark Relph.According to Relph, the actual number of apps designed to run on the latest iteration of the Windows client is in the hundreds of thousands, Microsoft not knowing the exa...

Internet Explorer is not what it used to be. Firefox, but also additional rival browser such as Safari and Google Chrome, have eroded Microsoft’s dominance on the browser market. IE is left struggling even after the release of Internet Explorer 8 this year and with no end in sight to its downward trajectory. The Redmond company’s proprietary browser has continually bled audience to competitors, and it looks like on certain markets, Internet Explorer no longer occupies the dominant position. And it is only Mozilla’s Firefox to blame for IE being forced to give up the lion’s share of the browser market. According to statistics made available by Gemius Ranking, Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer in terms of market share in Central and Eastern Europe. The chart below, courtesy of Mozilla, indicated the trends on the browser market share data, from the start of 2007 until present day. Users need to understand that the information provided is in no way illustrative of the worldwide browser usage trends. Instead, the graphics only show data aggregated from users across nine countries: Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. As of mid-November 2009, Gemius put the market share of Firefox above that of Internet Explorer for C...

Windows 7 has nothing short of hit the ground running in terms of sales, Microsoft has already noted on multiple occasions. Most recently, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer speaking to participants at Microsoft’s Annual Shareholder Meeting today, underlined the strength in Windows sales following the general availability of Windows 7, on October 22nd, 2009. Ballmer has mentioned that Windows 7 is off to a fantastic start with record sales figures, an early success that more than mirrors the rave reviews and accolades that the operating system received. But in spite of Windows 7 reaching a new apex for sales of a new Microsoft OS release, the Redmond company has actually dodged revealing any figures. The software giant is so far keeping mum on the actual qualities of Windows 7 that are being purchased by customers worldwide. But it shouldn’t be that hard to estimate just how many copies of its latest iteration of the Windows client Microsoft actually sold. “Windows 7 is the simply best PC operating system we have ever built,” Ballmer explained. “It enables people to do more of what they want to do more easily and more quickly, and customers are responding. Since launch, we’ve already sold twice as many units of Windows 7 than any other operating system we’ve ever launched in a...

Adding extra horsepower to PHP applications running on top of the Windows operating system is now a simple task. On November 19th, Microsoft made available for download version 1.0 of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache. The extension was put together by the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team and is essentially designed to provide a PHP accelerator for customers choosing Windows and Windows Server rather than Linux and Apache to run their PHP apps. Peter Galli, the Open Source Community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, has revealed that with the GA of version 1.0, Windows Cache Extension is ready for deployment into production environments. WinCache is an open source project offered under the BSD license, with Microsoft providing full access to the source code. WinCache extension is a significant open source contribution from Microsoft to the PHP on Windows community. The extension code is hosted and maintained on PHP Extensions Community Library (PECL) and is available for everyone to view, branch, compile, and contribute to,” Galli noted. As a Windows PHP caching extension, WinCache was made a part of the PECL extension library, offered for free and requiring little additional efforts from developers beyond implementation. The promis...

The third major update for Microsoft’s home server is now just days away. Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 (PP3) will be made available on November 24, 2009, and users will be able to grab it through Windows Update. From the get go, the Redmond company will make available Windows Home Server PP3 in the following languages Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, and users will need to already be running the second Power Pack for the home server in order to be able to integrate the latest release. Windows Home Server PP2 customers need only turn on Automatic Updates in order to have PP3 automatically delivered and installed on their machines. “Power Pack 3 improves the Windows Home Server experience with Windows 7 and Windows Media Center by providing new features like: backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for netbook computers. Power Pack 3 will enable the most optimal experience for Windows 7 users on a Windows Home Server network,” noted Microsoft’s Mark Pendergrast. When it comes down to Windows Home Server, this Microsoft OS is a tad special, in the sense that major upgrades are not served through Service Packs but rather to Power Pa...

Microsoft continues to push forward with efforts to expand its mapping, search and location platform. While Bing Maps, formerly Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps, is essentially a Cloud based application covering the entire world, the company does focus on specific markets more than on others. Case in point: Bing Maps China, which along with Bing Maps (US) and Bing Maps UK, gets preferential treatment in comparison with other countries around the world. Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft, announced that the software giant introduced a massive update to Bing Maps China. “The Bing Maps China site has updated much of their data, added tons of new data and added a few new features,” Pendleton noted. Usually, the Redmond company measures its Bing Maps updates in multi-Terabytes, and most probably it is the case here, but no actual figures on the size of the refresh were made public. Instead, Pendleton enumerated a range of new features that were brought to the table with the latest update. Chinese users of Bing Maps will be able to enjoy enhancements associated with the Yellow Pages integration, business images, transit and traffic information, road data, directions, etc. At the same time, Microsoft has also bumped up a notch the resources made available to developers to bu...

Because of fundamental differences in the architecture of operating systems today, multi-platform applications have to be tailored to each specific OS on their own, as they won’t work by simply compiling the source code which was developed for a certain platform on all alternatives available. Unix and Windows are an illustrative example in this regard, forcing developers that need their app to run on both operating systems to take a series of actions in order to adapt their code, a process referred to as porting. One Microsoft employee, working with people from InteropSystems, put together a project designed to streamline the porting of Unix apps on Windows, when it comes down to the high performance computing environments. The Unix to Windows Porting Dictionary for HPC is currently live and accessible for devs around the world. The dictionary is designed with a focus on Unix calls, allowing users to easily find the Windows equivalent to Unix functions. In addition, the resource will also provide the header files associated with that specific function as well as a demonstration of how the header files can be used. “This dictionary is organized by frequently used HPC Unix calls. Each entry show the Unix function, its Windows equivalent (if it exists), required header files, an example ...

Microsoft is offering developers a chance to win no less than $15,000 in cash via a new contest with the Windows Embedded CE operating system at the core. The Redmond company is currently accepting participants in the embeddedSPARK 2010 Challenge, that requires developers to put together an embedded project for a chance to win $15,000 and additional prizes. According to the software giant, the contest has already started on September 22nd, 2009, but it’s by no means too late to enter. In fact, the first round is not scheduled to end until January 9th, 2010, so there’s plenty of time to put together the initial stage of your embedded project. For round one, devs need to “submit a 1-3-page paper that outlines an embedded project that catches the eye and brings a smile to your face. Perhaps it is a game you designed for an embedded device. Perhaps it is a magic button that turns your house into a disco, or an interactive toy for children. As long as it catches people’s attention and brings a smile to their faces, you are on the right track. Be creative, have fun but remember this is an embedded challenge,” Microsoft revealed. But once the first round is finished, participants in the embeddedSpark 2010 challenge will need to get their hands dirty. Fortunately enough, Micros...

Inevitable, the advent of a new operating system has to be branded with certain coordinates that position the platform in relation to the ubiquitous Windows OS from Microsoft. Google Chrome OS has in this manner joined the club of non-Windows operating systems, and don’t think for a minute that this does not apply to Microsoft’s itself. The Redmond company is also cooking non-Windows platforms (Singularity and Midori), and time will come when the software giant will have to go against itself on the OS market. However, which such a scenario is most probably reserved for the next decade, the Google Chrome OS has become tangible. Almost tangible, because the actual bits for the Google Chrome OS aren’t yet available for download. Instead, what the Mountain View-based search giant did was release the source code associated with the Chromium OS project. Users and developers, familiar with the way that the Google Chrome browser is built, already know that it too has a Chromium underlining project. And in fact, the similarities between the Chrome browser and the Chrome OS doesn’t stop at this. “We released Chromium OS, the open source project behind Google Chrome OS. Google Chrome OS is an operating system that is intended for people who spend most of their time on the web. It aims to ...

While just a single month into the development of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has opened up to participants at the Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles, and subsequently to the world, revealing the first details about the next generation of IE. Steven Sinofsky, president, Windows and Windows Live Division noted that there were three key areas of interest in developing IE9, namely standards support, performance improvements, and the introduction of hardware acceleration. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Internet Explorer, has shared the results of the SunSpider test involving a very early development build of Internet Explorer 9, as well as pre-release versions of rival products, such as Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome 4.0. As you can see from the chart below, IE9 is miles away from IE7 and IE8 in terms of performance, and almost matching in speed the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome. “It is worth noting that once the differences are this small, the other subsystems that contribute to performance become much more important, and perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites. That said, we remain committed to improving script performance,” Hachamovitch explained. “We’re looking at the performance characteristics of all the browser sub-systems as re...

The Acer Aspire 1420P, featured in the images accompanying this article, is a custom PC built by Microsoft in collaboration with Acer and offered for free to full-conference attendees who are onsite at the Professional Developer Conference 2009, in Los Angeles. It was Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky that announced PDC2009 participants that they would be getting the free machine during his keynote in day two of the conference. The Acer Aspire 1420P Convertible Tablet PC is offered as a sign of the Redmond company’s gratitude for the support from PDC attendees in building Windows 7. “This laptop promotion is the result of a collaborative effort with Acer, whom we worked closely with to have these laptops ready for PDC. This PC is not yet available in the US (Acer has not yet announced pricing and availability for this PC) so that makes this “PDC Edition” of the laptop exclusive to PDC attendees,” revealed Brandon LeBlanc, Windows Communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team.The Aspire 1420P PDC Edition features the 64-bit (x64) flavor of Windows 7 Ultimate preinstalled and is powered by an Intel Celeron CPU SU2300 running at 1.2GHz. The computer comes equipped with 2GB RAM, an Intel Graphics Media Acce...

Microsoft has made available for download a new version of the resources designed to permit managed code developers to take advantage of the unique features brought to the table by Windows 7. On November 18th, 2009, version 1.0.1 of the Windows API Code Pack was released, and is currently up for grabs via MSDN. According to the Redmond company, devs already leveraging the old version of the Windows application programming interface Code Pack for the latest iteration of the Windows client will not see a major upgrade. Instead, the API Code Pack has been updated with bug fixes, performance, and enhancements. In addition, there are new demonstrations available, new wrappers and new features updates, noted Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 technical evangelist on the Client Platform Evangelist Group.“The Windows API Code Pack is a free, managed Source Code Library provided by Microsoft as is. You should consider this library as if you wrote it yourself, as if it is your own code. It is a great starting point and provides a really good and solid solution for managed code developers,” Kiriaty added. “It covers a lot of the new Windows 7 features as well as some more fundamental core features from the Windows Vista timeframe. You may think of the Windows API Code Pack as the closest thing to an “official” man...