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The last two weeks have been rather busy both from quantity of news and competing time pressures, so I thought I would collect some short links to items worth noting that didn’t get separate posts of their own. The down side is that this post gets filed in a ton of categories as you can see above.
- MSN expects China to be top five market by 2010
- Todd Bishop covers Microsoft’s move into high performance computing at Supercomputing 2005, including the Bill Gates keynote and the Sheryl Crow party. He also scores an interview with Craig Mundie, “chief technical officer who ran a supercomputing company before joining Microsoft in the early 1990s.” The latest report is that Burton Smith who left Cray to join Microsoft last week will work for Mundie.
- Microsoft adds Firefox support for Microsoft Genuine Advantage validation.
- The very clever Microsoft virtual labs have been upgraded:
The team just re-launched the TechNet and MSDN virtual labs running on Virtual Server 2005 R2. Check out these sites if you want to test our new software, such as SQL Server 2005 integration services, Windows Server R2 or Visual Studio Team System, in a sandbox environment. Each session is 90 minutes and comes without install, strings attached, or price to participate.
- Microsoft says it won’t support SAML 2.0. It’ll stick with the WS-Federation web service protocols. More here.
- Hyperthreading hurts server performance, say developers:
Intel’s Hyperthreading Technology (HT) is being blamed for server performance problems.
With both SQL Server and Citrix Terminal Server installations, HT-enabled motherboards show markedly degraded performance under heavy load. Disabling HT restores expected levels, according to reports from within the IT industry.
- Paris accelerates move to open source and Vienna’s open source desktop migration takes off.
- Microsoft Taps Former Rational Heavyweight Ivar Jacobson to Lend Credence to Enterprise Tools Play
- Office 12′s slick new UI feature: “Live Preview” and Microsoft Office 12 Beta 1: Extreme Makeover
- New UI Font Coming to Vista, Office 12. It’s “Segoe UI” and I guess I’m going to need new specs:
Office 12 will primarily use the 8pt. version of the font, while Windows itself will use the 9pt. size.
- Vista Will Be Compatible with HD DVD but not in the first release.
- Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers. See also Browser makers to give trusted sites a green look.
As anticipated, today’s big launch went off as scheduled – Microsoft Joins Customers and Partners to Launch SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006:
Microsoft customers and partners gathered today to show their support for the launch of Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 and Visual Studio® 2005 and the upcoming release of BizTalk® Server 2006. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer kicked off the event by highlighting the tens of thousands of customers and partners that played a major role in the product development process, providing ongoing input to deliver the next evolution in Microsoft’s application platform.
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The advancements Microsoft is delivering with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 build on the foundation put in place over the last several years with significant investments in Windows Server™ 2003 and Microsoft .NET, providing developers and IT professionals with a dependable application platform that has underlying support for Web services and service orientation capabilities. The deeper integration of the server and tools with today’s releases enables a host of innovative scenarios and range of new capabilities:• Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 enable developers and development teams to build high-performance, security-enhanced and reliable solutions using an enterprise-ready development platform. Visual Studio 2005 features an expanded set of tools including Visual Studio Team System, an extensible life-cycle tools platform that enables collaboration among software development teams to deliver modern service-oriented solutions.
Hit the VS 2005 home page for version details, features, and launch tour events. (.NET Framework 2.0 info is here.) The Visual Studio Express Editions are available for download free for 1 year. Finally, although it did not get any press release ink, Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 also shipped and is available for download.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 provides an integrated data management and analysis platform that helps organizations reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run complex business applications. With embedded reporting and data analysis tools included with SQL Server 2005, companies can gain greater insight from their business information.
The SQL Server home page has more and the free (forever) SQL Server Express Edition is also available for download.
• BizTalk Server 2006 delivers new features that enable enterprises to better monitor, manage and deploy their mission-critical business processes.
BizTalk Server 2006 is, of course, not ready to ship, but a new CTP was released, a full beta is expected before the end of the year and the product itself in 1H2006.
In addition, Microsoft announced that it will include 16 new integration adapters in BizTalk Server 2006 Enterprise and Standard editions at no additional charge to customers. The move gives customers native interoperability to industry-leading business applications such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle Database Connector and Oracle Application Suite.
This policy for the BizTalk adapters rated it’s own press release:
Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will include 16 new application and technology adapters in the Enterprise and Standard editions of BizTalk® Server 2006 at no additional charge, including adapters for Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems Inc. This announcement marks a significant break from the industry norm of charging additional license fees for application and technology adapters, and offers customers a simple and cost-effective way to reduce the complexity of purchasing, building and implementing application integration and business process automation solutions. Separately, Microsoft announced pricing, licensing and product timelines for BizTalk Server 2006.
More details by following the link.
So what does it all mean besides the release of the latest versions of 2 major Microsoft products and a wannabee? Joe Wilcox says it’s all about integration of the products:
The three products launched today are the first wave of a tide of tightly, integrated products. There is simply no way to overstate how tightly Microsoft has integrated features among its late 2005-2006 software releases. While some Microsoft executives have said that Microsoft bet the company on Longhorn (now called Windows Vista), the real bet is on “Integrated Innovation.”
(See also the press materials [1], [2]) He goes on to discuss the pros and cons of this integration for customers, but I tend to think of the dependency problems for the Microsoft developers – you can’t ship one of the products until all of the prerequisite products are ready and getting them to line up always seems to mean “later” or loss of features and we’ve seen both in this package.
Update:Video of the launch event.
From CNET:
The software giant plans to have a “release candidate” of Visual Studio 2005 and a “community technology preview” of SQL Server 2005 at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles the week of Sept. 12–barring any production-related glitches, said Prashant Sridharan, lead product manager in Microsoft’s developer division.
Sridharan added that both products will be available to all customers on Nov. 7, the latest delivery deadline for the products.
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Also in September, Microsoft will release the third beta for the server component of the Visual Studio Team System collaborative programming application, which will ship in the first quarter of next year, Sridharan said.
