The next release of the DirectX SDK is scheduled to ship to developers in early June 2010. This release will be the first update to the Windows Graphics components since the August 2009 release and will also introduce support for Visual Studio 2010.
Link – http://blogs.msdn.com/chuckw/archive/2010/04/15/what-s-coming-in-the-june-2010-directx-sdk.aspx
Microsoft Corp. today introduced Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010, an easy-to-use enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for midsize businesses that want advanced functionality, strong business intelligence reporting options and interoperability with other line-of-business applications. The solution features new Role Centers, out-of-the-box Web services and the ability to complete tasks through other software people use every day. Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 delivers on Microsoft’s Dynamic Business vision by increasing the agility of an organization to embrace new challenges, and will be featured at the company’s annual customer conference, Convergence 2010, April 24–27.
Data Protection Manager 2010 delivers unified data protection for Windows servers and clients, providing backup & recovery from Microsoft for Windows environments in a scalable, manageable and cost-effective way.
Data Protection Manager 2010 is part of the System Center family of management products from Microsoft. It delivers unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Virtualization and file servers — as well as Windows desktops and laptops. DPM is designed as a best-of-breed backup & recovery solution for Windows environments from Microsoft. DPM provides the best protection and most supportable restore scenarios of your Windows environment from disk, tape and cloud. Windows customers of all sizes can rely on Microsoft to provide a scalable and manageable protection solution that is cost-effective, secure and reliable.
We’ve talked a lot about the benefits to optimizing your Windows desktops and how Microsoft can help large companies reduce their TCO and have a more dynamic IT environment. But today I’d like to focus on smaller businesses, specifically the midsize businesses with 25 to 500 PCs in their environment and show them some love.
Many of these companies don’t have the resources or budget to setup and maintain an on-premise desktop management infrastructure and they want enterprise-class solutions. They’ve been coming to us asking for a solution that will meet their specific needs and budget. At the same time, we are seeing medium-sized businesses increasingly turn to cloud solutions. They are doing this because it gives them new IT capabilities with lower upfront investment and without the restrictions of traditional on-premise infrastructure.
Computerworld – Subscribers to Microsoft Corp.’s developer and IT professional services are first in line to get Office 2010, which will be released to MSDN and TechNet on Thursday, the company has confirmed.
MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) and TechNet subscribers can download the production versions of Office 2010 starting April 22, five days before volume license customers with Software Assurance will be able to obtain the new application suite.
Link – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175773/MSDN_TechNet_get_Office_2010_this_week?taxonomyId=86
Recently, the final versions of both Silverlight 4 and .NET 4 have been released! Microsoft have since released an updates version on Expression Blend.
Links –
Today we reached an exciting engineering milestone- the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!
RTM is the final engineering milestone and a major achievement for all of the internal teams who worked so hard to get to this point. As tirelessly as our engineering teams worked, we would never have reached this milestone without incredibly active participation from our customers and partners. More than 5,000 organizations and partners have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products, and the feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped a fantastic set of products that I’m sure our customers will love.
Link – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/04/16/sharepoint-2010-reaches-rtm.aspx
Earlier today we reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!
RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone. It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products. Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version – that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads! The feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we’re excited about, and that I’m sure will delight our customers.
Link – http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/04/15/office-2010-reaches-rtm.aspx
Microsoft has announced the Microsoft Fix it Online Portal. Microsoft Fix it Center makes getting support easier than ever because automatic troubleshooters solve the issues you have now and prevent new ones
You can use any computer with Internet connection to get started with Fix it Center. Simply download the Fix it Center client and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup. You can install Fix it Center client on as many PCs you like.
We’ve got some great news for Windows Touch developers. Today we’ve launched a toolkit for Windows Touch that allows developers to use some of the same controls that are used by developers on Microsoft Surface hardware today, but for PCs using Windows Touch.
SQL Server 2008 RTM finally reaches it’s end of support tomorrow i.e. April 13, 2010. Here’s snippet from SQL Release Services team blog:
Product: SQL Server 2008 RTM
Mainstream Support End Date: 4/13/2010
Extended Support End Date: Not Applicable
So, you should be making plans to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 SP1 soon.
Link – Microsoft Product Support Lifecycle Page
Visual Studio 2010 Express Editions are released to the web! What is even better is they are free! There are currently 4 Visual Studio editions.
You can start downloading at http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/
The latest edition of Visual Studio, the premier developer tool suite form Microsoft, launched today.
MSDN Subscribers may download the product from the MSDN subscription site.
Visual Studio 2010 has finally launched! You can check out the official website here:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/
If you haven’t already, sign up for a Launch Event close to you here:
http://www.microsoft.com/business/2010events/DevEvents.aspx
Today you can view the live webcast of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch Conference and Expo, held at the Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas. Come and listen to the keynote address by Bob Muglia, President of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/watch-it-live
MSDN Developers will be able to download the new version later today to coincide with the launches so you can get your hands on this stuff pretty quick.
One of our objectives with Internet Explorer 9 is taking full advantage of modern PC hardware to make the browser faster. We’re excited about hardware acceleration because it fundamentally improves the performance of websites. The websites that you use every day become faster and more responsive, and developers can create new classes of web applications through standards based markup that were previously not possible. In this post, we take a closer look at how hardware acceleration improves the performance of the Flying Images sample on the IE9 test drive site.
