Microsoft Support & Discussions

By Paul Thurrott In a support document posted to its Windows Phone web site, Microsoft has clarified how various new Windows Phone 7.5 features will be made available in different parts of the world. While I did explain much of this in my own Windows Phone 7.5 review, let’s take another look, since we can assume this document represents most accurately how these features will roll out around the world. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott With the release of Windows Phone 7.5, Andrew Birch is back, this time with his Windows Phone 7.5 feature tables. The first covers Windows Phone app and Zune Marketplace availability across the various locales in which Windows Phone is sold, and the second handles Bing Local, Xbox LIVE and other features. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott In the latest episode of the Windows Weekly podcast, Leo, Mary Jo and I are joined by special guest Microsoft senior director of Windows Phone Apps Brandon Watson and discuss this week’s release of Windows Phone 7.5, the truth about the infamous Microsoft employee meeting, Xbox Live TV details emerge, Zune Pass news, Samsung and Microsoft cross-license patents, Amazon shakes up the tablet market with its Kindle Fire, and Gears of War 3. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott And Rafael and I work our way through the improvements and new features in Windows 8, some small but interesting changes have caught our attention. This is one of them. Source: Win Super Site

SVG Open 2011, the 9th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, is just over two weeks away. This year

In this Microsoft news roundup: A potential Skype-acquisition hurdle, ZunePass changes, tethering in Windows Phone Mango and more. Source: All About Microsoft

By Paul Thurrott An often irreverent look at some of this week’s other news, including a follow-up on that Microsoft employee meeting, thoughts about Nokia’s Windows Phones, Nokia lays off more workers, Microsoft releases Windows Phone 7.5 developer tools, DOJ looking more deeply at Google’s Motorola bid, Google silently kills celebrity "gaydar," IBM surpasses Microsoft’s market cap, Microsoft still sought as an employer, one prediction about next week’s Apple event, and Brandon Watson joins us on Windows Weekly. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Microsoft announced on Thursday that it is changing its Zune Music Pass (which I thought was called Zune Pass subscription service and bringing it and the Zune Music Marketplace to Canada. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Samsung this week became the seventh maker of Android devices to sign a patent cross licensing deal with Microsoft in just the past three months. The company will pay an undisclosed royalty to Microsoft for each Android-based smartphone and tablet device it sells. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Microsoft today announced some more functional updates for its Office Web Apps running on Windows live SkyDrive. Office Web Apps, as you may recall, are the free, web-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint that were released alongside Office 2010 last year. Since that release, Microsoft has updated the OWA a few times. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott HP’s strategy in exiting the PC business makes sense

By Paul Thurrott While the Find My Phone services aren’t new to Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft has somewhat updated them for the new release and made them more easily available from the also revamped Windows Phone web site. So let’s take a look and see how they work. Source: Win Super Site

IE10 in the Windows Developer Preview introduces support for hardware-accelerated CSS3 text-shadow. Text-shadow is one of the top requested features from Web developers. It enables text effects that were previously difficult or impossible to accomplish in a standards-friendly way without resorting to inline images of text. Text-Shadow in IE10 As its name suggests, text-shadow is a CSS property that draws a shadow behind text. Example of a purple text-shadow behind text Use it to draw attention to text and to give the text some depth. In some cases, especially with text over an image or color background, text-shadow can be used to add contr…

FIVE TIPS FOR OPTIMIZING HYPER-V . Takeaway: By following a few simple practices, you can get more value out of your server hardware while still delivering good VM performance. Brien Posey offers tips for tuning your Hyper-V environment. Server virtualization products such as Hyper-V are designed to reduce an organizations hardware costs by allowing multiple server images to be hosted on a single physical server. Based on that premise, the more virtual machines you can fit onto a host server, the lower your hardware costs. Of course, increasing a hosts virtual machine density also increases the load on the server. Its critical to allocate resources to virt…

Amazon is relying on its cloud to optimize the performance of its coming Silk browser. Microsoft, despite its cloud chops, isn’t going the browser-as-a-service route. Source: All About Microsoft

Google has dropped its suit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, claiming that the agency has changed its stance to allow the company to bid against Microsoft for a $49.3 million cloud-hosted apps contract. Source: All About Microsoft

By Paul Thurrott As part of its launch of Windows Phone 7.5 this week, Microsoft also launched a web-based version of its Windows Phone Marketplace. This service is somewhat limited in that it provides access only to apps and games, but it does offer two major features that are missing from the other ways in which you access the Marketplace on the phone and PC. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it has successfully taken down the Kelihos botnet. This is the third botnet the software giant has taken down a botnet in the past two years, and while Kelihos is not as large as its predecessors, Waledac and Rustock, this one comes with a twist: It’s the first time Microsoft has named a defendant in a botnet civil case. Source: Win Super Site

Windows 8 tablets, expected out in 2012, have some new and formidable competition from Amazon’s newly announced Kindle Fire tablet. Source: All About Microsoft

By Paul Thurrott Amazon announced its Android-based Kindle tablet, the Kindle Fire, on Wednesday as expected as well as two touch-based Kindle eBook readers and a low-end Kindle eBook reader without touch. But Amazon thoroughly undercut even the wildest estimates for the cost of the eagerly anticipated Kindle Fire, which will retail for just $200. Source: Win Super Site

Microsoft has signed yet another patent-protection deal with an Android phone/tablet maker. This time it’s Samsung which is paying Microsoft an undisclosed amount for licensing undisclosed patents. Source: All About Microsoft