Microsoft Support & Discussions

Today on Xbox Wire we shared the news that the Minecraft: Story Mode skin pack update is now available for the Windows 10 Edition, the Pocket Edition and all the Console Editions. You can get the entire pack for free for the first week on Windows 10 and Windows phone, and buy it for $2.99 through April 13th. The new Story Mode skin pack brings characters from the beloved Telltale Games series. Play as one of the various Jesse options, the TNT juggling Magnus, the scheming Ivor, or one of the many other Minecraft: Story Mode characters. If you have the Windows 10 Edition, you can also assemble a team of adventurers and see how long you can survive in Soren’s mob …

Microsoft Studios and Remedy Entertainment’s action-packed thriller Quantum Break is now available on Windows 10 and Xbox One. The Windows 10 version can be purchased and downloaded right now through the Windows Store. To celebrate the release of the game, 11 Microsoft store locations in the U.S. and Canada hosted launch events with fans. In addition, beginning today at 8 a.m. PDT, Remedy Entertainment will be hosting a Quantum Break livestream on Twitch featuring key members of the team, including Creative Director Sam Lake, from their studio in Espoo, Finland. Quantum Break is a unique experience; one part hard-hitting video game, one part thrilling live act…

Yesterday marked the first day of what we hope will be a long tradition. Our new flagship event for business leaders — the Microsoft Envision conference — kicked off in New Orleans with a keynote from Satya Nadella and a guest appearance from astronaut Captain Scott Kelly. The topic of digital transformation was the red thread that connected the keynote, the drill-down sessions and conversations on-and-off the expo floor. With Microsoft Envision, we’re creating a truly global summit for issues critical to CxOs and other business leaders. More than 6,000 leaders from 70 countries representing every walk of industry are here in New Orleans. We’ve moved some of our deeply…

Today, HP announced their redesigned HP Spectre with Windows 10 that will become available for pre-order in April. Designed with the mobile professional in mind this new PC combines exceptional engineering and craftsmanship with beauty and performance. Many on our team have been using the HP Spectre as their primary device and are loving its fast performance and sleek design. Let’s take a closer look at the features it has to offer. HP Spectre features: The HP Spectre comes at a total weight of just 2.35lbs. Its carbon fiber bottom also creates a thin profile that is both durable and lightweight, making it easy and flexible to carry on-the-go. High gloss copper …

At Monday’s kickoff to Microsoft Envision in New Orleans, Peggy Johnson, executive vice president for Business Development at Microsoft, announced a strategic partnership with R3, a consortium of leading banking institutions, to help move blockchain technology from hype to reality for the financial services industry. “Together, we will help R3’s over 40 member banks develop, test and deploy blockchain technologies to modernize decades-old processes and streamline operations, potentially saving billions of dollars from back-office operations,” she writes on the Transform business blog. “Digital transformation is lighting up across industries in every region of the world…

Toyota announced on Monday that it’s creating a new company called Toyota Connected to serve as the carmaker’s data science hub as it seeks to connect cars to people’s daily lives. Microsoft Azure will be the cloud computing platform, providing a hybrid solution for everything Toyota Connected creates as it works to make driving more personal, more intuitive and safer. “We’ve all been talking about big data for a long time, but we are at a unique point in history where the technology is catching up with what we hope to achieve by delivering new services and capabilities into the vehicle,” said Zack Hicks, president and chief executive officer of Toyota Connected. Wi…

Water is vital to life, but it’s a finite resource – 97.5 percent of it is salt water. The 2.5 percent that is fresh comes from glaciers, ice caps, groundwater, lakes, rivers, ice and snow. Your morning cup of coffee takes 55 gallons of water to produce, the shirt you’re wearing commanded another 700 gallons of water to produce, and the car you drive to work requires a staggering 39,090 gallons to build. The demand for water has risen alongside population growth, urbanization, changing diets, rising demand for energy and increasing industrialization. Recent events such as the California drought are currently keeping water management in the public spotlight. Personal co…

//Build will always be a special place for Windows containers. This was the stage where last year we first showed the world a Windows Server container. So it’s fitting that back home at //Build this year we made two new announcements as part of our Friday session “Setting the Stage: The Application Platform in Windows Server 2016”. First, as we all know, Windows is an operating system that users love to customize! From backgrounds and icon locations to font sizes and window layouts. everyone has their own preferences. This is even more true for developers: source code locations, debugger configuration, color schemes, environment variables and default tool configuration…

New content is always being added to the Windows Store, from a new blockbuster film to a special offer from Hulu, here’s what’s new this week. Movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Buy the movie for $19.99 Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now available to purchase in the Windows Store! Relive every epic adventure and discover deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and cool bonus features. And for a limited time, receive a $5 Microsoft credit when you buy Star Wars: The Force Awakens and play Star Wars: Battlefront on Xbox. Game Killer Instinct: Season 3 – Free Microsoft Studios and developer Iron Galaxy Studios celebrated the the worldwide lau…

I’m excited to announce that the Engadget app is now available for download on Windows 10. As the General Manager at AOL Alpha, I partnered closely with Microsoft and our engineering teams to define the features users would experience as well as the overall look and feel of the new app. Over the past six months we at, AOL Alpha, have been highly focused on bringing our brands onto many emerging platforms, such as streaming OTT boxes, new distributed content plays and virtual reality. Now we are excited to announce our latest emerging platform … Windows 10! Home screen of the Engadget app for Windows 10 Our focus on Windows 10 as an emerging platform might come a…

Welcome to the Build 2016 edition of Weekend Reading, highlighting all the news from Microsoft’s annual developer’s conference this week. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined the company’s vision to help developers embrace a new era of conversational intelligence, with additions to the Cortana Intelligence Suite and new cloud services and toolkits to help us understand the world around us and create intelligent, helpful bots. “As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence,” Nadella said. “At Microsoft, we call this Conversations as a Platform, and it builds on and extends the po…

On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled more technology and innovations that help every developer easily and simply build intelligent apps and services. You can find out more with our top 10 list of why Day 2 of Build rocked it for developers. For starters, at No. 10, Skype me, baby: The new Skype for Business App SDK and Skype Web SDK allow companies to integrate Skype calls directly within their Web or device offering. Read the full list, and get more details from the event at the Microsoft Build news site. Athima Chansanchai Microsoft News Center Staff The post Microsoft Build: The top 10 reasons Day 2 rocked the developer world appeared first on The Official Micr…

Imagine a future in which a personal travel assistant looks over your schedule, checks traffic for you, tells you when to leave for an appointment, ferrets out parking spaces and alerts people of your arrival time — all while learning your driving patterns to get more helpful over time. That assistant will be BMW Connected, whose first version made its debut Thursday at Build 2016, Microsoft’s developer conference in San Francisco. “Mobility needs are unique and personal and a very important aspect of our everyday life,” says Thom Brenner, BMW Group vice president of Digital Life. “We are really focused on how we can integrate our offerings smoothly and seamlessly i…

Every business and industry is being transformed by the cloud – and as cloud speed, scale and agility continue to increase, so too does what’s possible using cloud services. Imagine a dairy farmer who can improve his cows’ milk production by hooking them up to monitoring sensors. Or a hospital that can auto-monitor hygiene practices to make it a safer place. Or a car that can alert you to traffic and save you hassle on the way to work. All this is happening today, thanks to exponentially increasing amounts of data, and new ways to analyze this data for better business insights and connect it to a growing number of devices. But helping businesses evolve to the next gene…

On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled technology and innovations that help every developer easily and simply build intelligent apps and services. You can find out more with our top 10 list of why Day 1 of Build rocked it for developers. For starters, at No. 10, the future is here now: Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition shipped! Read the full list, and get more details from the event at the Microsoft Build news site. Suzanne Choney Microsoft News Center Staff The post Microsoft Build: The top 10 reasons Day 1 rocked it for developers appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog. Continue reading...

What a day at //build 2016! We’re very proud of the wonderful new features coming in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, many of which we showcased this morning. One of the areas we focused on today was Windows Ink, an all-new experience, putting the power of Windows in the tip of your pen. Windows Ink enables you to write on your device as you do on paper, creating sticky notes, drawing on a whiteboard, and easily sharing your analog thoughts in the digital world. Windows Ink is integrated into apps like Maps, Microsoft Edge, and Office. More than 70% of us spend more than one hour a day using a pen. We lose notes in our notebooks, take pictures of whiteboard…

Due to an undisclosed vulnerability in Adobe Flash, Apple has triggered Safari's web plug-in blocking mechanism to disable all Flash versions prior to 21.0.0.182 and 18.0.0.333. When using Safari with an outdated Flash plugin, Safari will block flash from executing and show a Flash out-of-date alert in its place. It will also trigger an alert to display that explains that the plugin has been blocked and that you can download the latest version from Adobe's website or turn it off. Adobe Flash Blocked in OS X To update to the latest, and most secure, Flash version simply click on the Download Flash.... This will bring you to the Adobe Flash site where you can …

Today at //Build 2016 in San Francisco, I was excited to join Satya to share new Windows 10 experiences and new opportunities we’re creating for developers. 270 million active Windows 10 devices In the eight months since launch, Windows 10 is off to the fastest start in Windows history, with over 270 million active devices, outpacing Windows 7 in the same timeframe by 145%. In the eight months since launch, Windows 10 is off to the fastest start in Windows history, with over 270 million active devices, outpacing Windows 7 in the same timeframe by 145%. People are spending more time on Windows than ever before – over 75 billion hours – with the highest cu…

This post was authored by Jason Messer, Principal PM Manager, Windows Server. Deploy a cloud application quickly with the new Microsoft SDN stack. Introduction Part 1 of this blog post series introduced the Windows Server 2016 SDN Stack, a three-tier cloud application and PowerShell deployment scripts. Part 2 builds on the core SDN concepts, terminology and assumes a working knowledge of overlay-style SDN from Part 1. If you’re not yet familiar with GitHub, how to define and create fabric resources such as servers, logical networks, or a software load balancer, you might find it useful to read Part 1 before continuing with this part. In this post we’ll pick…