Microsoft Support & Discussions

The recent blog post await[/b] keyword in C# and Visual Basic enables developers to use WinRT asynchronous operations while still maintaining and reasoning about good control flow. In this follow-on post, I dive much deeper into exactly how await works with WinRT. This knowledge will make it easier for you to reason about code that uses await, and as a result, will enable you to write better Metro style apps. To start, let’s ground ourselves by taking a look at a world without await. Reviewing the basics All of asynchrony in WinRT is rooted in a single interface: IAsyncInfo. Every asynchronous operation in WinRT implements this interface, which provides the base …

Microsoft is tweaking SharePoint Online storage quotas and pricing for enterprise users of its hosted service. Source: All About Microsoft

Live Mesh, Microsoft’s PC-to-PC sync service, has been meandering down a long and winding road since 2008. Are its final days in sight? Source: All About Microsoft

The next public Windows 8 test build is due the first week of June., just in time for Computex 2012. Source: All About Microsoft

In one smooth move, Microsoft is pocketing $550 million by selling hundreds of patents it bought from AOL to Facebook. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft has announced the rumored paid storage tiers for SkyDrive, its cloud storage service, and has rolled out previews of new SkyDrive apps for Windows and Mac OS X Lion. Source: All About Microsoft

Over the last year we’ve been hard at work building SkyDrive alongside Windows 8, setting out a unique approach to designing personal cloud storage for billions of people by bringing together the best aspects of file, app, and device clouds. Meanwhile, we’ve made our file cloud more accessible with HTML5 and mobile apps, improved integration with Office and 3rd party apps, and built a device cloud for Windows and Windows Phone. Today, we’re excited to take another big step towards our vision by making SkyDrive far more powerful. There are new storage options, apps that connect your devices to SkyDrive, and a more powerful device cloud that lets you “fetch” any file from …

The 1.0 version of Skype for Windows Phone is available in the Marketplace as of April 22. Source: All About Microsoft

What’s coming in the Exchange Server 15 component of Microsoft’s next wave of Office wares? Here’s some scuttlebutt from my sources. Source: All About Microsoft

Will Windows on ARM devices find an accepting home in the corporate world? Microsoft has some manageability plans to try to keep consumers and IT admins both happy. Source: All About Microsoft

One of the major trends in IT in recent years has been the drive towards consumerization of IT, which is a term describing how consumer technology, from phones to PCs, is bleeding into business organizations in all forms and fashions. And increasingly, the devices that are showing up are owned by and liable to the employee rather than the organization they work for. We see this most notably in the smartphone device category, but more recently also in tablets or other portable PC form factors that are increasingly showing up in the workplace. As organizations embrace consumerization, IT must consider how much control they can exert over a users personally-owned device, and…

Microsoft has released a partial list of features in the coming Windows 8 Enterprise SKU for volume-license business users. Source: All About Microsoft

GesturePak is a new third-party toolkit for Kinect for Windows developers that requires little coding. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft is now disclosing publicly the new features it is adding to its Office 365 cloud for both small business and enterprise customers. Source: All About Microsoft

In Choosing delivery method for a notification [/size] Now that I know what I want the tiles to look like (see part 1 for a refresher) I need to figure out when to update them. There are 4 ways that an app can update its tile (see [url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh779721.aspx" target="_blank">Choosing a notification delivery method in the Dev Center). Apps can use local notifications to update their tile, which is useful if info changes while the app is running. Apps can schedule tile and toast updates to happen at precise times. Also, apps can use push or polling tile notifications to update their tiles from the cloud while they are not run…

Microsoft is accepting tester applications for the next version of its Windows Intune service for managing and securing Windows PCs — and soon iOS and Android devices. Source: All About Microsoft

Previous blog posts have discussed the Metro style application model using Windows Runtime. An important attribute of this app model is that apps are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. Suspending Metro style apps in the background is a good thing, as it conserves CPU for other apps and ensures that background apps dont cause activity that can consume resources, thereby improving the battery life and increasing responsiveness. This is outlined in detail in Sharif Farag and Ben Srours blog post, all[/i] the memory that suspended Metro style apps would otherwise hold onto. Windows 8 can reclaim this memory without having to terminate an app. Your browser…

Microsoft officials have finally started to confirm specific features that will and won’t be included in the various Windows 8 editions that are due out later this year. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft has added another bunch of new features to its SkyDrive cloud storage service. Source: All About Microsoft

It’s a big week on the Windows branding front, with Microsoft officially releasing the final names for Windows 8 client and Windows 8 Server. Source: All About Microsoft

There’s a new version of Microsoft’s Windows Intune service coming. There’s documentation about an April preview now available for download. Source: All About Microsoft

Windows 8 is the official name of the next version of Windows client. Here are details on the four SKUs that are in the pipeline. Source: All About Microsoft