Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft has released betas of the first service packs for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5:

Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases.  These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November.  They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them).

We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.  You can download and install the beta here.

At the first link there’s quite a list of enhancements including SQL Server 2008 support, ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria"), and the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 extensions previewed in December.

Microsoft this week released their "spring Zune update" which is version 2.5 if you are keeping track:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that Zune, the company’s all-in-one digital entertainment brand, is adding new software features and content to the Zune online store, music community and Zune Pass monthly subscription service. Zune is expanding its video store to include downloads of popular television shows from COMEDY CENTRAL, FUNimation Entertainment, MTV, NBC Universal, Nickelodeon, Starz Media (including Manga Entertainment), Turner Broadcasting, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and VH1 that consumers can sync to their device and enjoy on the go.

I’m hardly a fan of watching TV in the first place and watching on a tiny screen (whether on the Zune or iPod) seems excessively excruciating, but Microsoft did manage to grab NBC away from iTunes.

In addition, by further integrating the Zune music community into the core experience, the new software makes it easier for people to find and listen to the music they want, share it with friends, and take it with them wherever they go — whether they choose a Zune Pass or a la carte MP3 downloads. Zune Pass subscribers can now set up automatic, real-time feeds of the music their friends are listening to and add those songs to their collection or Zune device.

Following the above link provides a laundry list of new social networking features added to the Zune Social which is what Microsoft occasionally calls their online Zune community, but it takes a critical mass to tango in the social networking world and the Zune is still very much a niche:

And to use the social features, your friends need to have Zunes, too — which ours don’t.

And yours probably don’t, either. WSJ: "According to market-research firm NPD Group Inc., Apple had 71% of the U.S. portable-music-player market in the first quarter, compared with 4% for Microsoft."

It’s social networking where the price of entry is a proprietary hardware gadget. Microsoft isn’t the first vendor to chase that chimera.

Also of note: Microsoft is now sufficiently comfortable with the Zune program to expand beyond the USA - Zune is coming to Canada on June 13.

Update: Microsoft today announced the release of a XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview for building games for "the entire family of Zune media devices." Some notable features of v3.0 include using non DRM background music and "the ability to have multiple nearby Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc social gaming experience."

The traditional weakness of Microsoft’s system management software has been that no matter how good it was for managing Microsoft systems, it didn’t play in the heterogeneous environments that predominate in large enterprises. Yesterday, Microsoft stepped up to that challenge with public betas of new heterogeneous environment enhancements for their flagship data center management products, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager:

Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.

Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.
…
Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.

Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, of course, but Microsoft clearly is making a serious run at the traditional enterprise system management vendors like HP and IBM. If you want to try the free samples, all three betas are downloadable at Microsoft Connect.

Last week Microsoft announced a technology preview of Live Mesh, their platform for future Software plus Services applications, and as usual, they seemed to have a hard time explaining it:

As has become the norm with so many of its Software + Services products and strategies, Microsoft isn’t the best at coming up with a succinct Live Mesh definition. The closest I found (in a Live Mesh reviewer’s guide) was this: “Live Mesh is a ’software-plus-services’ platform and experience from Microsoft that enables PCs and other devices to ‘come alive’ by making them aware of each other through the Internet, enabling individuals and organizations to manage, access, and share their files and applications seamlessly on the Web and across their world of devices.” If I were in charge of defining Live Mesh, I think I’d go with “a Software + Services platform for synchronization and collaboration.”

That was Mary Jo Foley and sounds about right to me. If you want a detailed but crisp explanation of what was announced, I recommend Nate Mook’s rundown at BetaNews. If you would like the big picture, the tech pundits have been busy, but I’d offering the following.

Live Mesh is about creating a fixed point on the Web for a user to store, synchronize, and optionally share all his important information from all of his various intelligent devices including PC’s, smartphones, and whatever else comes down the pike. It’s very early days since the developer tooling isn’t ready and the synchronization isn’t even functional yet, but Microsoft hopes to get developers started looking at their platform.

If the vision is appealing, you can sign up to kick Live Mesh’s tires. If you want to be critical, there’s room for that too starting with the usage of the Web as a data "hub" and not a real application platform plus the perennial worry about just how open this supposedly open offering will truly be. In other words, it’s a typical Microsoft technology gambit and duly reflects their corporate perspectives and prejudices.

With Neelie Kroes looking over their shoulders and the entreaties of Web developers ringing in their ears, Microsoft is promising that the default mode for Internet Explorer 8 will follow the latest Web standards:

Consistent with its efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft Corp. is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content — by default — using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability.

The progressive evolution of the Web has necessitated that browsers such as Internet Explorer include multiple content-rendering modes – both supporting strict interpretation of certain Web standards and also supporting behaviors designed to maintain compatibility with existing Web sites. Web site designers generally have the ability to specify which mode they are designing for; in the absence of specific instructions from a Web site, browsers are pre-set to use one of the modes by default.

Internet Explorer 8 has been designed to include three rendering modes: one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of current Web standards, a second reflecting Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, and a third based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web. The newest rendering mode is forward-looking and preferred by Web designers, while the others are present to enable compatibility with the myriad sites across the Web that are currently optimized for previous versions of Internet Explorer.

Originally, the plan had been to make the IE7 compatible mode the default. The first beta of IE8 is expected in 1H2008. I also hope that the second thing on Microsoft’s IE8 list is to spiff up the incredibly sluggish performance of IE7.

Update: No sooner mentioned than the first beta of IE8 arrived on March 5, but there still are problems with IE8 passing the ACID2 test.