Microsoft News Tracker

No it’s not the Video Professor, it’s Tim Sneath, who has two new screencasts up on Channel 9:

Introduction to XAML demonstrates how you can embed all kinds of content in XAML and integrate them together.

Data Binding in Windows Presentation Foundation shows you how to build an RSS browser in just 14 lines of XAML using the data binding features present in Avalon.

Very slick!

Gene Johnson of the AP reports Ex-Microsoft exec alleges incompetence:

In testimony during a hearing on Microsoft’s lawsuit against Lee and Google, Lee said he wrote a memo to another Microsoft executive saying he was “deeply disappointed at our incompetence in China — that we have wasted so many years in China with little to show for it.”

Lee went on to say in the e-mail that he was embarrassed by Microsoft’s business practices and that people in the government joke about Microsoft’s internal politics. But he provided few details in his testimony Tuesday about what exactly the Chinese government was frustrated with.

The former executive testified that one of the lowest moments of his career with Microsoft was a conversation in which Gates yelled at him and said that the company had been “f—–” by the Chinese people and its government. Lee did not clarify the context of Gates’ comments.
…
In his testimony, Lee also complained that Microsoft had more than 20 business groups operating virtually autonomously in China, with little cohesion.

Among other problems, Lee said, was a commitment Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer made in 2002 to outsource $100 million in work to China. Within the last year, after it had become clear that Microsoft wasn’t fulfilling this promise, Lee said, he was put in charge of outsourcing jobs to China.

Why does this seem like a particularly nasty divorce trial? I guess that’s what it is.

Update: Ina Fried notes an interesting email between two of Lee’s former Microsoft employees and Todd Bishop reveals that even the godfather made an appearance.

AnandTech points to a report from APC Magazine’s Dan Warne at the recent Australian Tech Ed:

Hardware vendors are going to love the news that Windows Vista is going to need very beefy hardware to run well. At Microsoft’s TechEd conference, Dan Warne finally managed to squeeze blood from a stone – or rather, answers about Longhorn’s hardware requirements from Microsoft.

Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.

More by following the links.

Update (Sept. 9, 2005): Scoble says these requirements are overstated, but the formal requirements won’t be known until next year.

Update (Sept. 12, 2005): The reported requirements were overstated.

It was bound to happen some time and now according to KC Lemson (the release manager for Exchange) Exchange 12 will ship on a single DVD:

I wanted to let you know how important your feedback was to us making this decision as well as address some of the concerns that were raised on the anti-DVD side. Another plus of this experience was it was a great proof of concept as to how useful this blog is in gathering diverse customer feedback, so thanks for all the comments and please keep them coming. Even when we don’t explicitly ask for feedback, the comments are still useful, any time you tell us what you think about something, positive or negative, we appreciate it.

First, I should explain what would be taking up this much space. The main feature is unified messaging, which is a core feature in E12 that we’re very excited about bringing to the masses (and trust me on this one, there are some amazing features in UM). The largest part of this feature are the text-to-speech engines that are needed for each language. These engines allow you to call up your server on your phone and have it read your email and appointments over the phone to you. We estimate that the final size of each language of these engines (using a non-lossy compression) will be around a couple hundred megs and we are working on including as many languages as we can.

That would do it. More on all the considerations that went into the decision by following the link.

Stephen Walter has a new technical paper at MSDN titled Building ASP.NET 2.0 Web Sites Using Web Standards:

Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 has many features to help you design and build Web sites that are compliant with XHTML and accessibility standards. This article looks at how and why you should be building these standards-compliant sites.

It’s 78 printed pages on a subject of increasing importance these days.

Hat tip: Scott Guthrie who has some further background.