Microsoft News Tracker

When Microsoft first announced Max a year ago, it was a photo cataloging and sharing application that really showed off the Avalon (now Windows Presentation Foundation) graphical interface technologies coming in Vista and being retrofitted to Windows XP. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then and now a new version of Max is available, but for some reason a limited RSS feed reader has been added. I’m not sure exactly what Max is supposed to be other than good looking, like one of those auto show concept cars. Download it here if you would like to take a test drive, but note carefully the system requirements (including .NET 3.0 RC1) and that it’s all beta code.

Microsoft has been working on their “Atlas” technology for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) Web applications so popular in the Web 2.0 world and Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie has the latest:

Many people have asked us to deliver a fully-supported 1.0 release of “Atlas” before the next release of Visual Studio. “Fully supported” means that Microsoft product support services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and that any customer can obtain hotfixes if they encounter a bug affecting their application. It also means that the product has a committed servicing product lifetime of 10 years – which provides companies with the ability to depend on it for mission critical applications.

I am excited to announce today that we are going to ship this fully supported “Atlas” 1.0 release on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and ensure that it works with Visual Studio 2005. Our goal is to ship the “Atlas” 1.0 release around the end of this year. The plan is to first have a Beta, then an RC, and then decide on the final date based on customer feedback.
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Things will get even better next year with Visual Studio “Orcas” where we are adding rich JavaScript intellisense, debugging and WYSIWYG designer support for the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions within Visual Studio and many other great features to take advantage of.

There are more details on the feature set and “Go-Live” license by following the link.

As far as the renaming, Microsoft had been having a contest to decide on the final product name, but predictably, the end result wasn’t any funky Web 2.0 name. Guthrie again:

1) The client-side “Atlas” javascript library is going to be called the Microsoft AJAX Library. This will work with any browser, and also support any backend web server (read these blog posts to see how to run it on PHP and ColdFusion).

2) The server-side “Atlas” functionality that nicely integrates with ASP.NET will be called the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. As part of this change the tag prefix for the “Atlas” controls will change from <atlas :> to <asp :>. These controls will also be built-in to ASP.NET vNext.

3) The “Atlas” Control Toolkit today is a set of free, shared source controls and components that help you get the most value from the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. Going forward, the name of the project will change to be the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.

Market Watch says Windows Live Search has already launched:

Microsoft Corp. late Monday said it officially launched its Live Search service, the successor to the Web-search tool on its MSN portal. The company, which had previously released Live Search in test form, said the new service is available in 47 markets globally, with users able to use its Live.com Web site for personalized Internet searches. Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash., additionally said its Live Search Local service is now available in the United States and the U.K.

Frankly, it’s hard to tell because of the ubiquitous beta logo on the live.com header and the AP says the official launch isn’t until tomorrow, but presumably it’s imminent.

Update: Press release:

Microsoft Corp. today announced the release from beta of Live Search and of Live.com in 47 markets worldwide, and final availability of Live Local Search in the U.K. and the U.S. Microsoft also announced that Live Search will now power the Web search capability on MSN®, the company’s media and entertainment portal, attracting more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month.
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Additional details can be found on the Live Search and Live Local Search team blogs at http://livesearch.spaces.live.com and http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com, respectively.

At the moment, there’s zip at the blogs and MSN is still showing the old MSN Search.

Update 2: Mary Jo Foley reports that the transition from beta to final will take place gradually through the 14th.