AWS

Posted on Windows Core[/b] The biggest change in Windows Phone 8 is the transition to the NT kernel and related operating system elements. What this means is that Windows Phone 8 will share many of the same features, such as the same kernel, and the same file system, and the same media foundation, device drivers, and parts of the security model from Windows 8. Why go to such lengths? Is it overkill? Apparently not because the core elements of the Windows NT architecture will allow Windows Phone 8 to support multi-core processors, device encryption, and other improvements for IT. App development Clearly, one of the most innovative ideas of the last decade was the App. These small, highly focused programs did much to make the iPhone and the iPad the central commercial IT device. Other copy cats followed suit. For Microsoft the problem was how to develop Apps for Windows 8 and Apps for the Windows phone if at the core, their OS’s were different. The solution is simple, if complex. Have the same kernel for both. This is important for developers because they will benefit from a shared Windows Core in Windows Phone 8. Microsoft will drop the .NET Compact Framework in Windows Phone 7, but instead will move to a Core CLR which will allow managed code to run in a manner identical to how it runs on desktop Windows. The great thing for developers is that their existing apps will continue to run on the current Windows Phone 7 OS even after the Windows 8 platform goes on line. If Windows 8’s Metro style applications succeed then that’s bound to benefit Windows Phone 8 also, since developers will have an easy way to share common code across each platform. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/18/windows-phone-8-era-beginning-steve-ballmer-era/winphone_3/" rel="attachment wp-att-95102">http://cdn7.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/winphone_3-400x225.png?9d7bd4 User Interface The main Windows Phone 8 user interface change is the Start Screen. It will have three sizes of live tiles: small, medium, and large. Currently the existing ones in Windows Phone 7 are medium and large versions. It is also expanding the screen environment where you will be going to be able to place live tiles on. The area along the right hand side of the Start Screen will now be filled with tiles. Skype and VoIP Integration Another feature about Windows Phone 8 is the integration with two communication elements. One is Skype and the other is VoIP. Skype will be an application that you can download one that will take advantage of the VoIP integration. The integration sets up VoIP applications to become a full integrated app on Windows Phone 8 handsets, which will allow them to integrate into the phone dialer. Next The importance of the changes Microsoft is pursuing show that it is looking far down the road for hardware and software development. This is a new style for Microsoft. Will Windows 8 succeed? Can’t tell yet. Will Windows Phone 8 succeed? Can’t tell yet. But what we can tell is that Microsoft is now engaged in an entirely new way of looking at its software and hardware services. It is pursuing a new direction, one that marks its old way’s obsolete. This sets a new mark on how Microsoft will operate. Will it be a strictly software company? Probably not. It will most likely pursue hardware as well, since it already has XBox and Kinect as successful hardware devices. If the Windows Phone 8 succeeds, and if Surface succeeds, there’s no telling what other hardware devices Microsoft will bring out. So goodbye Bill Gates. The Steve Ballmer era is now at hand because Steve is driving the change. Source: [url=http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/20/3096667/windows-phone-8-screenshots-features-nfc-start-screen-dual-core">TheVerge [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/18/windows-phone-8-era-beginning-steve-ballmer-era/">The Windows Phone 8 Era – The Beginning of the Steve Ballmer Era was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

…October 26th, 2012! That’s right! Just a few minutes ago, Steven Sinofsky announced at Microsoft’s annual sales meeting that customers will be able to get Windows 8 – whether http://freepchelp.forum/data/MetaMirrorCache/63e1dea26f5625f7721233c82ab4ab1e._.gif[/img] Source: Windows Team Blog

Shortly before we released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in February, we blogged about our work to make Windows 8 more accessible to people with disabilities. This included our work on Narrator to enable customers who are blind to use Windows 8 on touch screens. This work has continued to evolve in the Release Preview, and will also improve as we move toward the final release of Windows 8. This post details some of the work we have done to improve Narrator when using a touch-enabled PC. This post was authored by Doug Kirschner on our Accessibility team. –Steven First off, we would like to thank all the people who have given us feedback there has been a lot of positive reaction—people are excited that Windows 8 touch screens will include basic screen reading support by default. We've gotten a tremendous amount of constructive feedback on things we could do to make Narrator work better on touch screens and easier to use on the web. We’ve listened. Your suggestions, combined with suggestions from usability testing on visually impaired users here at Microsoft, have resulted in some important changes that we think you'll really like. Listening to the accessibility community When the Developer Preview build was released, we took the opportunity to reach out and gather feedback on Narrator from as many people who require visual assistance tools as we could. To start with, we worked with the community of folks inside Microsoft (we are fortunate to have a significant and organized community that is engaged in the accessibility of all Microsoft products) to install Windows 8 and send us their impressions, and we held internal accessibility events where people could come and try it out in person. We also held usability studies where we invited people to Microsoft’s campus to experience Narrator on a touch screen and walk through common tasks to see where we could improve. Millions of you downloaded the Developer and Consumer Previews, and many of you tried out Narrator and sent us some great feedback. We followed up with a number of people who contacted us via @BuildWindows8. Lastly, we attended the CSUN conference for Technology and Persons with Disabilities, where we were lucky to have the chance to sit down with people one-on-one as they tried out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview for the first time on touch screens. There were a couple of key scenarios we wanted to validate. In particular, we wanted to make sure touch users could get up and running using Narrator on a new PC, right out of the box. That includes finding and installing accessible apps from the Store, and accomplishing basic everyday tasks like sending email, reading webpages, and listening to music. The excitement around the work we'd done so far was overwhelming and gratifying, but it was clear that we still had more work to do to make touch Narrator even better. Thanks to all of your constructive feedback, we identified key areas that we've improved for the Release Preview: Responsiveness: We heard that Narrator on touch screens didn’t feel responsive enough. Gestures: Some people had difficulty with Narrator gestures, particularly some of the more complicated multi-finger gestures. App exploration: Finding particular elements on the screen (e.g. finding tiles on the Start screen) could be hard for people not already familiar with the particular app or UI. Web navigation: The commands available in the Consumer Preview were not extensive enough for some webpages. We worked heavily on each of these areas for the Release Preview, and we're still working in some areas for the final release of Windows 8. We wanted to share with you some of the improvements you can already experience in the Release Preview today. Download this video to view it in your favorite media player: High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4 Making Narrator feel more responsive to touch Some people we heard from felt that Narrator touch was not very responsive. We heard various versions of this feedback–that Narrator was slow, that Narrator sometimes didn’t respond, or that people just felt disconnected or disoriented—but the root cause of the issue was the same. When you touch the screen, you expect a timely response. We found two common scenarios where this problem occurred: Single-finger exploration: When people had to find an item on the screen by dragging a finger around, we observed that they would often skip right over the item they were searching for, as they moved their fingers too quickly, generally before Narrator had a chance to start reading the item. Gesture response: Some people were confused as to whether their gesture had succeeded, and would attempt to repeat the gesture several times, even though the first attempt was already successful. The problem was that there was a delay between the time Narrator recognized the gesture, and when it provided the speech response. Sometimes it was also unclear from the response whether Narrator had done what the user wanted, or was just reading something similar but unrelated. In each case, the blue, visual highlight rectangle that moves to whatever Narrator is currently reading was quick to jump to the appropriate item, indicating that Narrator had registered the user’s movement and was responding appropriately. However, the problem was in the actual speech process. The text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is fast, but even at high speeds, it takes a while for the system to read the response back moreover it took additional cognitive time to process the language and to understand what they were hearing. To complicate matters, the speech response time varied widely, depending on context, which made it hard for the user to discern whether the intended gesture was the one that Narrator had recognized. Each of these minor delays added up people would skip over items altogether or repeat successful gestures, thinking that their first attempt was not successful. Audio cues For users with full vision, even if an action takes a few more milliseconds to complete, visual feedback such as highlighting a button or animating a flyout help indicate immediately that the system is responding. These cues are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also functionally important to understand how your touches are influencing the system in real-time. As we dug into some of the feedback around responsiveness, we realized that Narrator could make more effective use of audio cues. In the Release Preview, we have started to add audible cues each gesture now has an associated sound that plays when the gesture is performed. These cues were designed to be quick, short and easily distinguishable, allowing you to instantly recognize whether your gesture is successful and if your action has been taken. Here are some examples: Moving to the next item plays a “tick.” Activating plays a “click.” Scrolling plays a sliding sound. Selecting plays a “thud.” Narrator errors play a “bloop” sound that is easily distinguishable from the system error "ding." Explore the screen with a single finger, and Narrator makes a tick with each new item that you touch, so you know if you passed over an item too quickly to hear what it was. We had a lot of fun designing and implementing these sounds! Making interactions easier The next step was to tune Narrator's touch interaction model. Some people told us they found it difficult to use multi-finger gestures. In particular, we saw people struggle with the two-finger swipe for next and previous item, and even more so with the four-finger swipe to scroll. We also observed people accidentally triggering the commands lists (available item commands, search window, etc.), which consequently caused them to lose their context in an app. In response, we've made it easier to interact with touch Narrator. The system is now more forgiving, with a simpler gesture model that is easier to remember. Single-finger taps and flicks now carry out a majority of the common tasks in Narrator. The revised interaction model is easier to perform, and it groups gestures more logically, so that command lists and windows don’t pop up when you’re trying to perform an unrelated gesture. The table below outlines the new interaction model: Touch gesture Command Tap or drag Read item under finger Double-tap OR Hold with one finger and tap anywhere with a second Do primary action Triple-tap OR Hold with onefinger and double-tap with a second Do secondary action Flick left or right Move to previous/next item Flick up or down Change move increment Hold with one finger and 2-finger-tap with additional fingers Start dragging or extra key options 2-finger tap Stop speaking 2-finger swipe Scroll 3-finger tap Show/hide Narrator settings window 3-finger swipe up Read current window 3-finger swipe down Read from current location in text 3-finger swipe left or right TAB forward and backward 4-finger tap Show commands for current item 4-finger double tap Toggle search mode 4-finger triple tap Show Narrator commands list 4-finger swipe up or down Enable/disable semantic zoom (semantic zoom provides a high-level view of large blocks of content) Improving Narrator’s exploration model As we collected feedback from people who were using the Developer Preview, we reviewed the exploration model in Narrator. One of the things we heard clearly was that people wanted an easy way to find all of the controls on the screen like buttons, labels, text fields, list items, etc. without having to manually touch around the whole screen. One user who was blind gave the analogy that when he enters a hotel room, his first task is always to walk around the room and locate the door, dresser, beds, and bathroom in order to understand the layout of the room before doing anything else. Similarly, when exploring a new app, users want to know what's on the screen before deciding what to do next. One of the ways we made all elements on the screen accessible in Developer Preview was to use horizontal swipe gestures to move between items in a container, and vertical swipe gestures to move into and out of containers. This was a powerful model —you could find all accessible items on the screen—and it was a true representation of how graphical UI is constructed. However, it wasn't intuitive. Having to navigate into and out of containers made it difficult to discover all of the interesting elements on the screen. Changing our default cursor mode In response to the feedback, we made some changes to the way navigation works by default in Release Preview. The navigation gestures, which are now all single-finger flicks left and right, move you through all of the items on the screen. You no longer need to know how the UI is constructed in order to navigate it all you need to do is flick to get to the next and previous items, and Narrator presents you with a linear ordering of the important items on the screen. This allows you to learn about all of the interesting items in an app in an easy step-by-step manner, and interact with any item as you go. If you just want to hear all of the items in an app without flicking each time, you can swipe up with three fingers and Narrator will read through all of them in order, without stopping. (Note: This is the new default mode of navigation, which allows you to explore apps by flicking left and right to find all of the interesting items. If you prefer the old way of moving through the multiple layers of UI manually, you can change the Narrator cursor movement mode to “Advanced” in the Narrator settings). Improving web navigation In Windows 8, Narrator has made reading the web much easier. It has various features that are optimized for web reading, such as the “start reading” command, which reads out continuous sections of webpages without stopping, and search mode, which provides a list of various types of controls on a page. After we released the Developer and Consumer Preview builds, we heard from users that although these features were helpful, they did not enable them to accomplish some common tasks on the web, such as quickly scanning news headlines, doing a quick search, or checking stock quotes. So we revisited this feature, and as we dug further and gained a better understanding of these scenarios, we found ways to improve them in the Release Preview. For news reading in particular, we heard people saying they wanted to jump to various points in the page (e.g. headings, links), and then subsequently to be able to read line-by-line and even letter-by-letter. Many users wanted Narrator to provide these commands for them to navigate the web with more precision. In response, we added the concept of views to Narrator’s navigation commands. The new views are available in default navigation mode whenever you are on a webpage or other accessible text area, such as in the Mail app. The default Item view moves through the items on the page, and works the same way as item navigation throughout the system. But for accessible text areas such as webpages or Mail, Narrator now supports seven additional views: Headings Links Tables Paragraphs Lines Words Characters You can easily change the view by flicking up or down, and then flick left or right to move through the items in that view. These commands are also available with a keyboard by using Caps Lock + Arrow keys. With the new views, web reading is more powerful in the Release Preview. The views work with other Narrator reading commands as well. For example, if you find an interesting news headline and want to hear more, you can swipe down with three fingers and Narrator will start reading all of the page content until you tell it to stop. Finishing the job These examples represent some of the major work we’ve done in response to feedback from people who tried Narrator touch in the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview. We’ve made many more improvements based on your feedback—including reading out touch hints that teach you how to activate items, improving the Narrator settings UI to be easier to use with touch, and adding a new setting that makes it easier to type on the touch keyboard. While we believe Narrator is feature complete at this point, we’re still fixing bugs and fine-tuning it before Windows 8 is complete. It’s been fantastic and humbling to hear from so many of you who have had the chance to try out Narrator. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working one-on-one with users through our usability studies, at the CSUN conference, and within the Microsoft community. Thanks to all of the great constructive feedback we’ve received, we’ve made these important changes to Narrator for the Release Preview to make it a much better feature. While we work towards shipping this product soon, we’d love for you to download and install the Release Preview for yourself, and try out Narrator. Note: The touch features described in this blog require touch screens supporting at least four contact points. Windows 8 certified touch hardware will universally meet this requirement, but some current Windows 7 hardware may not (see this post for more info). If you do not have a touch screen supporting four contact points, you can still run Narrator using the keyboard. Thanks! -Doug Kirschner

Posted on Availability[/b] Users will be surprised by how Office is made available. While the conventional Office distribution is available with a perpetual license tied to a PC. But Office 2013 adds Office 365 subscription services. This means that you can install the desktop [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/quick-view-office-2013/office365-homepremium/" rel="attachment wp-att-95087">http://cdn5.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Office365-HomePremium-400x252.jpg?9d7bd4 apps on up to five PCs and store documents using 20 GB of included SkyDrive storage. The Office 2013 user interface follows many of the Metro design guidelines of Windows 8. Removing “chrome” is one of the biggest changes to the effect that when you open an Office desktop app on Windows 7 or Windows 8, you don’t see any window borders. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/quick-view-office-2013/office2013/" rel="attachment wp-att-95088">http://cdn7.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Office2013.jpg?9d7bd4 The Ribbon… Still there. However, it is flattened, with a plain white background. You’ll notice vivid colors on the File menu and in the status bar along the bottom, with color-coding to help distinguish between different office programs (dark blue for Word, green for Excel, orange for PowerPoint, and so on). [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/quick-view-office-2013/ribbon/" rel="attachment wp-att-95089">http://cdn7.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Ribbon.jpg?9d7bd4 Running Office 2013 on Windows 7 is easy, however, it will be interesting to see how it functions on the Windows 8 environment. Because Windows 8 will be geared to the touch screen, the desktop apps now also include options that make them easier to use on touch-enabled devices such as tablets. You can use Word’s new Read mode to change a document into columns that use the full screen, then with a flick of the finger flip through the document. Office 365 Versions The Cloud is big on the Microsoft agenda. So big in fact that the Office 365 versions include cloud storage, with SkyDrive Pro to sync files between SharePoint and the desktop. The cloud-based storage also allows easy online sharing and syncing. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/quick-view-office-2013/office_365/" rel="attachment wp-att-95090">http://cdn9.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/office_365-400x239.jpg?9d7bd4 The preview option of Office 2013 give users a taste of what will come down the pike when Windows 8 is released. The options available now for Office 2013 will create an interesting invocation of Windows 8. If it is this good now…wait for the new OS implementation. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/quick-view-office-2013/">A Quick View of Office 2013 was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

Windows 8 keeps users always connected. They can be connected to the internet, cloud services, and their other Windows 8 PCs. Your app can participate in this always connected ecosystem by taking advantage of roaming app data. In this post I tell you more about roaming app data, what it is, why it’s important, and best of all how easy it is to implement in your app. Why roam data Roaming personalization settings is key to feeling connected to Windows, and Windows 8 does that for many Windows settings, such as your desktop theme, backgrounds, and browser favorites. But Windows is only a small piece of a user’s personalization. Apps are the cornerstone in creating that always connected experience in Windows 8. It is your apps that bring enjoyment to Windows users, and it is your apps that they spend much of their time using. While our apps such as Bing Weather and Sports have these roaming experiences, we need your help to complete the vision of a connected Windows 8. Roaming to the cloud is also something cool and exciting that can delight your customers with convenience and help your app stand out from the rest. A great Metro style app with roaming will allow the user to configure it once and use it everywhere, so the user doesn’t have to re-configure the app each time they access it from a different PC It will also help them connect from anywhere by having a continuous experience as they transition from one PC to another. How we made it easy Our goal with roaming app data was to make it very easy to create these roaming experiences. We steered away from having you, the developer, manage the sync mechanics because it can be cumbersome and complex. We wanted to make it simple for you to roam everything the user might configure. To make this happen, Windows 8 has an integrated roaming sync for Application Data for all Metro style apps using the connected Microsoft Account associated with the user. ApplicationData is partitioned into three types of data which we call localities: local, roaming, and temporary. Simply by writing its data to the roaming locality your app can participate in the data being synced with the connected Microsoft account. This means that you don’t need to worry about managing the sync relationship, setting up an identity and login, buy or manage a service, or any of that other messy stuff. Windows takes care of it for you. All you need to focus on is what data to roam and how to design your app to take advantage of these benefits. When users connect to Windows, they also connect to your app. . User data vs. app data Before we dive in, it is important when working with roaming experiences to understand the difference between user data and app data. User data is data that a user creates and manages in the course of using the app, such as the user’s documents, music, videos, and pictures. It could also be anything that the user perceives as valuable or that may be shared among apps. This type of data should be stored in one of the KnownFolder libraries, or roamed using the SkyDrive APIs. Passwords should always be stored and roamed using the PasswordVault. This blog post is scoped to data that the app creates and manages, such as its settings, preferences, and state. These differences between user data and app data and how to roam each of them are summarized in this table. User data App data May be used by multiple apps Only meaningful to the app that created it Documents, music, pictures, exported data Settings, preferences, context, app state Stored in the cloud using SkyDrive Roams with ApplicationData Creating a configure once, use everywhere experience Let’s get started with a simple configure once, use anywhere experience. Suppose I have an app that is a simple RSS reader that allows the user to read items from a set of feeds. When viewing a particular feed the app displays a certain number of items per page. I have a user configurable setting called ItemsPerPage that controls how many feed items to display on a page. I want to make it so if the user sets this setting on one PC, it will roam to other PCs that have my app installed. Within the ApplicationData class there is a RoamingSettings property, and enabling a setting to roam is as simple as writing it as a value in RoamingSettings. JS: Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.current.roamingSettings.values[“ItemsPerPage”] = 10 C#: Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.RoamingSettings.Values[“ItemsPerPage”] = 10 That’s it! All the sync mechanics are handled by Windows, and that setting will now sync between all of the user’s PCs that have my app installed without any further action from me. This setting is typically presented to the user in the App Settings Charm. I highly recommend that you roam any app settings by default. Some settings may be machine specific and should not be saved into roaming locations. If you wanted to write a file instead of a setting, Application Data also offers RoamingFolder, which functions the same way. If you choose to use a file for roaming data, be sure to close any open handles to the file when you are done writing to it. Files with open handles are not roamed. Planning for the roaming quota If all you use in your app are simple settings, then what we looked at so far is all you need. But what about a favorites list or a collection or larger amounts of data? How big can it be? Roaming app data is optimized for roaming settings and preferences and it does have a per-app storage quota that is suitable for these types of data. The quota exists to be considerate of system resources. Long battery life and system performance are important characteristics of Windows 8, and our limit helps ensure neither are sacrificed to deliver these roaming experiences. You can get this quota using ApplicationData’s RoamingStorageQuota property, which at the time of writing this is 100KB. The best way to work within the quota is to plan your app’s data usage at design time and ensure that it will not grow out of the quota. So what happens if you exceed the RoamingStorageQuota? Nothing! More specifically, nothing roams. Your app will not break, and it can continue to read and write the data from the roaming locations. But until the total roaming data in the roaming locations is less than the RoamingStorageQuota, that data will not be synced to the cloud. One common pitfall that we see with apps that don’t properly plan their roaming data usage is that they roam content instead of references to the content. For example, if I wanted to roam a set of favorite news articles I should roam the article identifiers or URLs, not the entire articles. Roaming raw data rather than references to available content is a fast way to burn through the quota and waste space. You can get the most out of roaming by roaming identifiers to content, not the actual content itself. When planning your app it’s best not to use unwieldy sets of data. Any open-ended sets of data such as a favorites list should be capped so your app will always stay within the roaming quota. Continuing with my RSS feed reader example, suppose I wanted to save the list of RSS feeds, which is a user-managed list. The way to do this is to turn something that would otherwise be unbounded into something that has a limit. This requires a little estimation. Suppose I wanted to allocate 20KB for RSS feed lists. For simplicity I will give a conservative estimate of 80 bytes per URL. At that size I could cram 250 URLs into 20 KB. URL shortening could make this even smaller, but 250 is likely way more feeds than my app will ever need. All I have to do is cap it at that limit and write my feed list to a file, save it in the RoamingFolder, and it’s good to go. Creating a continuous experience across PCs There’s another cool roaming experience you can add to your app – the continuous user experience across PCs! Imagine a person at home on a desktop using my reader to catch up on their feeds who then needs to catch a bus. On the way out she grabs her Windows 8 tablet and opens up my app. The experience I want is for her to be able to continue reading right where she left on her desktop PC. Enabling the continuous experience is to preserve the context of what the user is doing and roam it. Functionally this is no different than roaming any other setting, but this scenario is a bit different than most settings. The user may navigate through the feeds very rapidly, so this setting may change frequently while other settings typically don’t. Moreover, for the experience to really delight the user, the data needs to be accurate to what the user was last doing. To meet these customer needs we created a unique setting name that is specifically designed to handle this experience, HighPriority. To use it, simply name your setting HighPriority in the root container of the RoamingSettings. It is used like any other setting. The roaming engine allows this setting to roam much more quickly than other roaming data so you can deliver on that experience. To enable this for my feed reader all I have to do is roam the feed identifier. On app launch or when resuming from suspend I check the identifier and navigate to the appropriate feed. It is very similar to my previous setting only the setting name is HighPriority. JS: Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.current.roamingSettings.values[“HighPriority”] = currentFeedId C#: Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.RoamingSettings.Values[“HighPriority”] = currentFeedId Like the other roaming experience, Windows takes care of all the hard stuff so you don’t need to worry about it. The key in using HighPriority is knowing when to read the setting and when to write it. Generally, check HighPriority on app launch or when it resumes after being suspended so the user can access whatever they were doing when last using the app, either on the current PC or another PC. We write HighPriority on user-initiated actions, like navigating to a new page or clicking on a link. The HighPriority setting is often instantaneous but may be throttled with rapid writes, so unnecessary writes will only cause performance degradation within the app and not improve the roaming experiences. As a general rule, make HighPriority represent where and what the user is doing, such as when the user navigates to pages within the app or browses content. Some apps may have rapidly changing data, such as a video player that is keeping track of the counter within the video being played. It would be overkill to write to HighPriority every time the video counter increments, so instead you could update it when the video changes states such as play/pause, the user reaches a checkpoint, or when the app is suspended. Keeping your data consistent Some data is tightly coupled and should always roam together. The classic example is the coordinates for a point. You don’t want the x and the y coordinates roaming independently when changed or it can corrupt the data and create invalid points. The units of roaming for ApplicationData are settings and files, so anything within a file will always roam together as a unit, and a setting itself is a unit. If you want to roam multiple settings together, such as the coordinates, you can use a CompositeSettingValue. This type of setting allows grouping of multiple settings into a single value that will always roam as a unit. The HighPriority setting can also be a composite, allowing you to safely roam multiple pieces of data that represent the current state of your app. For example, my feed reader groups feed items by pages for easy reading. I don’t want the feed ID and the page to ever roam independently of one another because the feeds may have different numbers of pages. What I really want to do is roam the current feed ID and the current page within that feed together as a CompositeSettingValue so they are always consistent. JS: var currentFeed = new Windows.Storage.ApplicationDataCompositeValue() currentFeed.insert(“CurrentFeedId”, currentFeedId) currentFeed.insert(“CurrentFeedPage”, currentFeedPage) Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.current.roamingSettings.values[“HighPriority”] = currentFeed C#: Windows.Storage.ApplicationDataCompositeValue currentFeed = new Windows.Storage.ApplicationDataCompositeValue() currentFeed.Insert(“CurrentFeedId”, currentFeedId) currentFeed.Insert(“CurrentFeedPage”, currentFeedPage) Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.RoamingSettings.Values[“HighPriority”] = currentFeed If a composite is used as the HighPriority setting then it must be under 8KB in order to retain the HighPriority benefits. Exceeding 8KB will not cause errors, but it will be roamed as if it were a normal setting. Responding to incoming roaming changes There is one last part of the roaming experience that you should know about, and that is ApplicationData’s DataChanged event. The DataChanged event is simply an event that you can signal whenever app data changes, such as signaling to a background task that the user changed a setting. When roaming data in the cloud causes a local change to your app, Windows will automatically signal this event for you. This allows you to respond to situations where data from another PC may have been delayed and then arrived after the user had already started using your app. You could use this event to refresh your view on the data or respond to setting changes. It is important to understand that this experience is optimized for consumers who use one PC at a time and switch between them, so you should not use DataChanged events as a real-time communication mechanism across PCs. Become part of the connected experience Having apps that utilize roaming is an important part of creating a connected Windows 8, and we’ve created a platform that makes it easy to create these cool new experiences. Roaming to the cloud is a great way for your app to stand out and delight your customers with convenience and a fluid transition between PCs. For additional guidance on using Roaming, please see the Guidelines for roaming application data. Also be sure to check out the ApplicationData sample, which contains examples of all of the experiences discussed in this blog entry. Thanks for reading! -- Dave Bennett, Program Manager, Windows View the full article

Posted on Start8[/b], an application that provides access to “Run” and “Shutdown” and so on. While this is a useful addition to Windows 8 Release Preview, there is an even better option available called Classic Shell. This replicates the old Start menu totally. In addition, right clicking the Start button provides access to its Settings allowing further tweaking. Classic Shell not only provides a user-friendly version of the Start menu but it also contains three other tools – Classic Explorer Settings, Classic IE9 Settings and Classic Shell Update. The former two allow you to re-configure Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer IE9. However, my main interest in this tool getting back a usable version of the former Start menu. I leave others to tinker with the other three options. You can access Classic Shell from this link - [url=http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/">http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/ After you download this application and install it you will find four APPS on the Metro screen. Classic Shell works fine with Windows 8 Release Review. On installation you will find the four Apps in the Metro menu. As most users of Windows 8 Release Preview know by now you can add these Apps to your Taskbar. One user, Annet Kalipso, wrote the following review of Classic Shell . . . ” But the best thing is that Classic Shell 3.5 puts its beautiful Start Menu on Windows 8 Consumer Preview, turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse! . . .” I feel Annet’s comments sums it all up but I’ll leave it to you to decide! [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/start-menu-classic-shell/">Get the Start Menu back with Classic Shell was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

Posted on View the full article

Posted on View the full article

Posted on New Look and Feel[/size] Trying to figure out which change is the most drastic is a challenge. On one hand Microsoft completely revamped the UI. Improving touch input and flattening out the user interface, Microsoft created apps which now closely resemble the full screen Metro apps found in Windows 8, which is the point. The new Office apps take their cue from the Zune PC software, which Windows Phone users currently use to update, manage, download and upload their media to Windows Phone devices. The infamous ribbon UI is still present in the new version of Office, but can be hidden and is hidden by default. [url=http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/2012/07/17/microsoft-announces-office-2013/excelflashfill_page/" rel="attachment wp-att-7393">http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ExcelFlashFill_Page.jpg Microsoft has also updated the icons for Office 2013. The new icons are flatter and more consistent with the metro style and theme in their new products. [url=http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/2012/07/17/microsoft-announces-office-2013/office2013-icons/" rel="attachment wp-att-7391">http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Office2013-icons.png Cloud Integration is Seamless One could also argue that the new SkyDrive integration is the biggest change to Office. Office 2013 uses[url=http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/2012/07/17/microsoft-announces-office-2013/skydrivelogo-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-7394">http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/SkyDriveLogo.png your SkyDrive or SharePoint accounts to store your documents. This way you’re always using the most up-to-date document and can access it from anywhere as long as you possess an internet connection. SkyDrive storage works just as a local drive does. When you first install and setup Office 2013, you will login with your Microsoft Account credentials and SkyDrive will be enabled by default. Of course, the user can change these defaults if they wish. New Cloud-Based Delivery Method Keeping with the cloud theme, I would submit that the greatest change in Office 2013 is the new delivery system for Office apps. The new system effectively streams a copy of Office to your computer, keeping all of your documents and settings intact. This ability would, for example, allow a user to log into their Office apps on a friend’s computer and continue working on a document that they started at home on their personal computer. The new system installs in minutes and is pretty impressive if I say so myself. There are a ton of new and interesting features coming in the next version of Microsoft Office and this post is just the tip of the iceberg, so tune into the official [url=http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/07/13/introductiontoofficenext.aspx" target="_blank">Office Next blog for tons of news and information on the coming software. [url=http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/2012/07/17/microsoft-announces-office-2013/office2013/" rel="attachment wp-att-7395">http://www.windowsphonemetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/office2013.jpg Don’t take my word for it though. Microsoft is offering a public preview of their new suite of productivity apps for users to try for themselves. You can try Office 2013 for free [url=http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/try-office-preview" target="_blank">here. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/17/microsoft-reveals-office-2013-offers-public-preview/">Microsoft Reveals Office 2013 and Offers Public Preview was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

Starting with the earliest TabletPC enhancements to Windows, we have been working on “on-screen keyboards.” With Windows 8, we started fresh and took a "first principles" approach to developing the touch keyboard. Given the amount of experience many of us have with touch keyboards for phones, and the myriad of touch devices we interact with these days, we set a very high bar for the quality of the experience and effectiveness of input with the new Windows 8 touch keyboard. In this post, Kip Knox, a member of the Windows User Experience program management team, details this work. --Steven When we began planning how touch and new types of PCs might work on Windows 8, we recognized the need to provide an effective method for text entry on tablets and other touch screen PCs. Since Windows XP SP1, which had Tablet PC features built in, Windows has included a touchable on-screen keyboard. But those features were designed as extensions to the desktop experience. For Windows 8, we set out to improve on that model and introduce text input support that meets people’s needs, matches our design principles, and works well with the form factors we see today and expect to see in the future. I’m writing this blog post on our Windows 8 touch keyboard using the standard QWERTY layout in English. As I look at it, the keyboard seems very simple and sort of obvious. This comes partly from having worked on it for a while, but also because keyboards are familiar to us. But there is more here than meets the eye (or, fingertips). We started planning this feature area with no preconceived notions. As we do with all our features, we began the text input design project with a set of principles or goals. On a Windows 8 PC using touch, we want people to be able to: Enter text quickly, reasonably close to the speed with which they type on a physical keyboard Avoid errors, and be able to easily correct mistakes Enter text comfortably, in terms of posture, interaction with the device, and social setting You might note that none of those goals explicitly assumes a keyboard. And when we started the project, we cast a broad net across possible approaches to text input. We found that of all the methods of text input we considered, none met the goals above as well as a keyboard. The majority of people are simply faster, more accurate, and more comfortable typing than they are writing any other way. Windows has highly accurate handwriting recognition in several languages, as well as advanced speech recognition, for example. But without a great touch keyboard, we were not going to be able to fulfill people’s needs and expectations for touch-screen devices running Windows. So we set out to create the best touch keyboard on any device. Optimizing for comfort and posture There are many ways to imagine touch keyboards on a tablet, and we sketched a lot of them—large keyboards, tiny keyboards, floating keyboards, circular keyboards, swipe keyboards. But our initial design process was grounded in research we did into the ways that people interact with tablets. Our researchers conducted an in-depth study in which they observed people “living with” tablets over a period of time. Through these observations and interviews, we saw a set of three postures that are most common among people using tablets: One hand holding the device, with one hand interacting with the user interface Two hands holding the device, with thumbs interacting Resting the device on table, lap, or stand, and interacting with both hands . Research into people “living with” tablets revealed three common postures. In these postures, people felt most natural and most likely to use the tablet for longer periods of time. We’ve made many design decisions in Windows 8 to optimize for these postures, and that includes how people intuitively input text. When typing on a tablet, most people either set it on their lap or a table and multi-finger type, or hold it in their hands and type with their thumbs, or hold it with one hand and “hunt and peck.” Our standard touch keyboard layout is optimized for laying the tablet down and multi-finger typing, and also works well for typing with one hand. We also introduced a new layout we call the thumb keyboard (which we showed for the first time at our very first preview of Windows 8 about a year ago), which is designed for holding the tablet with two hands and typing with your thumbs. This keyboard is adjustable in size, to accommodate different hand sizes. An interesting observation from our posture research is that people frequently switch postures, and that posture switch is often seen as a positive thing, as we move about to remain comfortable. So in our keyboard layouts we also considered what it would be like to type for a period of time—say, an email to your mom—and switch postures while you do it. You might start by typing with the tablet lying on the coffee table, for example, but then you might tire of that posture and pick up the tablet, lie back on the couch, and interact with two thumbs. Further research into posture and comfort helped us to understand how people hold tablets, and how far our thumbs typically reach. In a follow-up study, we had a wide selection of people with different hand sizes use a tablet with sensors that would indicate where their thumbs could reach most comfortably, where they could extend to, and where reach was just uncomfortable. These results helped us optimize the use of the system with thumbs, and helped shape the thumb keyboard layout. . This heat map illustrates the typical reach of people’s thumbs, overlaid on the thumb keyboard layout. Green is very comfortable, yellow can be reached, and red is typically uncomfortable. Typing on glass The next challenge we considered was the experience of typing on the glass display of a tablet. At least one of the key postures—laying the tablet down—is analogous to typing on a physical keyboard. So unlike typing text on a phone, we were faced with direct comparisons with the physical keyboard experience. When you type on your laptop or desktop, you enjoy some real benefits. You get a lot of sensory feedback as you type. First, you can position your hands quickly on your home keys, and most keyboards have small bumps on the J and F keys (in English QWERTY keyboards) to confirm that position. Then, as you type, the shape of the keys reinforces where your fingers are as they move about. The keys have “travel,” or small up-and-down movement, which confirms that you struck them. And because the keyboard is mechanical, there is a tapping sound that confirms your key strikes (perhaps to your chagrin, if your colleagues are checking email during meetings J). If you lay down a piece of glass and type on it, you get no feedback there is no indication for where to position your hands, and there is no indication of whether you’ve hit a target or not. Recognizing this, we made a few decisions. We needed to provide some type of feedback, and we needed to recognize that people will be more “sloppy” when typing on a touch keyboard. But we also observed that a touch keyboard can do things that a physical keyboard can’t, and we should bring those functions out. The feedback you see in the touch keyboard comes in two forms—the keys change color when you touch them, and they trigger a subtle sound. This is similar to what you see on most phone touch keyboards. We considered other forms of feedback, but ruled them out as too disruptive or unnatural. For example, we explored haptic feedback (a vibration of the device based on input) which you also find on many phones. But most people find the current state-of-the-art haptics somewhat irritating when typing pieces of any length and a buzz can feel as much like a punishment as a reassurance. Our two forms of feedback—visual key changes and sounds—are not without controversy either. Visual key changes are not always ideal when you are entering a password, for example, and for that reason we enable you to suppress feedback in these cases. Some people have argued that key press sounds are irritating and artificial. But user testing confirmed our assumption that people clearly find the sounds reassuring and confidence-inspiring when typing on glass. The specific sounds we use (which are very similar to those on the Windows Phone) are designed to be “residual,” where you quickly forget that they are there, but would notice if they were turned off. Both forms of feedback may be used more when people are first getting used to the experience. We have done eye-tracking studies in the lab, which showed that as people become more proficient with the touch keyboard, they spend more time looking at the input field, and less time looking at the keyboard itself. So the appearance of each character becomes the best feedback when you are typing efficiently. I’ll tell you a little more about these eye-tracking studies later in this post. . As people spend time with the touch keyboard, their focus moves more consistently to the input field, as this heat map from an eye-tracking study shows. But even when you “get good” at typing on a touch keyboard on glass, you will still be sloppier and slower than you would be with a physical keyboard. The Windows 8 touch keyboard has some special accommodations to address this reality. The most interesting one is what we call the “touch model.” When you tap a key on the touch keyboard, we detect the coordinates of your touch, and we can map it to the geometry of the keys. But as your fingers move about across the glass, your press is likely to migrate outside the boundaries of the key you intended to touch. If we relied simply on the geometry mapping of the keys, you would see a lot of errors. To account for this, the key press is first compared against a model that assesses the likelihood that you intended to strike that key or a key near it. This processing is informed by two things. First, we use data from many people’s typing pangrams, or phrases that use every letter of the alphabet, recording trends where peoples bias their touch away from the intended target. For example, they might intend to type a p, but often strike the o, because most people’s fingers curve inward. Based on a set of characteristics, including typing speed, the model weights the likelihood that you intended to type one key over another. Secondly, we use lexical data representing letters and words that are likely to be strung together in writing. This is the same system that enables spelling correction—the system “knows” what you probably intended to type even if you made a mistake. Based on the touch model, the keyboard is often able to quietly correct cases where you intended to type a p for example, but inadvertently struck the o, on a QWERTY layout. Or consider the example where you are typing the word “the.” If you type t then h and then touch between the e and w but slightly more on the w, the touch model adjudicates this, knows that t-h-e is the common character combination in English rather than t-h-w, and appropriately outputs the e. But if you touch the w fully, the keyboard respects that input and assumes you know best. This all happens while you are typing, so the right character goes into the input field and doesn’t require further correction. When this works best, you don’t realize it’s even happening, increasing your confidence in typing on glass. . This map from a report on touch model data illustrates biases that people show toward certain keys when typing on a touch keyboard. Great for typing Once we accounted for feedback and provided “guard rails” for inevitable mistakes, we still had to determine the specific keyboard layouts—what keys go where. Key positions have a big influence over typing speed and accuracy, and people have very strong—and often conflicting—opinions about keys. But the design problem broke down logically, based on our observations of interaction and some physical realities. For example, we confirmed our assumptions that: Most people have developed very strong habits based on the conventions of physical keyboards. When you break these conventions, it slows their typing down appreciably. This even applies to very young folks or dedicated T9 typists, for example, as most of us learn to touch-type in some form at a young age. There are optimal targetable sizes of keys. The extensive research Microsoft has done into physical keyboards applied here too. For example, the letter keys on our touch keyboard are 19mm wide, the same as on most physical keyboards, because people showed faster typing speeds with targets of that size (rather than smaller or larger). The more keys you include, the more likely people are to make mistakes. This is partly because more keys mean the keys need to be smaller and there’s a greater likelihood of hitting a key you didn’t intend. More keys also create visual clutter and distraction and slow your ability to scan and find a key. You don’t want to obscure more than half the display with a keyboard. A too-large keyboard creates a claustrophobic experience and you lose context. However, there is a counter rule that says obscuring about half the display works fine. This is because entering text is most often a “modal” activity, where your focus is very much on typing something and not on the periphery. Your area of focus outside the keyboard is relatively small, and directed toward the characters you’re typing. Our eye-tracking studies, illustrated in this post, demonstrate this. People use some keys more than others. We deduce this from analyzing passages of text written in real-world circumstances. There are clear patterns of frequency in the use of letters and symbols. People will learn to do new things—and learn quickly—if they don’t interfere with habits. So in the end, the layout of a touch keyboard in any language becomes a balancing act of the different factors. You want to reduce the number of keys in the default layout, for example, but if you remove a key people rely on in typing every day, you will frustrate them. The layout needs to be big enough to support accuracy, but not so big it obscures the application. There was one more overall rule or principle that we applied to the keyboard layouts specifically: They must be great for typing. That seems obvious but it’s clarifying when you recognize that keyboards are used for a lot of things other than writing words—shortcuts to UI, for example, or sending commands, or entering codes. Our keyboard is optimized for typing, because that is its primary purpose and it must do it well above all other things. Let’s take a look at a few of the decisions we made that fit within these parameters. Numbers We get a lot of questions about why we don’t include a number row in the default keyboard layout. We use numbers frequently in our jobs, and we’re used to finding number keys on the top of our physical keyboard. The Windows 7 on-screen keyboard has a number row, for example. This is consistent with the overall design of that keyboard—it is essentially a software emulation of a physical keyboard. It has not been optimized for a world of touch. . The Windows 7 on-screen keyboard emulates a physical keyboard and isn’t optimized for touch or typing. Some of our early designs and prototypes had a number row too. But when we brought these designs in front of people, the feedback was strong that the keyboard felt “cramped” compared to what they were used to. We observed frequent errors and accidental invocation of keys, especially around the perimeter of the layout. This resulted in a number of changes, and it confirmed the decision to not include a number row. Here’s why: Including a number row meant adding a fourth row of character keys. When we optimize for keys with a targetable size, that means the keyboard must be that much higher. On a typical tablet device (say with a screen size of 10.6 inches) adding a number row would mean that more than half of the display would be covered by the keyboard. When we combined this with the observation that numbers are typed less frequently than most letters and common symbols, and you recognize that the extra keys are causing accidental key presses, we settled on including numbers on the separate number and symbol view. That settled, we still had debates about whether to display numbers as a row across the top of the numbers and symbols view, or to display it as a numeric pad. We chose the numeric pad for a few reasons: People often enter multiple numbers at once. It’s easier to scan an organized group than a long row. People type number sequences much faster when the numbers are clustered. We also decided to include the numbers in 1,2,3 order from the top, rather than 7,8,9, as it appears on many extended computer keyboards or cash registers. This is an interesting case where the physical keyboard convention didn’t matter as much, because people have become familiar and very comfortable with the order of number pads on phones, ATMs, remote controls, and other modern devices. 1,2,3 order is simply easier for the eyes to scan and the brain to process than any other order. . The number and symbol view includes a numeric pad that reflects modern layouts we find on phones, ATMs, and remote controls. Tab key The tab key has a similar story. It’s a key we use a lot—for formatting documents, but also for things like navigating input fields on a webpage. For that reason, we included it in one of our early touch-optimized layouts, after we had removed a lot of other keys typically found on physical keyboards. It looked like this. . An early layout of the keyboard had extra keys that interfered with accuracy and speed. You might observe that on the right and the left, there are borders of keys that aren’t letters or symbols. This layout yielded the results described above—people experienced a cramped feeling. And worse than that, they frequently missed character keys and inadvertently touched one of the border keys. When we removed them, people raved about the openness and comfort of the layout, their errors went down, and their speed went up. With the Tab key on the numbers and symbols view, it was harder to reach—but the keyboard was better for typing, and so the Tab key’s peregrinations were over. Downshift: a mistake to learn from The last example we’ll share involves a feature we had in the product and have subsequently cut. This is a feature inspired by our desire to make punctuation easier to get to, without a complete view switch. In this design, the left shift key acted as the shift key does today—it enabled capital letters and access to alternate symbols from the default view. We used the right shift key differently—it provided a “peek” into frequently-used symbols or punctuation. The idea was that you would “downshift” briefly to select punctuation, for example, but not lose the context of the main view, and thus be faster. We theorized that this was a place where we could deviate from convention and provide value you could only get with software. Here’s a picture of the “downshift” keyboard. . The downshift design was intended to provide fast way to access symbols, but interfered with expectations for shift behavior. Suffice to say this prototype did not succeed in the lab. Participants continually struck the right shift key for the usual reasons you’d use a shift key. And when the keyboard showed the “peek” to symbols, they were confused and their typing came to a halt. So this was a case where we had to stick with the convention of a physical keyboard. There is an interesting counter example in press-and-hold behavior. On a physical keyboard, when you press and hold a character, it repeats. On our touch keyboard when you press and hold, we show alternate characters or symbols. This is something a touch keyboard can do well and a physical keyboard can’t. If you don’t know the specific key combination to show ñ or é or š, for example, it’s painful to type on a physical keyboard. It’s easy to find on the touch keyboard. Practically no one has complained about this departure from convention. We built on it, in fact. You might discover that you can simply swipe from a key in the direction of the secondary key, and that character will be entered, without an explicit selection from the menu. So if you use accented characters a lot, you can get pretty fast with this. Try it out! . When you press and hold a key, it reveals related keys. If you swipe quickly toward the secondary key you want, you can select it quickly. Testing and validating We’ve been conducting a series of eye-tracking studies, where cameras record the direction of the participants’ gaze as they are interacting with the system. These studies help us determine a few things: Where do people look when typing on a touch keyboard? Does visual gaze change over time? Are these patterns consistent across different views or layouts? And is visual gaze correlated to speed of typing? . An eye-tracking study participant begins the session. We’ve found very consistently that people primarily look at the text field where their characters appear, and they look at the keyboard. This is so consistent that we designed our text suggestion experience to optimize for this tendency. Text suggestions (words that are predicted as you type) appear right by the cursor in the text field, and you insert them by touching the “Insert” key on the touch keyboard. This is optimized for where we saw people putting their attention as they typed. It is notably different, for example, from text suggestion UI you see on many phones, where there is a band of possible words that run across the top of the keyboard. On a PC with a full-sized keyboard, people just don’t look there, and they don’t want to stop typing and change their posture to select these words. . Individual fixations, or recordings of a stabilized retina, show that people look either at the keyboard or at the text field. We do not typically look in between the two. Our text prediction UI appears near the caret for this reason. We also found that our gaze does change over time, and as the gaze changes, we type faster. You can see this very clearly in the gaze plots of the eye-tracking studies. A full range of people show this tendency—from slow typists unfamiliar with tablets to skilled typists who spend a lot of time with tablets. In all cases, at first, there is more attention on the keyboard, and the speed is slower. Over time—say, about 90 minutes over a few days—there is markedly less attention paid to the keyboard, more to the text field, and words per minute go up significantly. . We can see in lab studies that the focus of our gaze changes over time. The left hand image shows a typist after just a few minutes. The right image shows the gaze plots after about 90 minutes. You can see that focus moves to the text field. This typist doubled her speed during the session. Continued refinement Lastly, below is a picture of the current English QWERTY layout, which we have in the Windows 8 Release Preview. It is intentionally spare and open, and the keys that remain are there for explicit reasons. Each of these has its own story, but we can call out a few highlights: The backspace key is there because it’s used very frequently on physical keyboards and touch keyboards. If we removed it, you would find your finger groping for it repeatedly. The mode switch key is essential to moving between views and languages and for hiding the keyboard. IME users will find that this is how you switch to Windows IMEs, which also feature touch-optimized keyboard layouts. The CTRL key and the right and left arrow keys are intended for text editing operations. You can move your input cursor and cut, copy, and paste without moving your hands from the keyboard. (Note that the CTRL key works just as it does on a physical keyboard—so any supported combination will work. We include labels for things like cut, copy, paste, and bold, because they are related to text editing. The touch keyboard is not intended for “commanding,” which is why you don’t see things like the Windows key or function keys. That is a deliberate decision to stay focused on the goal of being really great for typing. The space bar is centered and wide. Physical keyboard research shows that about 80% of strikes on the space bar occur on the right (if you look at older keyboards, you will notice the wear on that side). This holds for touch keyboards too, where people will miss the spacebar if it’s not ample-sized, and this creates errors that are hard to recover from. The “emoji” or emoticon key switches you to emoji view, where we support a full set of Unicode-based emoji characters. The use of emoji continues to grow worldwide, and has become a part of how people write and express themselves. We also include an option for a standard keyboard layout, which can be useful on a PC without a keyboard when using desktop software that requires function keys or other extended keys. This is easily enabled from the settings Charm, in the General Settings section of PC Settings. As you use the keyboard, we hope you also discover some extra features we’ve added to make things easier. For example, if you hold down the &123 key, you can select symbols or numbers with your other hand, and when you release, you return to your original view. The team calls this “multi-touch view peek.” . The current touch-optimized layout reflects decisions about each of the keys based on a series of studies. These optimizations apply across the input languages we have in Windows, as we support a touch-optimized typing experience worldwide. We expect to make a few more improvements to the typing experience, and we are really grateful and delighted by the feedback we’ve received so far. Thanks!

Posted on [*]Add a “Start” menu to the Windows 8 taskbar [*] Enable quick access to install applications [*] Add “Run” option via a right-click menu [*] Add “Shutdown” option via a right click menu [*] Customize the Start button image . . . and more When you go to download Start8 you are required to add your email address to access a download link. Check you email account and you will see Stardock’s invitation to download Start8. It’s well worth considering! [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/16/hankering-start-menu/">Start8 for those still hankering for the Start Menu was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

Posted on View the full article

Posted on View the full article

Posted on [url=http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/discover/features.aspx">Kinect for Windows[/b] Kinect for Windows offers the potential to transform how people interact with computers and Windows-embedded devices in multiple industries, like, healthcare, retail, and transportation. At the heart is the sensor, which allows programs to pick up distant operations and process them into software components. So instead of limiting programs to run from the keyboard, the sensor allows for the development of software that can process information from a remote source. So think of the opportunities. Instead of having a program that is limited by keyboard or mouse function, a program can operate on the distance reflection picked up by Kinect. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/13/kinect-windows/sensor_setup_hero/" rel="attachment wp-att-95012">http://cdn9.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/sensor_setup_hero-400x188.png?9d7bd4 Human Sensor The key to the operation of Kinect is the technology of remote integration. That is the ability of the hardware to pick up a remote presence in order to process the information. The SDK allows developers to write Apps and other programs that make it possible to bring together Windows and Kinect, thereby making Kinect an extension of the PC. All of this is not under the radar of Microsoft technology, but the odd thing is that it is under the radar. While most technology websites still look at Kinect as a gaming device, there is a lot of technology change coming from it. But the talk is not there. Recently, Microsoft acquired a touch screen company, [url=http://www.perceptivepixel.com/company/overview-history">Perceptive Pixel, with the anticipation that it take touch screen technology to a new level, beyond what the Surface tablet will currently provide. With Kinect as another technology that is making innovations, Microsoft is walking in a new direction by looking at incorporating new technologies into their operating system. We may be looking at how Windows 9 may be developing. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/13/kinect-windows/">Kinect for Windows was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

Posted on Live Disk Linux[/b] If you only have a fleeting need for Linux, installing it on a live disk could potentially be the best option for you. Linux on a disk is great for those users who only need to run the operating system sporadically, and allows the operating system to be launched as necessary. Live disks can either be obtained directly from Linux, whenever a new distribution takes place, or by purchasing the CD inside of a technology magazine. Simply popping the disk into a computer should be enough to get the operating system functioning. Linux on the Virtual PC A slightly more involved installation of Linux is running the operating system in a virtual environment. Windows computers can easily run virtual machines. Some of these virtual environments can be created with a paid software application, whereas others can be created with free products available on the market. In fact, Virtual PC 2007 is a free product that has been developed specifically for this purpose by Microsoft. Running Virtual PC 2007, users can install Linux and use it specifically within the environment as needed. Just like the live disk option, running Linux separately from the Windows operating system experience presents a couple of unique challenges. The primary such obstacle is that running Linux in this manner taxes the system resources pretty significantly, as RAM and virtual memory are being split between the two operating systems. One good way to avoid this issue is to upgrade PCs that are currently using lackluster hardware. If you have a significant amount of memory and system resources available to be utilized, you shouldn’t experience any issues with this. Linux Through Wubi Finally, there is one other way that you can easily experience the wonder that is Linux on your Windows machine. Wubi allows Linux to be installed like a simple file on the machine, which can be opened and closed at will. While hibernation mode will not work with a Wubi installation, it will nevertheless be able to provide computer users with the vast majority of features of a more traditional installation. To install the latest Linux release, Ubuntu, on your computer using Wubi, you will need to first download the Wubi installer to your computer system. Using this download, you will be able to launch Linux and begin using the operating system immediately on the machine. No matter why a computer user chooses to give Linux a go, installing on the operating system should not feel like mission impossible. By considering all of the options available, most users should be able to determine what method is the best option for their machine. Of course, should Linux prove to be a more enjoyable computing experience that that offered by a Windows machine, the entire system can be overhauled with a Linux installation. Doing so is a bit more involved, but could be worth it in the long run, assuming the computer user no longer has any need for a Windows-based operating system. ABOUT AUTHOR: An article is written by Kate Willer. I like social networks, Google android, View the full article

In the world of Metro style apps, your apps are the focus of the whole experience. For this experience to be delightful to your users, you want to ensure that your apps are well tested and represent a high level of quality. Producing a Metro style app involves four main stages: design, development, testing and finally distribution. A number of previous blog posts focus on the design and development aspects of Metro style apps. In this post, we cover a few high level verification areas related to testing your apps. The term testing is overloaded, meaning different things to different people, especially in the context of the software development lifecycle. It also involves a diverse set of activities that can be executed at different stages of software development. These activities include unit testing, functional testing, usability testing, scenario testing, and a few others. Any one of these activities represents only one piece of the testing puzzle and doesn’t cover all the necessary verification that you need to put an app through to make sure it is of high quality. In this post, we don’t distinguish between the specific types of verification. Instead, we provide a broad set of high-level verification areas and exercises that will help you ensure that your app represents a high level of quality. In addition to these verification areas, you can also verify the functionality of your app during development using Visual Studio for debugging and testing, and the Visual Studio Unit Test Tools. In the coming weeks, we plan to do more blog posts that will dive deeper into specifics of testing Metro style apps. As we saw in the “managing app lifecycle” blog post, a Metro style app can transition between various runtime states. Based on this app lifecycle, we like to think of these key areas of verification: Activated: verify the app through several activation paths Running: verify the app at runtime Suspended: verify the app suspends correctly Resumed: verify the app resumes correctly Terminated: verify the app terminates Not running: verify behavior when your app is not running Let’s dive deeper into the key verification areas during each of these areas. Verify activation behavior of the app To test activation we need to go through the various contexts in which users can launch your app. It is important to verify each activation scenario your app supports. Here are the common contexts in which users can activate your app: Tile:The launch of your app through the tile is very likely the first interaction that users have with your app. Verify that your app follows the appropriate app launch design pattern. Toast notifications: If your app supports toast notifications, verify that your app activates functions as expected when you click an incoming notification that your app is meant to handle. Search:If your app supports Search, verify that your app activates and that you can complete a search in your app. If your app supports displaying search suggestions, verify that it functions as expected. Share target:If your app supports being a Share target, verify that your app activates and posts the content shared from another app for the supported types of content. Protocol:If your app registers for a protocol, verify that you can activate your app by launching various types of URLs corresponding to this protocol. File association:If your app registers to handle a file type, verify that you can activate your app by launching files of the corresponding file type. File pickers/contact picker: If your app is registered as a file open/save picker or as a contact picker, verify that you can activate your app in those contexts. Verify runtime behavior of the app Verifying the functionality of a Metro style app is a combination of verifying the common characteristics that apply to all apps, and verifying the app specific functionality. In addition to the key verification scenarios we talk about in a moment, you must also verify the app-specific functionality. This involves understanding the key scenarios targeted by your app and verifying that these scenarios work as expected. Tiles The app tile is a core part of your app, and possibly the most frequently seen part of your app. The following aspects of your tile behavior are important to verify: If your app supports live tiles, verify its behavior while your app is running. Verify that the tile updates are consistent with the state displayed within your app. For example, a photo app’s tile could show photos from the most recently added album. If your app supports secondary tiles, verify that they display the expected info. For example, a weather app can support pinning specific cities as secondary tiles. You need to also verify that clicking the secondary tile results in the app launching and taking you to the expected context within the app. If your app supports notification badges in the tiles, verify that any badge update shows as expected, and that it is consistent with the corresponding state displayed within your app. For example, a badge related to the count of unread mail in a mail app must get cleared when the app runs to let the user know that they no longer have any unread mail. Toast notifications If your app supports toast notifications, verify that the toasts trigger and display correctly. Also verify that clicking the toast notification results in the app launching and taking you to the expected context within the app. Contracts and extensions We looked at a few contracts earlier as part of verifying the activation behavior of your app. Let’s look at a few additional areas related to verifying contracts at runtime: Share source: If your app supports being a sharing source, verify that you can use the Share charm to share content from your app (for the supported types of content) to other target apps on the machine. Play to: If your app supports the Play To contract, verify that you can use the Devices charm to play media from your app on a remote device. Settings: If your app supports the Settings contract, verify that you can view and modify your app specific settings. Also, verify that the app persists the modified settings across termination/re-launch. Windows App Certification Kit The Windows App Certification Kit allows you to verify that your app meets the Windows Store submission criteria. This kit includes automated tests to verify the usage of supported APIs, testing for crashes/hangs, verification of the application manifest, and launch/suspension time performance. We recommend that you run this kit early and often. We’ve experienced a number of situations where the app didn’t make it to the Store by the deadline because the app owner waited till the last minute to run the certification kit against the app. If you run the kit early and often you can discover and fix any app issues quickly and submit your app to the Store. The Windows App Certification Kit documentation has details on the types of tests the kit does and additional tips on the configurations under which to run the kit. Snapped and fill views Users can run your Metro style app under various view states. In addition to the full screen view, users can use your app in the snapped and fill views. It is important to verify that your app handles these view state transitions correctly. Verify that your app supports the snapped and fill views. Verify that your app maintains the context when it gets snapped or unsnapped. Verify that snapping and unsnapping doesn’t destroy the user's work or state. Verify that the user can interact with your app while it is snapped. Rotation Users can rotate and flip their tablets and monitors. If your app supports the portrait orientation in addition to the landscape orientation, verify that your app can handle the orientation changes. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Metro style apps to test your app in both modes. So, you don’t necessarily need a tablet device to test this scenario. Touch Windows 8 enables apps to have a number of new touch experiences. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Metro style apps to test the touch interactions that your app supports. So, you don’t necessarily need dedicated touch hardware to verify these interactions. Verify that all the controls used in the app are standard basic controls that are touch-friendly. Depending on your programming language, use either the XAML controls or the JavaScript controls. Verify that your Metro style app follows the standard Touch interaction design. Verify that your app provides visual feedback for the user actions. Verify that your app avoids dragging actions from the edges of the screen to avoid conflicting with the Windows OS gestures. If the app supports any text input controls, verify that the soft keyboard works as expected. Verify that the area with the keyboard focus shifts up into view when the soft keyboard is displayed. Playing audio Windows 8 supports a model for Metro style apps to play audio, including playing in the background. Here’s what we recommend for testing audio: If your app plays audio, verify that it handles the sound level notifications appropriately when a user switches between your app and other types of audio apps. For example, if your app is a game, you might want to pause the game when it receives a “Muted” notification. For details, see Audio playback in a Metro style app. If your app supports playing audio in the background, verify that your app continues playing audio in the background without getting suspended. Verify that your app continues to play audio when the user locks the machine. If your app registers for the transport controls to control playback of music, verify that it works as expected. Different screen sizes Windows 8 runs on a variety of screen sizes, from a small screen on a tablet, to a medium laptop screen all the way up to a large desktop screen. Therefore it is important to test your app on different screen sizes. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Metro style apps to test your app on a variety of screen sizes and pixel densities. On resolutions between 1024x768 and 2560x1440, verify that your app’s layouts are not truncated and that content appears where expected. Verify that images are crisp when scaled to pixel density. Data roaming Windows 8 enables roaming settings across multiple PCs, including the roaming state persisted by your Metro style apps. To test this: Verify that the app context roams as expected across multiple PCs. For example, this could be the last completed level in a game, the most recently read page in a book, or the last watched position of a video in your app. Verify that the context the app set on one PC is reflected when you use the app on another PC. Verify that the applicable user preferences for your app roam as expected across multiple PCs. For example, this could be the user’s unit preference for the temperature in a Weather app. In this example, verify that the user’s unit preference set on one PC is reflected when you use the app on another PC. Devices and sensors If your Metro style app supports devices or sensors, you need to verify these areas. If your app supports tailoring the view based on the geolocation, verify that it works as expected. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Metro style apps to test this as it supports an option to set the current location. If your app supports responding to user-initiated device connections like a camera or USB drive, verify that your app correctly performs the action corresponding to that event. For example, this could be verifying that users can use your app to copy all the images from a camera. Also, verify that your app handles device disconnects gracefully. For example, this involves verifying how your app behaves if the user disconnects the camera while your app is copying images from the camera. Users can dock certain types of machines or devices to a docking station. Verify that your app behaves as expected both when the machine is docked and undocked. Performance Users expect apps to respond immediately to inputs. So it is critical to verify the performance characteristics of your app. As Windows 8 can run on a variety of hardware, consider installing your app on a low end machine to measure its performance characteristics. The post How to improve performance in your Metro style app has details on how to prepare a machine for measurements. Responsiveness For the key scenarios supported by your app, understand the expected interaction classesand verify that the app meets the goals for that particular interaction class. Verify that your app remains responsive to the user. Verify that your app provides feedback to the user during any long-running activities, such as an asynchronous network call. Being a good citizen in the app ecosystem As the post How to improve performance in your Metro style app explains, it is important to verify that your app is a good citizen in the app ecosystem. This involves contributing positively to the user’s overall experience (whether your app is in the foreground or not). In addition to verifying the areas that post lists, here are a few additional areas to verify: When in idle state, if you expect your app to not be using CPU, verify that the app doesn’t consume any CPU. Users could be on various types of networks including metered networks. If your app connects to the Internet, verify that it adapts its behavior for metered networks when sending and receiving data. Error handling As the saying goes, anything that can go wrong, will :). Seriously, when a condition your app depends on changes, it can impact your app’s behavior. For example, your app needs to handle network connectivity not being available and decide on how to behave in this situation. Verify that your app handles error conditions appropriately. As in our example, network and/or device connectivity is a great way to trigger error paths in your app. Verify that your app follows the guidelines for managing connection state changes. Verify that the error handling is not intrusive and that your app displays only the critical errors to the user. Verify that your app provides actionable error messages to the user. See the guidelines for actionable error messages. Reliability Users expect apps to work reliably and consistently. It is important to verify that your app is highly reliable. Verify that your app runs reliably across varied conditions and that it doesn’t crash because of unhandled exceptions. Verify that your app doesn’t leak memory or any other resources. To detect memory leaks in a Metro style app, you can use the same methods that you normally use with other Windows applications. After you publish your app to the Windows Store, you can use the Windows Store developer portal to review your app’s usage and quality data. For example, you can view the data about exceptions, crashes, and unresponsiveness issues that your users encountered. Consider using this data to fix the top crashes and hangs in your app. Accessibility Windows 8 is designed for a broad spectrum of people and is accessible to everyone regardless of their abilities. If your Metro style app meets a baseline of accessibility, it can contribute tremendously to improving the accessibility ecosystem. If your app supports accessibility, verify that it meets the criteria described in Testing your app for accessibility. Globalization and localization If your Metro style app is designed to be global, it can be localized for a variety of regions and markets. Metro style apps can use the configured language and display formats (date, time, currency, and numbers) to tailor their content. For example, if a user configures Japanese as the primary language on an English installation of Windows, and then launches a Metro style Stocks app, the app can display all the related news articles in Japanese and additionally show info about the stocks trading in the selected region (e.g. Tokyo Stock Exchange). If your app is localized, verify that it works for different locales and display languages. For the languages your app supports, use the Language settings in the Control Panel to add each of the specific languages as a primary language, and verify that your app tailors the content appropriate for that language. Verify that changing the language when your app is running or suspended works as expected. For the languages your app supports, verify that the user interface strings appear as expected and don’t get truncated. Verify that any text shown in the app’s images is in the selected display language. Processor architectures A Metro style app can be architecture-neutral or it could target a specific architecture. If your app is architecture neutral, it can be tested on any chosen architecture. If it is architecture specific, it needs to be tested on all the supported architectures. If your app is targeted specifically for Windows RT (ARM), verify its functionality on a Windows RT PC. You can find additional info on developing and testing on ARM in the blog post What you need to know about developing for Windows on ARM (WOA). If your app targets x86 and doesn’t separately provide a x64 package, verify that your app functions correctly on both x86 and x64 systems. This is because x86 apps can run on x86 (32-bit Windows) or x64 (64-bit Windows) systems. Windows allows apps targeted for x86 to run on x64 systems. Verify suspension behavior of the app Windows suspends your app when it is not in the foreground. In this way, Windows gives the foreground app better use of system resources and ensures that apps in the background can’t drain the user’s battery. For example, during suspension, a Stocks app can persist info about the last stock that the user was viewing and the time range for a stock chart. Verify that your app reduces memory usage while it is in a suspended state. To view the suspension status in Task Manager, click More details in Task Manager to see all available options, and then click View > Status values > Show suspended status. If your app supports uploading or downloading of data in the background, verify that data continues to be transferred even when the app is suspended. You can use Visual Studio to simulate the suspension/resumption of an app. To do this, select View > Toolbars > Debug Location. Verify resumption behavior of the app When your app comes back to the foreground, Windows resumes your app, and it continues from the state that it was in when Windows suspended it. It is important to verify that your app resumes gracefully. Your app could be resuming after being suspended for a long time. During this time, the displayed content and any network connections could have become stale. Verify that your app resumes and that it provides a visual indication about the state of its content. After your app resumes, verify that it can refresh its content and can reconnect to any network resources, as required. For example, after a Stocks app resumes, it can provide a visual indication of the time the data was last updated, and then go on to update the cached stock data so that the user sees the latest stock prices. Verify termination behavior of the app Windows can terminate a suspended app when the system is running low on resources. Additionally, your app can also get terminated when the user manually closes it, or signs out of Windows. Depending on how the app gets terminated, it is important to verify that your app restores the right app data when it is launched after a termination. When launching an app after Windows terminated it, verify that your app restores the context and state as it was before getting suspended and/or terminated. For example, this could be the last viewed stock info and the selected duration of the chart that was saved when the app was suspended. When launching an app after manually closing it (by swiping from the top to the bottom of the screen), verify that your app starts with the default data. When launching an app after an unexpected termination such as a crash, verify that your app is still able to launch and that it loads the default data. To cause an unexpected termination for your app, in the Task Manager right click your app > Go to details > right click > end task. For more details, see Managing app lifecycle so your apps feel "always alive". Verify app behavior when not running A Metro style app can surface info to the user even when it is not running. So, it is important to verify that the below scenarios work as expected. Tiles Here are the main areas to verify when your app is not running: Verify that the default tile displays as expected. Verify that the tile size, usage, and notifications follow the guidelines in Guidelines and checklist for tiles. If your app supports scheduled notifications or periodic/push notifications from the cloud, verify that its tile gets updated even when your app is not running. Examples of this are a weather app that periodically updates its tile with the current temperature, and a sports app that updates its tile with the latest scores pushed from the cloud. A live tile is one of the best ways to entice users back to your app. Validate that the info in your live tile shows the best of what’s going on inside of your app. Toast notifications If your app supports toast notifications even when it’s not running (using scheduled notifications or push notifications), verify that the toast notifications trigger and display as expected even when the app is not running. Examples of this are a calendar app that schedules meeting reminders as toast notifications and a news app that displays breaking news as toast notifications. Background tasks If your app supports background tasks, verify the corresponding behavior. If your app is capable of showing lock screen notifications (e.g. a mail app or a VoIP app that always has to stay up to date), verify that the info surfaced by your app stays up to date even when the PC is not used. If your app can perform background tasks on certain triggers (e.g. a Photos app that processes pictures from the Photos library when on AC power), verify that your app performs that task correctly when the appropriate conditions are met. For details, see the Background tasksblog post. Conclusion Testing your Metro style app and verifying its quality is a critical step to ensure that your users have a great experience with your app. In this blog post, we covered a few key areas related to verifying your Metro style apps including verifying the behavior of your app when it is launched in different contexts, verifying the functionality of your app, and verifying the behavior of your app as it transitions through various states of the Metro style app lifecycle. In the real world, a user could combine many interactions that impact your app. For example, a user could, in quick succession, snap your app to the Fill view, rotate the device, and adjust the screen resolution. So, in addition to testing the app behavior for a specific scenario in isolation, bring out your creative juices and exercise your app to account for such complex interactions. We hope you find this to be a good starting point to think about how to verify the functionality of your apps and have them represent a high level of quality. In the coming weeks, we plan to do more blog posts that will dive deeper into specific topics pertaining to testing Metro style apps. View the full article

Posted on View the full article

Posted on What will Server 2012 bring to the System?[/b] Much of the talk this year has focused on the replacement for Windows 7 with Windows 8. Moreover, Microsoft has drawn a lot of attention with its own smart mobile system and just recently with the Surface tablet, but for business operations, the talk about Server 2012 has been relatively quiet. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/11/server-2012-released-september/windows-server-2012/" rel="attachment wp-att-94975">http://cdn5.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Windows-Server-2012-400x348.jpg?9d7bd4 The era of standalone servers is gone. Servers now are expected to be devices that not only connect to the Internet and manage networks at the local level, they have to perform newer operations. So in that vein, Windows Server 2012 will manage on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments for enterprises. Then along side of Windows Server 2012, its cloud counterpart, Windows Azure and Microsoft System Center, will work together for managing the entire system. That make up will be the Microsoft “Cloud OS.” The VMware Challenge Microsoft’s big push will be to challenge VMware in the virtualization field. Virtualization is the computer inside a computer, where the virtual computer runs on its own memory and processor, separate and independent from its host. This allows separate programs to run independently. And the mark of a good virtual machine is how well and fast it operates in the environment. So how well will the virtual machine run in the Server 2012 environment? According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2012 will support up to 320 logical processors per server. It will also support up to 4 terabytes of memory per server plus up to 64 virtual processors per virtual machine. That is a lot of horsepower. Then there is the feature called offloaded data transfer, or ODX. This allows faster data backups to storage, even for cloud computing backup operations. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/11/server-2012-released-september/windowsserver2012logo/" rel="attachment wp-att-94981">http://cdn6.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/WindowsServer2012Logo-400x132.jpg?9d7bd4 For now, Server 2012 is quietly making its place as the server for advanced business cloud operations and virtualization. The new dimensions that will come from this are just beginning to become apparent. But what is clear is that the expectations of the IT vision for LAN systems will change. Server 2012 is a prelude to what the computer industry will be looking at in the future. Source [url=http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/2012-editions.aspx">Microsoft Download the [url=http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/2012-default.aspx">Release Candidate [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/11/server-2012-released-september/">Server 2012 to be Released in September was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

When you submit your app into the Store, there will no doubt be other apps in your category that will compete for people’s attention. Being able to crisply showcase the differentiation points in your offerings and staying focused on delivering the core scenarios that you are best at are crucial to a successful Metro style app that will stand out from the crowd. Windows 8 provides a set of design patterns, common controls, and built-in platform functionalities such as contracts that can help you focus on what you are best at. For example, just to name a few: the app bar is a common control that helps people focus on your content and minimize distractions the touch pattern prescribes a set of gestures that are used consistently in platform controls, such as swiping from the edge to bring up the app bar, so that people can focus on confidently use your app without having to learn new interfaces the Share contract is the glue that lets two apps work together so that users can accomplish more with your content. This post is a little different from some of the other posts – rather than talking about coding patterns, we talk about design patterns that you can use in your planning process. I introduce an example app, Food with friends, and start by answering the question that is key to standing out from the crowd: “What is my app best at in its category?”. Then I illustrate some practical steps to designing the app’s structure and layout to highlight the core scenarios and differentiation points that it is best at. This is the first in a series of occasional posts that will come over the next few months. The later posts will continue to use this app as an example and walk through ways that you can take advantage of these various aspects of the Windows 8 platform to create experiences that feel immersive, crafted, fast, and fluid. Let’s get started! Example: Food with friends Say we are building an app that helps people find restaurants. Let’s look at the design process for this app. 1. Identifying the differentiation points We will start by identifying a focus that will allow to differentiate ourselves from other competitors in the restaurant and dining category: My app is the best in its category at helping users and their friends find a restaurant to eat at tonight. The unique point of view of this app is on helping users and their friends and dining tonight. This app will revolve around getting friends to agree on a place to eat, and will focus on bubbling up friends’ preferences so a user can take them into account when making decisions. This emphasis makes our app stand out from other generic apps in the same category that may simply be providing local restaurant listings. This “best-at” statement describes the reasons why user will want to buy this app and not a competitor’s in the same category. We will be referring back to it many times as we make design trade-offs and decide on which feature set and platform functionalities to use. Given this, let’s call this app Food with friends. 2. Picking the right scenarios Next, let’s identify the core scenarios our app will focus on based on our best-at statement. In the process of brainstorming and selecting scenarios, there may be a great number of interesting ones that we could support (such as seeing nutritional value of dishes). But to actually deliver the unique, differentiated, best-in-class experience that our best-at statement promises, we must say no to them if they don’t tie back to our vision. Based on that, here are the core scenarios that this app will be great at: Find restaurants that I want to eat at Find restaurants that my friends want to eat at Make dinner plans for tonight with friends We want to start by thinking about scenarios that describe why people want to use the app, before we start thinking about features, which are how they will achieve those goals. Each of our scenarios will encompass a number of features. When we know what the core scenarios are, we can then think about features that will enable those scenarios. We will get to more details on feature selection and design in the next post, but here are some examples of possible features: Find restaurants that I want to eat at: Browse restaurants on a map or in a list Search by name or keyword Filter/Sort by category, price and rating Add/remove restaurants to/from wishlist 3. Creating the landing experience The landing page is the key to any Metro style app. It is your chance to tell your user what your app is best at. When users open your app you want them to immediately understand what your app’s core scenarios are and how they deliver unique values. A good landing page motivates users to open the app by always providing new and up to date content, and convinces them to stick around and spend more time in the app. It is like a hub, the center of interest and shows the best of the app. Designing a great hub is about creating a layout that optimizes for bringing content and functionality to people in an easy to explore way. Typical navigation in apps or on the web involves showing a default section of an app, and then relies on users choosing to go to a new section from a navigation bar or table of contents. The trouble with this pattern is that it doesn’t encourage exploration. In order for people to decide to click a tab and navigate to a new section, they need to believe that there is something in there that would be interesting or useful to them. If there are no interesting sections, they’ll switch to another app. For example, this newsreader app uses a tab-based design where people land in a single section, but then have to consciously make a decision to navigate to other sections of the app just based on the name. You cannot tell if any of those 4 other sections are interesting until you switch to it: . Instead, convert this to a hub and simply add panning, which requires no hard decision from users at all, and they will see why the content or functionality of the app is interesting to them. . By laying out the app so it’s easy to explore, we show users why they should stick around. We show them the full breadth of what our app is best at. So with that in mind, let’s start with a basic hub layout using the Visual Studio Grid project template (XAML, HTML). Its landing page (the groupedItemsPage) has a number of sections and selected items from each one: . We want this page to really represent the best-at statement of: My app is the best in its category at helping users and their friends find a restaurant to eat at tonight. The first step is to make each section of our hub represent one of our three core scenarios. Each core scenario must be represented (though there could be multiple sections that tie back to a scenario): 1. Tonight Focuses on making dinner plans for tonight with friends 2. Friends’ wishlists Focuses on finding restaurants that my friends want to eat at 3. My wishlist Focuses on finding restaurants that I want to eat at 4. All Restaurants Also focuses on finding restaurants that I want to eat at . The order of the sections is strategic. The reason tonight is first is because it is the most relevant section to what is going on right now and so it is likely to change every time you open the app. Info about tonight is also a great candidate for live tile content because it’s fresh, personal and relevant. This lineup means that if people see what is happening tonight on the app’s live tile on the Start screen, they can open the app and see the content they just saw on the live tile right on the hub page. Your app should reward users for opening the app with info that’s new and most important to them. For more on live tiles take a look at Kevin Michael Woley’s Creating a great tile experience post. Next we put Friends’ wishlists, and then My wishlist – these are in that order for two reasons: The focus of Food with friends is on my friends – that’s the differentiator, and is what Food with friends does that nobody else does in quite the same way. Like the Tonight section, others will update their wishlists while a user is away from the app and so it can change often. It contains info user doesn’t know, while they are more familiar with their own wishlists and so it is less critical to explore it. We put All restaurants at the end. We expect users to go to this section only when they want to manage their wishlist, but according to our best at statement, most of the time users will be making decisions about where to go tonight which means most of the time they will be looking at the wishlists that are already there and at the suggestions for tonight. Having it at the end also provides a nice benefit that the section can expand as long as you like, without pushing off other content. You may be concerned that All restaurants is so far over, but don’t be. Quickly jumping through a list is what Semantic Zoom is for. 4. Designing the sections A key to designing a section to optimize it for its corresponding scenario. It doesn’t need to be a uniform grid of tiles across the whole hub! This is where we can get creative, demonstrate how our app is different from others and bring forward what our app is best at. We also don’t have to show all items in a given section on the landing page because that may be overwhelming. Instead we may want to only bubble up a curated set of items that are the most relevant and up-to-date. For example, we show only the top friends under Friends’ wishlist, and the most recently added restaurants under My Wishlist. For this app, the first section, Tonight, is all about deciding with your friends where to eat tonight. Because this requires collaboration between your friends and you, this is best as a discussion: My friend’s wishlist is all about my friends and what they want, so in that section, let’s really make it about the people! . For my wishlist, it’s about the restaurants that I’m most interested in going to, so we bring the restaurant forward: . And lastly, All restaurants is about navigating the giant collection of restaurants that is out there, so let’s present some of the most popular ones that users might be interested in, and then present categories for easy browsing. With all these parts in place, you can now see how the app’s hub landing page now looks: . A crucial part to delivering a differentiated experience is expressing your product’s brand. This is a topic that deserves its own post, so stay tuned for a deeper dive into layout and visual design tips and techniques that will help your brand’s personality shine through while still maintaining a look and feel consistent with the platform it is created for. For now, let’s take a look at a simple example: . 5. Laying out the rest of your app Now that we have our landing page, it is really easy to lay out the rest of the app. We know that not all of the sections in the hub were exhaustive, so we need pages entirely dedicated to showing the full set of content for each section. The groupDetailPage in the Visual Studio Grid template is designed for this purpose. We tailor the layout of the ListView on that page to best suit the content type. My friend’s wishlist: . My wishlist: . All restaurants: . We also know that there are two core entities reflected on the hub: restaurants and people. That means we need two variants of the item detail page (itemDetailPage in the Grid project template) where users can see info on an item when they tap/click it: . . When designing each page, it is just as critical to continue to think about what each page is trying to be best at, and how it contributes to helping your app deliver on its “best at” statement. 6. Navigating the UI Now that we have the various pages, all we need to do is provide the user a way to move between them. Navigating the UI is quite unlikely the thing that any app is designed to be best at. We can apply existing navigation patterns that users already know so they can quickly get to our app’s content and functionality. In this example, we use the Grid project template, which follows the hierarchical system pattern. For example, tapping a tile takes you to the item’s detail page. Tapping a section header in the hub takes you to that section. Tapping back takes you to where you just came from (not up). Much of this is built into the Grid project template. In a future post, we will go into more depth on the implementation and tips for building more advanced in-app navigation. . Summary Figuring out what you are best in its category at is the first and most important step to creating great Metro style app that will stand out from the crowd. As we have seen, identifying and focusing on the differentiation points influences many foundational decisions that you will make around your content structure, landing experience, page layout, and navigation. In future posts, we will continue to build on this and show how you can use the Windows 8 platform to make your app the best in its category. To review some of the resources that are mentioned in this post, take a look at the content on http://design.windows.com.

Posted on View the full article

Posted on [url=http://www.microsoft.com/hosting/en/us/services.aspx">Community Technology Preview: Hosting Services[/b] One new offering involves bringing Windows Azure Web Sites, and Virtual Machines, and the Service Management Portal with API to the Windows Server. This means that Hosting Service Providers will provide high density website hosting and Infrastructure through a service scenario using the Windows Server-based environment. The upshot is that these services in Windows Azure will enable a consistent customer experience across cloud platforms. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/10/azure-cloud-service-tools/azureplatform/" rel="attachment wp-att-94964">http://cdn7.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/azureplatform-400x177.jpg?9d7bd4 So companies that provide Website services can use the Cloud server to host thousands of websites for many customers with management out of one farm. Another benefit comes with combining Windows Server and Linux VM’s. So a supporting company now has the ability present additional controls for customers that need virtual machine technology whether it be Microsoft based or Linux based. From this is the added feature necessary to any business which is how to control, customize, and extend services so that billing and customer integration can be easy to deploy and manage. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/10/azure-cloud-service-tools/ss-triangle_2/" rel="attachment wp-att-94965">http://cdn6.everything-microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/S+S-Triangle_2-400x300.jpg?9d7bd4 [url=http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/datacenter/virtualization-migration.aspx">Switch to Hyper-V Microsoft does not like VMware. Why? Because it is a challenge to their own virtualization system. And VMware is a successful virtualization software program. However, Microsoft in order to entice users away from VMware’s virtualization system offers to make it more economical. To do that Microsoft licenses its private cloud solutions on a per-processor basis, this way you get the cloud computing benefits of scale coupled with unlimited virtualization and which brings costs down consistently and predictably over time. Microsoft also provides a migration toolkit to perform the transition operations from one VM system to another. [url=http://crm.dynamics.com/online/default.aspx?tabid=fits-your-business&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_ID=SEARCH_CRM&EP=200083526&fbid=OPSn5amSnaS">Microsoft Dynamics The picture wouldn’t be complete without talking about what businesses really want…more business. One of Microsoft’s most enduring business solution products is Dynamics CRM. This product can help a business increase sales performance, improve marketing effectiveness, and obtain a higher degree of customer satisfaction. Now with Cloud operations, it is possible to extend the same software program to branch offices, making the entire enterprise functional along the same basis. For example, with Microsoft Dynamics, a business can put familiar tools such as Microsoft Office and SharePoint on top of huge business datasets stored in SQL Server. Then by running the operations on the Cloud the whole enterprise can benefit. The overall picture of the Azure Cloud continues to grow with new venues, new programs, and new ways to enhance customer operations. In part, this not only makes Microsoft the leader of the pact, it is the pact. [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com/2012/07/10/azure-cloud-service-tools/">New Azure Cloud Service Tools was posted on [url=http://www.everything-microsoft.com">Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission. View the full article

Backing up your critical files is something we all know we should do. Even with everything in SkyDrive, it is still something we need to do. With Windows 8, we took a new look at the way backup can work and set out to solve the perennial problem of not just restoring all your files but restoring a previous version of a critical file you have been editing through the course of a day. To achieve this, we're introducing a new feature in Windows 8, File History. Bohdan Raciborski, a program manager on the Storage team authored this post. --Steven Note: Comments have been off topic. Please maintain community standards and focus on the topic at hand. What is File History? File History is a backup application that continuously protects your personal files stored in Libraries, Desktop, Favorites, and Contacts folders. It periodically (by default every hour) scans the file system for changes and copies changed files to another location. Every time any of your personal files has changed, its copy will be stored on a dedicated, external storage device selected by you. Over time, File History builds a complete history of changes made to any personal file. It’s a feature introduced in Windows 8 that offers a new way to protect files for consumers. It supersedes the existing Windows Backup and Restore features of Windows 7. What is unique about this approach compared to a more traditional backup and restore? Regretfully, backup is not a very popular application. Our telemetry shows that less than 5% of consumer PCs use Windows Backup and even adding up all the third party tools in use, it is clear nowhere near half of consumer PCs are backed up. This leaves user’s personal data and digital memories quite vulnerable as any accident can lead to data loss. In Windows 8 Microsoft is actively trying to accomplish the following: Make data protection so easy that any Windows user can turn it on and feel confident that their personal files are protected. Eliminate the complexity of setting up and using backup. Turn backup into an automatic, silent service that does the hard work of protecting user files in the background without any user interaction. Offer a very simple, engaging restore experience that makes finding, previewing and restoring versions of personal files much easier. While designing File History we used learnings from the past and added requirements to address the changing needs of PC users. PC users are more mobile than ever. To address that, we optimized File History to better support laptops that constantly transition through power states or are being connected and disconnected from networks and devices. PC users create more data and are more dependent on it than ever before. So we do not only protect what’s currently on the system drive but also any work they have done and data they have created in the past. When a specific point in time (PiT) version of a file or even an entire folder is needed, you can quickly find it and restore it. The restore application was designed to offer engaging experience optimized for browsing, searching, previewing and restoring files. Setting it up Before you start using File History to back up your files, you'll need to set up a drive to save files to. We recommend that you use an external drive or network location to help protect your files against a crash or other PC problem. File History only saves copies of files that are in your libraries, contacts, favorites, and on your desktop. If you have folders elsewhere that you want backed up, you can add them to one of your existing libraries or create a new library. To set up File History Open File History control panel applet. Connect an external drive, refresh the page, and then tap or click Turn on. . You can also set up a drive in AutoPlay by connecting the drive to your PC, tapping or clicking the notification that appears… . … and then tapping or clicking Configure this drive for backup. . That’s it. From that moment, every hour, File History will check your libraries, desktop, favorites and contacts for any changes. If it finds changed files, it will automatically copy them to the File History drive. Download this video to view it in your favorite media player: High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4 Restoring files When something bad happens and one or more personal files are lost, the restore application makes it very easy to: Browse personal libraries, folders and files in a way very similar to Windows Explorer. Search for specific versions using keywords, file names and date ranges. Preview versions of a selected file. Restore a file or a selection of files with one tap or a click of a mouse. We designed the restore application for wide screen displays and to offer a unique, engaging and convenient way of finding a specific version of a file by looking at its preview. With other backup applications you would have to select a backup set that was created on a specific date. Then you would have to browse to find a specific folder, and then find the one file you need. However at this point it is impossible to open the file or preview its content in order to determine if it is the right one. You would have to restore the file. If it is not the right version, you’d have to start over. With File History, the search starts right in Windows Explorer. You can browse to a specific location and click or tap on the History button in the explorer ribbon in order to see all versions of the selected library, folder or an individual file. For example, when you select a Pictures library and click or tap on the History button… . … you will see the entire history of this library. . When you click on a specific file, you can see the entire history of the selected picture. . In this example, the selected picture has 4 versions. You can easily navigate to the desired version by clicking on the Previous/Next buttons or by swiping the screen. Once you have found the version you were looking for, you can click the Restore button to bring it back. The selected version will be restored to its original location. Continuous, reliable protection File History, instead of using the old backup model, takes a different approach to data protection. Protect only what is most important Instead of protecting the entire system (operating system, applications, settings and user files) File History focuses only on user personal files. That’s what is most precious and hardest to recreate in case of an accident. Optimized for performance In the past, most backup applications used brute force method of checking for changes in directories or files by scanning the entire volume. This approach could significantly affect the system performance and requires an extended period of time to complete. File History, on the other hand, takes advantage of the NTFS change journal. The NTFS change journal records any changes made to any files stored on an NTFS volume. Instead of scanning the volume, which involves opening and reading directories, File History opens the NTFS change journal and quickly scans it for any changes. Based on this information it creates a list of files that have changed and need to be copied. The process is very quick and efficient. File History was designed to be easily interrupted and to quickly resume. This way, File History can resume its operation, without the need to start over when a system goes into sleep mode, a user logs off, the system gets too busy and needs more CPU cycles to complete foreground operations, or the network connection is lost or saturated. File History was designed to work well on any PC including small form factor PCs with limited resources and tablets. It uses system resources in a way to minimize the impact on system performance, battery life and overall experience. File History process runs at low priority, uses low priority IO and low priority memory. . Figure 1: File History reaction to an increasing workload. . Figure 2: File History disk utilization in presence of other processes with normal priority I/Os. . Figure 3 Working set size per backup cycle, sampling every 3 min. The amount of data being backed up in one cycle is throttled. Any activity is suspended when the machine is sleeping. File History takes into account: If the user is present, i.e. logged on and actively using the system. If the machine is on AC or battery power. When the last backup cycle was completed. How many changes have been made since the last cycle. Activity of foreground processes. Based on all of these factors, which are re-checked every 10 seconds, it determines the optimal way to back up your data. If any of those conditions change, the service makes a decision to reduce/increase quota or suspend/terminate the backup cycle. Optimized for mobile users When File History is running, it gracefully handles state transitions. For example, when you close the lid of your laptop, disconnect an external drive or leave home and take your laptop out of the range of the home wireless network, File History takes the right action: Lid closed - When a PC goes into sleep mode, File History detects the power mode transition and suspends its operation. Lid opened – File History resumes its operation at a priority that makes sure files are protected without impacting overall system performance, even for gamers. It also waits for all post “lid open” activities to complete so that we do not affect the system while it is coming back out of sleep. Dedicated storage device disconnected – File History detects that the storage device is not present and starts caching versions of changed files on a system drive. Dedicated storage device re-connected – in the next cycle, File History detects that the storage device was reconnected, flushes all versions from the local cache to the external drive and resumes normal operation. Simplicity and peace of mind We designed File History with two objectives in mind 1) offer best possible protection of user personal files and 2) offer ease, simplicity and peace of mind. If you want to take advantage of File History, you have to make only few, simple decisions. In most cases it will be limited to only one – which external drive to use. The rest is taken care of by Windows. The operation of File History is transparent and doesn’t affect the user experience, reliability or performance of Windows in any way. Full control Most backup applications, including the Windows Backup and Restore that shipped in Windows 7 require administrator privileges to set up and use. This means that standard users have to ask the administrator to set it up and every time they need to restore a file, or to grant them administrative privileges. Not so with File History. File History offers full control to each individual user. Now users can decide if and when to turn File History on and which external drive to use. In fact, each user can select a different location to store their file history. And they do not have to ask for the administrator’s help to restore a file. Enthusiasts and experienced PC users can use advanced File History features to control many aspects of its operation, like: How often you want to save copies of your files: The frequency of backups can be changed from 10 minutes to 24 hours. Higher frequency offers better protection but consumes more disk space. How long you want to keep saved versions: Versions can be stored forever or as little as one month. This setting is useful when the File History drive fills up to fast. You can slow down this rate by reducing the time versions are stored. Changing the size of the local cache: File History uses a small amount of space on the local drive to store versions of files while the File History target drive is not available. If you create a lot of versions of files while disconnected or stay disconnected for longer periods of time, you may need to reserve more space on the local drive to keep all versions. Note that the versions stored in the local cache are flushed to the external drive when it becomes available again. Excluding folders that you do not want to back up: Some folders may contain very large files that do not have to be protected because they can be easily recreated (like downloaded high definition movies or podcasts). These files would quickly consume all of the File History drive capacity. This setting allows you to exclude such folders. Recommend a drive to other HomeGroup members on your home network: This setting is covered in more detail in the File History and HomeGroup section below. Accessing the File History event log: The event log contains records of events that may be useful while troubleshooting File History. It may be particularly useful if you want to identify files that File History could not access for any reason. Advanced settings can be accessed from the File History control panel applet. . To exclude a folder, select Exclude folders. Next, click on the Add button, browse to the folder you want to exclude and select it. Files in this folder will not be backed up starting with the next backup cycle. To start backing it up again, simply remove the folder from the list. . Other advanced settings are available on the Advanced Settings page. . File History also supports new storage features introduced in Windows 8. Users who have lots of data to back up can use Storage Spaces to create a resilient storage pool using off-the-shelf USB drives. When the pool fills up, they can easily add more drives and extra storage capacity to the pool. You can find more about Storage Spaces in this blog post. Users who use BitLocker to protect the content of their personal files can also use File History as it seamlessly supports BitLocker on both source and destination drives. File History was designed for consumers but could also be used by enterprise customers. In some cases, File History may conflict with the enterprise policies (like retention policy). To prevent such conflicts, we added a group policy that gives enterprise IT administrators the ability to turn off File History on managed client PCs. You will find the File History policy setting in the Group Policy Object Editor under Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, File History. . Minimal setup File History is part of Windows so you don’t need to install any additional software. However, File History has to be turned on, which typically requires only one click. As described above, to start protecting your libraries, you need to attach an external drive or select a network location. File History will store versions of your files on this device. File History automatically selects an external drive if one is available. If more than one drive is available, one with the most free storage capacity is selected. No schedule File History wakes up once an hour and looks for personal files that have changed. Versions of all files that have changed are replicated to a dedicated storage device. This approach eliminates the need to set up a schedule and leave a computer idle for an extended period of time. One hour frequency offers a good balance between the level of protection and amount of storage space consumed by file versions. Enthusiasts can change the frequency from 10 min to 1 day in order to increase the level of protection or reduce storage consumption. No maintenance File History runs silently in the background and doesn’t require any ongoing maintenance. The only time when it will ask you to intervene is when the external drive is full. At this point you will be asked to either replace the drive with a bigger one or change a setting that tells File History how long to keep file versions around. By default, we keep versions of user personal files forever, but if storage is an issue, it can be reduced to a period of time that best suits your needs. File History and HomeGroup File History was also integrated with HomeGroup to make it easier for someone to set up backup for all members of a home network. Here is how it works. Jane wants her entire family to have their personal data automatically protected. She knows she can do this with File History. Jane creates a HomeGroup on the family’s home network. Jane turns on File History on a computer that has a large external drive. File History control panel detects the HomeGroup and asks if Jane wants to recommend this backup destination to other HomeGroup members. Jane selects this option and File History uses HomeGroup to broadcast the recommendation to all HomeGroup members. Each HomeGroup member can now accept the recommendation. If they do, their libraries, desktop, favorites and contacts are automatically backed up to a network share on Jane’s computer. File History and SkyDrive File History doesn’t back up your files to the cloud. While the cloud is great for storing files you’d like to access on-the-go, or for sharing files with others, backing up terabytes of data to the cloud requires a specialized service. Many cloud services today support local synchronization, where the data in the cloud is mirrored in your local file system. Sync solutions by their very nature copy changes immediately to all locations, which means accidental deletes or inadvertent changes or corruption to files will be synchronized as well. The best way to address this problem is to couple your sync service with a point-in-time backup solution like File History. In the blog post, Connecting your apps, files, PCs and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8 we discussed how SkyDrive will integrate with Windows Explorer and the file system. File History takes advantage of that integration. If your SkyDrive is synced to your file system, File History will automatically start protecting the files stored in your local SkyDrive folder. This is a great example of local backup plus reliable anytime, anywhere access. You can access your files in SkyDrive through your PC, your phone, or the web and you’ll also know that File History is providing fast local backup and instantaneous access to all versions of those files. Full system backup Usually a full system backup is used to protect your PC against complete system loss, for example when a PC was stolen or lost or the internal hard drive stopped working. Our research showed that only a small number of users are concerned about losing the operating system, applications or settings. They are by far more concerned about losing their personal files. For these reasons, File History was designed specifically to protect user personal files. File History doesn’t offer the ability to do a full system backup but for those users who may need a full system backup it offers a good compromise. Together with other features introduced in Windows 8 it provides protection against such disasters. If you want to prepare for a disaster, we recommend a following strategy: Create a recovery drive to be used when you need to refresh or restore your PC. You can find more about it in this blog post. Connect to your Microsoft account Configure your PC to sync your settings Load apps from the Store Turn on File History When your PC is replaced or needs to be reinstalled: Use the recovery drive to restore the operating system Connect to your Microsoft account Configure your PC to sync your settings – this will bring your settings back Go to the Store and reinstall your modern apps Reinstall legacy apps Connect your old File History drive and restore everything – this will restore your personal files It may require more steps than a file or image restore but has some clear benefits: You do not restore any “no more desired” software or settings that were on your system You do not restore sources of some problems that you might have (or create new problems if you restore to different hardware) You do not restore settings that may cause your system to perform badly or fail Those who need a full system backup can still use Windows Backup to create a system image. Requirements File History requires: Windows 8 Client operating system An external storage device with enough storage capacity to store a copy of all user libraries, such as a USB drive, Network Attached Storage device, or share on another PC in the home network. FAQ What happens when you upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7? If Windows 7 Backup was active, i.e. it was scheduled and the schedule was active, then it will continue running as scheduled after the upgrade. File History will be disabled by default and users will not be able to turn it on as long as the Windows 7 Backup schedule is active. To turn it you will have to first disable the Windows 7 Backup schedule. Can Windows 7 users use File History? Windows 7 users cannot use File History. However, they can restore files from a drive used by File History by browsing the volume in the Windows Explorer and selecting a specific file. Files on the File History drive are stored in the same relative location, and use the same name. The specific version can be identified by the time stamp appended to the file name. Does File History protect the operating system and applications? File History only protects user libraries, desktop, favorites and contacts. Other files, such as operating system files, applications, and settings, are not backed up. Can File History be used with cloud storage? No. File History is designed specifically for consumers and does not support cloud storage in this release. Windows 8 Server offers a backup feature that can back up files to a cloud. This feature is available on the Server version of Windows and is designed for small and medium businesses. Can File History be used by enterprise customers? Yes. However, enterprise customers should be aware that File History may not comply with their company security, access, and retention policies. For that reason, we offer a group policy setting that allows enterprise administrators to disable the feature for an entire organization. Will File History protect files stored on a file share? No. File History only protects file stored on a local drive. If you use offline folders and folder redirection, your folders (like My Documents or My Pictures) are redirected to a network share and will not be protected. If you add a network location to any of your libraries, this location will not be protected. In closing File History silently protects all of your important files stored in Libraries, Desktop, Favorites and Contacts. Once turned on, it requires no effort at all to protect your data. When you lose a file or just need to find an original version of a picture or a specific version of a resume, all versions of your files are available. With the File History restore application you can find it quickly and effortlessly. Source: Windows 8 Blog When File History service is idle, it uses an average of 10 MB of working set. When it runs, it uses little memory and only for a short period of time. The chart below shows the working set histogram collected using a simulated workload over a period of 4 hours with File History cycle frequency set to one hour.

This sounds great.

Posted on View the full article

Today in Toronto, Canada, at Microsoft’s annual http://freepchelp.forum/data/MetaMirrorCache/4ed1c586d07ea27ab9e83b115f8a7f82._.gif[/img] Source: Windows Team Blog