Microsoft News Tracker

At ENT News (link via bink.nu), Stuart J. Johnston reports that Microsoft has started a restricted beta of Centro, the mid-market server offering announced in September, and a limited community technology preview (CTP) of the next version of Small Business Server, codenamed Cougar. Both are due out in 2008 which is later than the 2007 date anticipated in our previous mention of Cougar. It’s all approximate of course, since both are based on Longhorn which has to be completed first before they can put together the final packages.

Last week Microsoft released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Visual Studio 2005 as Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie reports on his blog:

Visual Studio shipped the final release of VS 2005 SP1 yesterday. It is available for immediate download in all 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese). You can download and install it here.

This SP release is a pretty major service pack, and incorporates a lot of bug-fixes and feedback from customers. Included built-in with the service pack is support for VS 2005 Web Application Projects (which we also made available as a separate download back in May). It also contains a number of design-time performance optimizations and fixes across the product.

The service pack itself is a fairly large download (431Mb), and can take 30-90 minutes to update your Visual Studio 2005 installation depending on which versions of VS you have installed, and what features are enabled. So you should plan ahead and not expect it to be a few second operation (note: it is a good task to kick off before lunch or in the evening).

Yikes, now that’s a service pack! Scott has more tips when you follow the link. Also note that what is available for Vista is a beta SP1.

One of the Windows Vista concessions that Microsoft promised the European Union antitrust regulators in October was that they would provide kernel level APIs for third party security software vendors to work with the PatchGuard kernel protection code in 64-bit versions of the operating system. The timeline for creating and delivering those APIs kicked up quite a ruckus, but today Microsoft released a draft and reiterated the promised availability by the time Vista Service Pack 1 ships:

Microsoft Corp. today released draft application programming interfaces designed to allow third-party security products to get around a contentious kernel protection technology in the Vista operating system called PatchGuard.

The draft APIs will be available to security vendors for testing and comment through the end of January. A final version of the APIs will then become available when Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 for Vista sometime in mid-2007, according to Ben Fathi, vice president of development for the Windows Core Operating System.

Microsoft today also released a separate criteria evaluation document that details the processes Microsoft used in evaluating vendor requests for APIs to the Vista kernel. As with the draft APIs, Microsoft is seeking third-party security vendor feedback on its criteria evaluation processes.

There are more details by following the link and in a separate Q&A with Fathi. Reactions from the vendors haven’t come in yet:

McAfee officials said they would comment on Microsoft’s move Tuesday afternoon; Symantec won’t talk about the decision until Friday.

but what strikes me is that we now have yet another date for the infinitely mutable Vista SP1 (mentioned previously here).

Update, Nov. 22: McAfee is pleased, no comment yet from Symantec.

Today, Microsoft released an update to the Zune PC software that makes it compatible with Vista plus they also released firmware update 1.2 which seems to have no function changes but generally improves performance.

Everyone seems to be on the edge of their seats watching Zune sales performance so there was a lot of punditry when research group NPD released their final November retail store sales stats. How it looks depends on your point of view: Zune does a bit better than expected or Zune sales continue to weaken. I’ll just quote the numbers as reported by Troy Wolverton at the Mercury News and you can provide your own spin:

Although Microsoft didn’t release the Zune until more than halfway through November, the company was the second-leading manufacturer of hard disk drive-based media players, capturing 9 percent of the U.S. retail market, according to NPD. Including both flash memory and hard disk drive players, Microsoft came in fourth, with 1.9 percent of the market.

The company’s much-hyped entree into the MP3 player market appeared to have little affect on industry leader Apple. Although Apple’s share of the hard drive market fell to 82.7 percent from 86.8 percent a year ago, its share of the overall market came in at 62.2 percent, essentially even with the 63 percent it posted a year ago.

SanDisk was No. 2 with 18.4 percent of the overall market, up from 17.5 percent last year.

Microsoft Watch’s Joe Wilcox has a table of the numbers that makes things clearer.

Other buzz:

RealMoney’s Michael Comeau (who has some other Microsoft predictions that are also eminently sensible):

Microsoft will kill the first Zune media player by midyear, and I will write a column headlined “Goodbye to the Social,” outlining Microsoft’s obvious strategic errors in developing the device, specifically the decision to not design a new player from the ground up. However, Microsoft will have some modest success with a new media player designed 100% from the ground up, which will be out in time for the 2007 holiday shopping season.

Microsoft considers games for Zune. Now that would be a good way to use the Wi-Fi without paying the record companies.