SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft still isn’t quite ready to release its new mobile browser, but I did get an advance look at Internet Explorer 6 for Windows Mobile at a Microsoft event Wednesday night.

The biggest benefit will be the fact that it is the full IE 6 rendering engine, meaning that any page that renders properly in IE 6 on the PC should do just fine on Windows Mobile. Tim McDonough, a senior director in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit, showed me the browser running the standard MSN home page.

Full Article – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10039152-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft still isn’t quite ready to release its new mobile browser, but I did get an advance look at Internet Explorer 6 for Windows Mobile at a Microsoft event Wednesday night.

The biggest benefit will be the fact that it is the full IE 6 rendering engine, meaning that any page that renders properly in IE 6 on the PC should do just fine on Windows Mobile. Tim McDonough, a senior director in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit, showed me the browser running the standard MSN home page.

Full Article – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10039152-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Microsoft and Citrix will announce on Monday that they are to work more closely on virtualisation.

The two software makers already have a close relationship, going back to 1989. As a result of a new agreement, they will announce that Microsoft is validating version 5 of the XenServer hypervisor, Citrix’s virtualisation software, for use with the Windows Server 2008 operating system.

The news emerged on Thursday at a roundtable hosted by Citrix, but the agreement will come as little surprise to industry watchers. Microsoft showed signs of wanting to extend its presence in the virtualisation market recently when it relaxed the licensing that limited the use of its own Hyper-V hypervisor. Then, earlier this week, it said that it was giving Hyper-V away for free.

Full Article – http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39486973,00.htm

BT was quietly confident earlier this year when it told me that a £10 device would significantly increase the speed of many people’s broadband connections – and judging by our tests, it’s absolutely right.

The iPlate (or interstitial plate, as its mother would call it) has boosted the speed of my home ADSL connection by a staggering 63%. Before I connected the easy-to-install device over the weekend, the actual throughput of my ADSL Max connection was averaging around 1.9Mb/sec, according to repeated tests at Speedtest.net. Now, that same speed test is reporting an average download speed of 3.1Mb/sec. All for doing nothing more than spending 10 minutes undoing a couple of screws and popping the plate in my master phone socket.

Full Article – http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/09/10/iplate-boosts-broadband-connections-by-60/

There’s been a lot of information around Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V this year, but one of the biggest outstanding questions regarded something called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a standalone version of the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008. This week, finally, those questions have been answered.

Monday, at a Microsoft Virtualization event in Bellevue, Washington, the software giant unveiled a few interesting virtualization news tidbits. For example, the company’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 product, which can manage environments running on all of Microsoft’s virtualization platforms, will ship within 30 days. The company also showed off some live migration features of Windows Server 2008 R2, due next year. Live migration will let customers move applications running in virtual environments from one server to another without disrupting users. VMWare already offers similar functionality.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is the latest version of Microsoft’s heterogeneous virtualization management server, and it can manage virtual machines hosted on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, MHVS 2008, or VMWare. This tool is aimed at larger businesses that will host multiple environments virtually, Microsoft says.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/ms_hyperv_2008.asp

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Monday said Hyper-V’s oft-delayed Live Migration feature will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2 when it’s released in 2010. While that might seem like a long time for Microsoft to add a feature that VMware has had since 2004, solution providers aren’t concerned that Live Migration isn’t part of the software giant’s virtualization portfolio.

“Live Migration is not important to us at all at this point,” said Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, an Oakland, Calif.-based solution provider and Microsoft Gold partner. “With what Microsoft offers out of the box today, I’m not sure whether we have a need for Live Migration.”

Live migration, an enterprise-class feature included in the VMware and Xen-based virtualization platforms, makes it possible to move running virtual machines from one system to another system. Microsoft says a feature in Hyper-V called Quick Migration, which is almost as fast as live migration, can perform virtual machine migrations in just six seconds.

Full Article – http://www.crn.com/software/210600662?cid=CRNFeed

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) on Monday said Hyper-V’s oft-delayed Live Migration feature will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2 when it’s released in 2010. While that might seem like a long time for Microsoft to add a feature that VMware has had since 2004, solution providers aren’t concerned that Live Migration isn’t part of the software giant’s virtualization portfolio.

“Live Migration is not important to us at all at this point,” said Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, an Oakland, Calif.-based solution provider and Microsoft Gold partner. “With what Microsoft offers out of the box today, I’m not sure whether we have a need for Live Migration.”

Live migration, an enterprise-class feature included in the VMware and Xen-based virtualization platforms, makes it possible to move running virtual machines from one system to another system. Microsoft says a feature in Hyper-V called Quick Migration, which is almost as fast as live migration, can perform virtual machine migrations in just six seconds.

Full Article – http://www.crn.com/software/210600662?cid=CRNFeed

When Microsoft was developing Vista, or Longhorn, as it was known way back when, company officials were fond of making promises about ways that Microsoft would improve on Windows XP with its next-generation Windows release.

With Windows 7, Microsoft’s goal seems to be to provide as few promises as possible against which the final product can and will be compared and measured. That said, over the Labor Day weekend in a post by Distinguished Engineer Michael Fortin — who leads the Fundamnetals feature team in the Core Operating Systems Group — Microsoft did dangle one tangible tidbit about Windows 7. From the post:

“For Windows 7, a top goal is to significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times. In the lab, a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.”

(The reason I put a question mark in the headline of my post is because Fortin doesn’t actually go so far as to say that Microsoft is promising to hit the rarefied “in the lab” boot-time measure. But the implication is definitely there.)

Full Article – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1563

It is with great enthusiasm that the Microsoft Application Virtualization product team announces the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of App-V 4.5!!! App-V 4.5 represents a huge step forward for the product and is the result of many hours of hard work by all of us on the team. Our TAP customers (selected customers who work closely with us to deploy the product into production prior to its final release) and our internal Microsoft IT team have already successfully deployed the product in production to more than 70,000 seats! We are very excited that all of our customers will soon be able to use App-V 4.5 to improve the way that they distribute and run applications in their environments!

Since the RTM of SoftGrid 4.2 last year, we have been working to take that great release and expand upon it. Besides changing the name and making it the first Microsoft-branded release, we’ve done a lot in this release for those of you who are responsible for deploying and administering App-V worldwide in your enterprise. It includes new capabilities designed to help IT support large-scale virtualization implementations across many sites and provides multiple delivery options, including over-the-internet application delivery. Newly added support for eleven languages enables your users to work in localized environments with localized applications. Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC) provides administrator-controlled virtual application communication and interaction. Compliance with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing and Secure by Default initiatives was also introduced in this release. Finally, integration with Microsoft System Center Management Products and infrastructure updates via Windows Update will make managing the product even easier.

Full Article – http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/09/03/microsoft-application-virtualization-4-5-rtms.aspx

Last week, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in English, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. While it was already known that IE8 would be going final before the end of the year it still wasn’t clear whether there would be a Beta 3 and when exactly IE8 would be released. It’s time to try to answer those two questions.

According to the IE8 Beta 2 support page, prereleased versions will no longer be supported come November:

Free unlimited installation and usage support is available for Internet Explorer 8 pre-released versions, but only for North America English customers. This support for Internet Explorer 8 pre-released versions is valid until November 1, 2008.

Full Article – http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/09/03/unless-theres-a-beta-3-ie8-may-be-set-for-november-release

Last week, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 in English, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. While it was already known that IE8 would be going final before the end of the year it still wasn’t clear whether there would be a Beta 3 and when exactly IE8 would be released. It’s time to try to answer those two questions.

According to the IE8 Beta 2 support page, prereleased versions will no longer be supported come November:

Free unlimited installation and usage support is available for Internet Explorer 8 pre-released versions, but only for North America English customers. This support for Internet Explorer 8 pre-released versions is valid until November 1, 2008.

Full Article – http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/09/03/unless-theres-a-beta-3-ie8-may-be-set-for-november-release

Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

Full Article – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7593106.stm

Sometimes you get what you ask for. For years, Web developers, standards advocates, technology enthusiasts and others have been asking–no, begging–Microsoft to ship a standards compliant version of its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser. Doing so would free Web site owners from having to worry about cross-browser differences, though given the millions of intranet and Internet sites developed solely for classic (read: Pre-IE 7) versions of its browser, such a thing would surely bring with it compatibility issues.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/ie8_beta2.asp

Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment” (visit the Web site) is a controversial and effective ad campaign aimed at getting individuals to form their own opinions about Windows Vista. This effort cuts to the heart of a matter with which I’ve been heavily involved over the past year and a half: An astonishing number of people are aware of the conventional wisdom about Windows Vista–that it’s too slow, too unremarkable, too incompatible, or just plain lousy–despite the fact that very few of these curiously opinionated people have ever actually used the thing.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, or of my blog, or a listener of my podcast, you’re familiar with the refrain: Windows Vista is not the piece of junk that so many people think it is. And yet everyone’s heard that it’s horrible. I blame a number of factors for this disconnect between the reality I see every day with Windows Vista on a wide range of machines and the fantasy world in which Windows Vista is a poor product doing poorly in the marketplace.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_mojave.asp

Mozilla did its best to throw a spoiler into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 launch on Wednesday. But the new Ubiquity add-in for Firefox doesn’t sound all that different from what Microsoft is doing with the version of its browser due to ship in November.

That’s my take, but you can form your own opinion. Starting today, August 27, at 3 p.m. EST, Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 became available for download by anyone who wants to give it a whirl.

As expected, there are a lot of new features that were not part of IE Beta 1 which are now available in IE 8 Beta 2. InPrivate browsing (”porn mode”) and InPrivate blocking are just two of the many new items that got added to the latest IE beta. Others include crash recovery (I’m installing just for that alone!), a “Diagnose Connection Problem” button, and Compatibility View (for sites that break when viewed in IE 8 — some examples of which are on the Redmond Pie enthusiast site).

Full Article – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1556