PDC 2008: Windows 7 will add a 'volume knob' to UAC
Will users feel better about Windows 7 when they have the option of turning off one of Vista's least understood features? Or will they instead make the attempt to understand it? That's the problem which Microsoft's Mike Nash is now facing.
LOS ANGELES - Since the original RTM version of Windows Vista, a Registry-based switch has existed for changing the running state of User Account Control -- the feature that stops processes from performing tasks that haven't been launched by human users. So even today, it's feasible, albeit not easy, to turn up the volume and have UAC prompt for passwords (as was originally planned in the early betas), or turn it off.
PDC 2008: The hard job of moving on after Vista
Remember the good old days when it seemed that a PC on everyone's desktop was a modern miracle? After recent experiences with Vista, the course Ray Ozzie may set for Windows 7 appears intended to recapture some of that magic.
Windows Vista has been described with a wide variety of adjectives, ranging from an ongoing success to, in the words of my friend and colleague at Microsoft Watch, Joe Wilcox, a "flop." The very fact that such a variety of monikers exists is all the indicator one needs that something went wrong during the lifecycle of this product.
PDC 2008: Don Box stars as 'M,' the minister of sensibility
During another overflowing demonstration here at PDC, long-time Microsoft developers Don Box and David Langworthy (two of the most popular presenters every year) introduced developers to M, the new modeling language for data.
The term modeling is being introduced here in more than one context, and for the realm of enterprise application developers, it refers to the ability to produce a workable schema that may or may not be populated with explicitly typed data. The need for more direct modeling has been known for long enough, though perhaps not understood; it hasn't occurred to people that the task could be approached through the use of another language.
PDC 2008: First glimpses at Office apps on the Web
In what will undoubtedly be perceived as Microsoft's response to Google in the Web applications field, the company this morning gave a first peek into Web-based versions of its Office components, which it's presenting as supplemental to the main Office package.
Though the Web-hosted versions of Microsoft Word and Excel bear respectable similarity to their desktop-hosted counterparts, and even though they will probably be fully capable of running on their own, Microsoft representatives this morning at PDC 2008 introduced these components as supplements to Office -- moreover, as features customers get access to by purchasing and using Office 14.
PDC 2008: Sinofsky acknowledges Vista UAC is a problem, Windows 7 adds options
Giving a nod to developers who've apparently given a lot of feedback, as well as "certain commercials," Microsoft's platform chief Steven Sinofsky acknowledged that perhaps User Account Control in Windows Vista may have been...a little annoying. In turn, Windows 7 has additional UAC settings.
"We got a lot of feedback about Windows Vista," Sinofsky said, before pausing several seconds for the inevitable developer response. Given the vast amount of response he received, he said, "We have to do what developers do." That is, to sit back, re-evaluate, and say, "What did we learn from that?" That, he said, is what engineering is about.
PDC 2008: Cleaning up the desktop in Windows 7
After another long, lofty, and philosophy-laden introduction from Microsoft's Ray Ozzie this morning, the #1 new feature being discussed in the "cleaned up" Windows 7 is improved file and application access.
The rethought Windows 7 taskbar, while not exactly like the dock in Mac OS X, certainly borrows some inspiration from it. Based on the early demonstrations given by Julie Larson-Green this morning, we're seeing a kind of sliding dock that is just as tall as the current taskbar, but which omits the text to the right of icons. The identities of running programs or active documents is ascertained by moving the mouse pointer over the icon.
PDC 2008: Ray Ozzie and company present the cloud
Monday morning in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie took his time unveiling his company's gamble to dominate a field of computing where it has actually fared third-place, or worse.
For over two years, a team of senior Microsoft executives stayed mostly out of the public view, working on something that was sometimes strangely called the "Windows Core." Some rightly guessed it was the company's services platform for cloud computing, though it was still a matter of speculation how that would work, or what it would consist of.
PDC 2008: First in-depth look at ASP.NET MVC
At Day 1 of PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, attendees got their first look at a technology Microsoft introduced earlier this month into beta: a new way for building reformed Web applications.
The Web site StackOverflow.com is the latest example of a fully operational Web site, running today out of beta, using a technology from Microsoft that is still in beta: ASP.NET MVC, the new compartmentalization model for content-driven Web site programming.
PDC 2008: First look at 'Dublin,' .NET for the cloud
Interest in how Microsoft would deploy an extension of the .NET Framework called Dublin in the cloud exceeded anyone's expectations today, as thousands of attendees literally spilled over into a spare room to watch the first Dublin demos on video.
Dublin is, as was already known prior to today, Microsoft's platform for extending .NET services as distributed architecture; but now we know that Dublin will be used for deploying custom .NET applications on Windows Azure. This afternoon, the company's Jacob Avital and Mauricio Ordonez performed live demonstrations of how a cloud-based .NET would asynchronously capture customer-generated events over the Web, respond to those events with code, and report on the results.
PDC 2008: Azure is, and isn't, Microsoft's answer to everyone else's challenge
Anyone who thinks Microsoft isn't capable of responding to a serious challenge doesn't know Microsoft. It's the familiar puzzle, put together the same way: Let others blaze the trail, then wait for an opening and leverage resources.
Windows Azure, depending not upon whom you ask but instead upon when you ask the question, either is or is not an operating system. It is not a kernel designed to operate on a single processor and provide access to resources on the local machine, so in that regard, it is not Windows.
PDC 2008: 'Windows Azure' is Microsoft's cloud-based hosting service
A few weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave clear hints of a Windows-branded product that will be deployed in the cloud. At 8:55 am PDT Monday, Ozzie christened this service Windows Azure.
As expected, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie began his first day keynote speech at PDC 2008 (he'll be back for Day 2) by staking his company's new claim to software as services. "The Web has become a key demand generation mechanism," he said in his characteristic high-flying style, "becoming Web services' front door."
PDC 2008 Preview: Change we can count on?
Get ready for the first concrete news on the next version of Microsoft Windows, the next edition of Visual Studio, and what could very well be the first Windows product to serve applications "in the cloud." PDC is all this week.
LOS ANGELES (BetaNews) - It's apparent even from before the get-go that the theme of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference is winning back the marketing momentum, and bringing back developers' enthusiasm in Windows as a brand. Certainly many of them are already enthusiastic about the technologies they work with -- ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, C#, LINQ, the new dynamic languages like F#. But in the last round, that enthusiasm didn't translate into Vista, the consumer brand.
SP2 for Vista, WS2K8 to enter beta Wednesday, will support Blu-ray
With Microsoft picking up the pace in both the development and marketing of Windows 7, it's also finding itself moving ahead with the next amendment package for Vista not too long after the release of SP1.
In an early piece of news that we had expected to hear on Monday, Microsoft will release the first beta editions of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista to private testers on Wednesday, October 29. Those testers will be among the first, according to a blog post from Windows 7 corporate VP Mike Nash this afternoon, to test burning data directly to Blu-ray Discs using only the Vista OS.
Microsoft prepares for a mild recession, nothing worse
In another indication that the American information technology industry is better suited to riding out the economic storm than other sectors, Microsoft's forecast for the rest of this year is for slightly slower growth.
Prior to the on-shore strike of an approaching hurricane, you're likely to hear many meteorologists use the phrase, "I'm not a fortune teller," as a way of downplaying expectations about the confidence one may have in their predictions. Over the last week of quarterly earnings reports, the keyphrase uttered almost invariably has been, "We're not economists."
Amazon EC2 exits beta, offers WS2K3 in the cloud
Beginning today, customers can implement instances of Windows Server 2003 (licensed to and purchased by them) in Amazon's cloud, enabling businesses to deploy sophisticated Internet applications without their own servers.
After a two-year beta cycle, Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service this morning entered general availability. Now, for what's essentially a service, what does this mean besides removing the warning that some parts are still under construction? Today, Amazon implemented a service-level agreement for EC2 customers guaranteeing 99.95% availability during what it describes as a "service year."