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I’d like to offer up a little insight into the “Release to Manufacturing” (RTM) for Windows 7.

Over the past week, there have been many rumors surrounding RTM.

We are close, but have not yet signed off on Windows 7. When we RTM you will most certainly hear it here. As we’ve said all along, we will RTM Windows 7 when it’s ready. As previously stated, we expect Windows 7 to RTM in the 2nd half of July.

Full Article – http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/13/update-on-windows-7-rtm.aspx

I’d like to offer up a little insight into the “Release to Manufacturing” (RTM) for Windows 7.

Over the past week, there have been many rumors surrounding RTM.

We are close, but have not yet signed off on Windows 7. When we RTM you will most certainly hear it here. As we’ve said all along, we will RTM Windows 7 when it’s ready. As previously stated, we expect Windows 7 to RTM in the 2nd half of July.

Full Article – http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/13/update-on-windows-7-rtm.aspx

NEW ORLEANS — July 13, 2009 — Today, at its Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, Microsoft Corp. announced that Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. Starting today, tens of thousands of people will be invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program.

“Office 2010 is the premier productivity solution across PCs, mobile phones* and browsers,” said Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft. “From broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualization capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word, we are delivering technology to help people work smarter and faster from virtually any location using any device.”

Full Article – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-13Office2010WPCPR.mspx

Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Office 2010 will be opening up the tech preview to tens of thousands of people. This iteration of Office brings great collaboration tools and a web client that you’ll be able to use simply by keeping your docs up on Skydrive. That means almost half a billion people will have access to free online Office apps at launch.
Senior Vice President of the Office products, Chris Capossela, stopped by the Channel 9 studios to tell us about Office 2010, what his favorite features are, and how we’ll all get a chance to try it out. Chris Bryant follows with a walk-through of Office 2010 and a look at just some of the new features. For more information, go to www.microsoft.com/Office2010/.

Full Article – http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/A-Look-At-Office-2010-with-Chris-Capossela/

Now that the Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Toolkit is out, it is time to start writing widgets!!!

Necessary equipment:

1) The Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator images

2) The web development environment of choice

3) WMDC or Windows Mobile Device Center (on Vista or Windows 7) or ActiveSync 4.5

With that you should be ready to go to get started, the first step is to start the emulator and cradle the device. The emulators can be started from the start menu under the “Windows Mobile 6 SDK -> Stand Alone Emulator Images -> ”. The device emulator manager can be started using explorer to navigate to the following folder “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0” and selecting dvcemumanager.exe.

Full Article – http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/06/04/getting-started-with-widgets-on-windows-mobile-6-5.aspx

Now it has been posted in Microsoft Partners Network that –

“……Windows 7 will release to manufacturing (RTM) during the last two weeks of July, with general commercial availability on October 22, 2009. So get started and test-drive Windows 7 RC today. Then show your colleagues and customers how Windows 7 can improve management……”

This was announced at Computex 2009 in Tapei. So get ready for the exact date which will be anytime in July only. Earlier there were rumors that it will be July 13th and then it said it will be delayed.

Here’s the screenshot and link : https://partner.microsoft.com/US/productssolutions/windows/wiwindows7

Now it has been posted in Microsoft Partners Network that –

“……Windows 7 will release to manufacturing (RTM) during the last two weeks of July, with general commercial availability on October 22, 2009. So get started and test-drive Windows 7 RC today. Then show your colleagues and customers how Windows 7 can improve management……”

This was announced at Computex 2009 in Tapei. So get ready for the exact date which will be anytime in July only. Earlier there were rumors that it will be July 13th and then it said it will be delayed.

Here’s the screenshot and link : https://partner.microsoft.com/US/productssolutions/windows/wiwindows7

It’s been very busy in the world of Windows Server. With the launch of Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate, Tech Ed and the announcement of several new Hyper-V R2 capabilities such as 64 logical processor support and processor compatibility, it’s been pretty non-stop. In fact, it’s been so busy, that we haven’t even had a chance to introduce one more really cool new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2, but first, some background.

Windows Server 2008 R1: Core Deployment

In Windows Server 2008, we introduced the ability to deploy Windows Server in a core deployment. Server Core is a minimal server installation option which provides a low-maintenance server environment with limited functionality. Just to be clear, Server Core isn’t a SKU. You don’t buy “Server Core” it’s simply a deployment option presented during Windows Server Setup. For example, here’s a screen shot during Windows Server Setup, notice that there are options for Full Installations and Server Core Installations.

Full Article – http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/07/07/windows-server-2008-r2-core-introducing-sconfig.aspx

Mountain View (CA) – Google today said that all Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk, are officially out of beta. There was no information what suddenly happened to remove the beta label from those products. But just in case you are just too used to be seeing Gmail with a “beta” logo, you can customize the interface to show a “beta” remark.

Google and beta software is a running joke and the simple fact that you can add a beta logo to Google Apps may be a sign that even Google does not take its approach to calling some products “beta” that seriously. It seems that especially Gmail has been in beta forever – in fact, the service launched on April 2, 2004 as an invitation only service with a then revolutionary 1 GB of free storage space. Five years and more than 100 million registered users later, Google felt it is time to remove the beta label.

Full Article – http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/43132/140/

The Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner is a diagnostic tool that is designed for administrators of small or medium-sized networks (recommended up to 20 servers and up to 500 client computers) who want to assess the overall health of their network infrastructure. The tool identifies common problems that can prevent your network environment from functioning properly as well as problems that can interfere with infrastructure upgrades, deployments, and migration.
When run from a computer with the proper network access, the tool takes a few minutes to scan your IT environment, perform more than 100 separate checks, and collect and analyze information about the following:

• Configuration of sites and subnets in Active Directory
• Replication of Active Directory, the file system, and SYSVOL shared folders
• Name resolution by the Domain Name System (DNS)
• Configuration of the network adapters of all domain controllers, DNS servers, and e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange Server
• Health of the domain controllers
• Configuration of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) for all domain controllers

Full Article – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dd7a00df-1a5b-4fb6-a8a6-657a7968bd11&displaylang=en

After years of repeated denials, Google has finally acknowledged that it is, indeed, building an operating system for PCs.

I think it’s good for customers, PC makers, software makers and even for Microsoft that Google is getting into the operating-system game. After more than two decades, Microsoft has only one real competitor in the desktop OS space: Apple. That’s not enough. Competition is good. It keeps prices down and true innovation up.

However,  after reading the very few Chrome OS details that Google smartly dropped a couple of weeks before Microsoft is expected to announce the release to manufacturing of Windows 7, I’ve got a few doubts…. And quite a few more than the huge number of Google fanboys and girls who seem to forget for all its product debuts, Google hasn’t had any home runs other than search.

Full Article – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3268

After years of repeated denials, Google has finally acknowledged that it is, indeed, building an operating system for PCs.

I think it’s good for customers, PC makers, software makers and even for Microsoft that Google is getting into the operating-system game. After more than two decades, Microsoft has only one real competitor in the desktop OS space: Apple. That’s not enough. Competition is good. It keeps prices down and true innovation up.

However,  after reading the very few Chrome OS details that Google smartly dropped a couple of weeks before Microsoft is expected to announce the release to manufacturing of Windows 7, I’ve got a few doubts…. And quite a few more than the huge number of Google fanboys and girls who seem to forget for all its product debuts, Google hasn’t had any home runs other than search.

Full Article – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3268

Just between you and me, I’ve heard that one could obtain copies of Windows 7, including builds newer than the public betas, from some not-so-sanctioned sources. Of course I would know very little about how this works, but I understand that there is a process of verifying the integrity of files to ensure files are as described and have not been tampered with, however not everyone does this.

Leading up to the inevitable leak of the Windows 7 RTM build like a bottle of champagne shaken once too many times, I wanted to make this process of verifying file hashes even simpler by making it easy and convenient to generate and compare the hashes. With the help of Sven Groot, we came up with this little applet for your Windows 7 ISO verifying pleasure.

Full Article – http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090706/windows-7-iso-verifier/

It may be a while before we know whether Microsoft’s decision to offer special “E” versions of Windows 7 in Europe–that is, versions of Windows 7 that do not include Internet Explorer–is crazy like a fox or just plain crazy. But there’s little doubt that the software giant’s answer to the increasingly irrational antitrust regulators in the EU is inventive. Rather than kowtow to the EU’s demands that it bundle competing web browsers in Windows 7 via a so-called ballot screen, Microsoft simply removed the source of the problem. In the Windows 7 E Editions, which will be provided to all of its customers in the EU, Internet Explorer simply isn’t included. And you can’t add it back via Programs and Features as you can in versions of Windows 7 that will be sold elsewhere around the world.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/e_preview.asp

I’ve been writing about remote display protocols for over six years now. In that time I’ve written about performance, user experience, bandwidth, and latency. I’ve written about the importance of the display protocol in a desktop replacement environment, where real users will use the protocol every minute of every day. And of course I’ve played with all the various protocols in the lab.

But there’s one thing I’ve never done: I’ve never actually used a remote display protocol for my daily job, every minute of every day. Since joining TechTarget last November, I’ve started working in an office (my choice!) and using a real desktop computer. I still tend to travel a lot, but I would guess that I still spend probably 60-70% of my time working at this desk:

Full Article – http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2009/07/02/is-standard-rdp-7-ready-for-everyday-desktop-replacement-i-m-on-a-mission-to-find-out.aspx