AWS

Microsoft is readying a number of new features and improvements for the next version of its cloud-hosted SharePoint, known as SharePoint Online 2013, according to my sources. Source: All About Microsoft

You need to put joe.com in the hosts file on the Windows 7 box also.

Microsoft is trimming prices of the enterprise and academic SKUs of Office 365 effective immediately. Source: All About Microsoft

Sonoma Partners, a Microsoft CRM consultancy, shares its experiences developing a custom, line-of-business Windows 8 app. Source: All About Microsoft

The Metro-style version of IE10 that’s integrated into the Windows 8 Consumer Preview includes a number of new features added since September. Here are some of them. Source: All About Microsoft

To deliver the best browsing across all Windows 8 devices, we re-imagined the architecture and experience of the web browser with Internet Explorer 10. We built a new browsing experience in lockstep with Windows 8 to give you all the advantages that Metro style applications offer. We built that experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other web standards. The result in Windows 8 Consumer Preview is a Metro style web experience. IE10 is designed to make website interaction fast and fluid for touch as well as for heavy mouse and keyboard use. With IE10, websites participate in the Metro style experience in Windows 8, including the Start screen, charms, snap, and more. IE10 also provides the best protection from malicious software on the web while providing real control over your online privacy. While building and tuning the Metro style browsing experience for the Consumer Preview, we realized it is a better way to browse – whether on a desktop computer with a big screen, mouse and keyboard, or on a touch-enabled mobile device. As people browse more “chromelessly” on their phones, they’ve become accustomed to a more immersive and less manual browsing experience compared with the desktop. Metro style browsing offers you a full-screen, immersive site experience. With IE and Windows 8 you can always use the charms to accomplish what you want to do next with a website (e.g. share, print, search…). We’ve found that many people – even those with the most enthusiastic and intense browsing patterns – prefer Metro style browsing because it’s less manual and more focused on what you browse than on how you browse. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video. Download this video to view it in your favorite media player: With IE10 in Windows 8 Consumer Preview, browsing the web is fast and fluid[/i] You can read more about the technical details and architectural improvements to the underlying HTML5 “Trident” browser engine and Chakra JavaScript engine on the The Metro style web browser [/size] We built IE10’s user experience exclusively around all the Metro style design patterns to be fast and fluid for even the most intense everyday browsing. We designed the interface and controls to be there when you need them and out of view when you don’t. We also designed in the comprehensive functionality that people need for everyday heavy-duty web browsing: great touch keyboard support for forms, integrated spell checking with AutoCorrect, finding text on the page, etc. The user experience follows Metro style patterns and conventions for personality, animations, and command activation and support for Windows 8 charms, snap, and more. [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/6215.1_2D002D002D00_fullscreen_5F00_070AB2E3.png" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8053.1_2D002D002D00_fullscreen_5F00_thumb_5F00_4A068150.pngIE10 puts the focus on your sites, providing a full screen edge-to-edge experience that uses every pixel for the web. [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/4152.2_2D002D002D00_tabs_2D00_and_2D00_navbar_5F00_37518799.png" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8030.2_2D002D002D00_tabs_2D00_and_2D00_navbar_5F00_thumb_5F00_1D7D516A.pngTabs are available but stay out of your way until you need them. IE10 is fast and fluid for the real web, not just the mobile versions of sites. We made IE super responsive to touch, mouse, and keyboard. The Metro style browser delivers on touch browsing, not just browsing on a touch device. You can feel it in the stick-to-your-finger responsiveness of the touch support for panning and zooming, swiping back and forward for page navigation, and double tapping to zoom in and out of content. Context menus and form controls are optimized for touch, and the browser responds fluidly to device orientation (scaling smoothly to landscape and portrait screen layouts) and “snapping” Windows 8 applications next to it. IE10 also improves on the experience of browsing the Web with mouse and keyboard with support for the keyboard shortcuts you expect, and convenient mouse activations for back and forward navigation. Metro style IE10 takes a different, more modern approach to browsing. It puts the focus squarely on the websites you browse rather than all the tab and window management activity that has defined browsing to date. On our hallways, we’ve been using it as our primary browser on laptops and desktop workstations, with touch screens as well as with keyboards and mice. From tiles on the Start screen for websites to the immersive full screen web experience, we designed IE in Windows 8 to be your daily browser for the real web. Connecting websites and apps in the Metro style With IE10, websites are part of the Metro style experience in Windows 8. Through snap, charms, and integration with the Store and the Start screen, Metro style browsing blurs the boundaries between the web and apps. With site pinning, you can personalize your Windows Start screen with the sites you use all the time. You can pin any website to the Start screen from IE10, so you have one place to access all the things you care about or need. The tiles for pinned sites reflect the site’s color and icon. With IE10, sites can provide background notifications for new messages and other account activity on the website. The site can also program additional commands that appear in IE’s navigation bar in a touch-friendly way, the same way that sites can program jumplists for IE on the desktop. [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/2021.10_2D002D002D00_pinned_5F00_70583ECE.png" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8372.10_2D002D002D00_pinned_5F00_thumb_5F00_770B4851.png Site tiles let you go directly to your sites from the Windows 8 Start screen [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/6708.11_2D002D002D00_pinned_2D00_zoomed_5F00_08E7DC1F.png" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/0435.11_2D002D002D00_pinned_2D00_zoomed_5F00_thumb_5F00_769F155C.pngPinned site tile notifications keep you up-to-date at a glance, without opening the site [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/3755.12_2D002D002D00_jetsetter_2D00_jumplist_5F00_1D6D2B9D.png" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/3568.12_2D002D002D00_jetsetter_2D00_jumplist_5F00_thumb_5F00_35FCC8ED.pngJumplists make it fast to get to site sections and information tailored for you Integration with the Store makes it easy to discover and launch Metro style apps for the sites you visit in IE. The navigation bar shows if the site has an application available. One tap (or click) takes you to the app in the Store. Once an app is installed, you can launch it directly from the site. For example, here’s [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/4667.13_2D002D002D00_app_2D00_switch_5F00_3CAFD270.png" target="_blank">http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-29-43-metablogapi/8468.13_2D002D002D00_app_2D00_switch_5F00_thumb_5F00_4700F6D0.png[/i] Site favicon button lets you download and launch the app with a single tap or click Protecting you from malicious web IE10 offers the same industry leading security, privacy, and reliability features, building on IE9’s SmartScreen, XSS filtering, Application Reputation, InPrivate browsing, Tracking Protection, and hang detection and recovery. In addition, IE10 takes advantage of Windows 8 to provide “Enhanced Protected mode” for better isolation of website content in each tab. InPrivate browsing is also extended to run per-tab, so you can run some pages InPrivate, leaving no history, cookies, or cached data. Summary of changes from the Developer Preview IE10 in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview brings a more full-featured Metro style experience to your browsing. Here are just some of the improvements to IE10 for fast and fluid browsing: Full, independent composition enables responsive, fast and fluid behavior on real websites (including pages with fixed elements, nested scrolling regions, animations, and video) Back and forward swipe navigation with preview Double-tap to zoom in on content Fast back and forward navigation controls for mouse Mouse (CTRL+scroll wheel) and keyboard methods for quickly zooming in and out to mirror touch interactions Automatic domain suggestions for faster navigation and less typing Share charm support for URLs, snippets, images and selection with Mail and other apps Search charm with visual search suggestions Devices charm for printing, projecting, and playing video to external devices like TVs Plug-in free support: notifications for sites requiring activeX Background notifications for pinned sites and other tile improvements Jumplists for pinned sites InPrivate tabs that are easier to open Clean up tabs command, which quickly closes all but current tab Metro style and no-compromise browsing You used to have to make a choice between browsing the mobile web on small screens with good touch support, and browsing the full web with good mouse and keyboard support on big screens. The Metro style web experience in IE10 in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview means no compromises. You can browse and touch and multitask and print and share with all the power of Windows 8 and your PC. The web with IE10 is more fast and fluid, better connected to your applications, and more secure and private. --Rob Mauceri Source: Windows 8 Blog

Microsoft is planning to release its new Emporium shopping app on iPhones and Android phones this year, according to an internal roadmap document. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft officials have posted a detailed analysis of what led to a widespread leap-year-day outage of its Azure public cloud service. Source: All About Microsoft

It sounds like there’s a new Office 365 SKU coming that is aimed specifically at U.S. government customers. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft finally is going public about OnLive, the company offering hosted Office and Windows on iPads and Android tablets and whether it is in violation of Microsoft’s virtualization licensing terms. Source: All About Microsoft

The Microsoft Research-developed Mayhem scripting technology is the latest open-source app the Redmond company is donating to the Outercurve Foundation. Source: All About Microsoft

Kinect-based projects — ranging from new webcam prototypes to projectors enabling new kinds of virtual/augmented reality scenarios — are the stars of Microsoft’s TechFest 2012 research fair this week. Source: All About Microsoft

Three years ago, I wrote a Tell me a bit about yourself. Where do you come from and how long have you been at Microsoft?[/b] Chris: Hi, my name is Chris Edmonds. A native Oregonian, I attended school at Oregon State University (Go, Beavers!) and have had internships at NASA and Garmin. During these experiences I worked on projects ranging from robotics to avionics and did research on high speed routing for many-core processors. Microsoft recruited me from Oregon State, and I arrived on the Windows team roughly two and a half years ago. Mohammad: Hello, My name is Mohammad Almalkawi. I am a software design engineer in the Windows division at Microsoft. I have also been at Microsoft for about two and a half years. I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Go, Illini!) where I was working on fault-tolerance and real-time systems integration research. What do you work on for Windows 8? Chris: I started working with the Windows team a few months before Windows 7 was released to manufacturing. Shortly thereafter, I joined the newly created Windows Runtime Experience team. The Runtime Experience team builds many pieces of the Windows Runtime (WinRT) infrastructure. During Windows 8 development I had the opportunity to work across many parts of the WinRT. In the first milestone (of three), I worked to define core patterns of the WinRT system. We break the project into three milestones and divide the architecture and implementation across these milestones to get us from a whiteboard sketch to a finished product. We have to include all the work it takes to coordinate the different technologies across Windows 8. In first milestone (M1), we designed patterns for events, object construction, asynchronous methods, and method overloading. It was important to define strong patterns for these basic concepts in order to allow each programming language that interoperates with the WinRT to expose these concepts in natural and familiar way for their developers. In the second milestone, I had the opportunity to build part of our deployment story for Metro style applications. Specifically, I worked on registering Metro style applications with the WinRT so that they can be launched and can interact with contracts. The third milestone included lots of cross-group collaboration, which I learned is crucial to a project as deep and as broad as Windows 8. I worked with a team to define and implement core pieces of the application model for Metro style applications. This work ensured that Metro style apps written in different languages and on different UI platforms behave in a consistent manner in regards to contracts and application lifetime. Mohammad: I had the opportunity to participate in Windows 8 since the very beginning. We had three major feature milestones (M1, M2, and M3) to realize the goals of Windows 8. Each of these milestones consisted of: Specification and design phase to tease out requirements through feature crew meeting and active engagement with partner teams in Windows and across the company. A feature crew is made up of the developers, testers, and program managers who work on a specific featureusually 4 or 5 people. The outcome of this phase was a set of specification documentsfunctional (pm), development design (dev), test design and a threat model (test)), as well as an execution plan (all of us). This lets us better understand features details and allows us to execute at high confidence with focused efforts. Coding phase to implement the features identified in the specification phase along with their unit tests and functional tests. Integration and stabilization phase to integrate the various pieces from various teams together and to fix bugs. In the first milestone, I worked on the design and development of the discovery and activation of application extensions. This WinRT infrastructure allows applications to participate in [url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464906.aspx" target="_blank">OS-supported contracts (such as search and share) and serves as a basis for exciting Windows features, including the search and share charms. In the second milestone, I was in charge of implementing the Windows metadata resolution feature, which is a key API that ties the Windows metadata generated by the WinRT tool chain and JavaScript and C# language projections. And in M3, I was in charge for the design and development of the namespace enumeration API, which enabled the Chakra JavaScript engine to support reflection functionality over WinRT namespaces and types. CLR also uses this API to implement metadata resolution and Visual Studio uses it to support Intellisense for WinRT types. Whats a normal work day like? Chris: Normal day? One of the things that I really like about working in Windows is that there is rarely a normal day. Depending on the period of the product cycle, I may spend my day writing specifications, writing code, hashing out ideas with people on my team, fixing bugs, or one of many other activities. Even though the activities are varied, my day almost always involves problem solving in some form. Whether it is figuring out the cause of a crash or helping to design features, I get to work with smart people to solve interesting problems each day. What has been your biggest surprise? Chris: I think the biggest thing that surprised me about working in Windows was the size of the team and the number of activities that are going on at any point in time. In working on the few features assigned to me I had the opportunity to interact with hundreds of other people across the team to come up with specifications and solutions. It sounds really hectic (and it was a little overwhelming at first) but it always amazes me how well teams communicate together to come up with some really cool solutions to problems. When I think of the number of people who use Windows and the number of ways Windows is used, I guess it seems incredible that we get all this done with as few people as we do. Mohammad: The thing that surprised me the most at Microsoft is that you get thrown at real-world problems and you will be given the opportunity to own critical pieces from the very beginning. You learn on the job as opposed to training, which is also available if you need it. Of course you are not left alone in the dark, as there are lots of support channels, domain experts, and senior engineers who are there to provide help when you need it. How was Windows 8 different from other projects youve worked on? Chris: Having worked mostly on smaller projects at Oregon State and in my prior internships (most code projects are small compared to Windows), the biggest difference is how much code I read every day. I find that I spend a good portion of time reading and debugging code written by other teams before I came to Microsoft, as well as going over code I wrote myself in a previous milestone. This has really made me appreciate well-written code. What has been your biggest challenge that you had to solve? Mohammad: Soon after joining the team, I had to makes fixes in unfamiliar code in COM activation. This code is very infrastructural, as a lot of components in Windows are built on top of it, so it was crucial that my changes would not cause regressions. This code might have seemed straightforward to experts in my team, but certainly that was not the case for a new guy like me. I had to read a lot of code, step through the debugger, and write lots of test cases to improve my understanding and confidence in making the necessary changes without breaking anything. Can you tell me something about what it is like to come up with the plans for Windows 8? Chris: Planning Windows 8 takes different shapes for different people on the team. As a part of the planning effort the newly formed Runtime Experience team took a week to build apps using a variety of languages, stacks, frameworks, and technologies. Thats because a design tenet of Windows 8 is that it can be programmed in multiple languages. Part of the goal of this effort was to force each of us use a language that we were not already familiar with so that we could experience the learning curve. I worked on a 3D terrain generation program using IronPython and XNA, a photo gallery app using HTMLJavaScript, and a simple 2D physics engine in C++ using GDI for drawing. From the app building exercises, we created presentations to give to the team on the experience of building each app, along with a list of the good, bad, and ugly of each experience. What impressed you? Mohammad: I was very impressed by the quality of the Windows engineering system that we have in place it supports thousands of Windows software engineers and keeps millions lines of code in the operating system healthy with nightly builds and quality gate runs. The automated quality gate runs include critical end-to-end tests, performance tests, application compatibility tests, static code analysis and a few other tests that we use to quickly discover problems and to tightly control their propagation across branches via forward and reverse integrations. What is milestone quality (MQ)? Chris: This milestone is all about getting the code base, engineering tools, and engineering processes ready for the next product cycle. As I learned, MQ is a time to look across the code and do some housekeepingfrom just cleaning up source files, to redoing abstractions that prepared us for the work we would do in Windows 8. Code is our asset so dedicating time to maintaining that asset is pretty important. During MQ of Windows 8 I participated in three different efforts. The first was to create a system that automatically reported back code coverage numbers via an internal dashboard for our team based on our daily test passes. This was one of the first things I worked on at Microsoft, and it gave me a great opportunity to learn about our engineering systems. The second effort that I participated in was a code sanitization practice to help standardize the way we use asserts across the code base. Finally, I worked on a prototype system that would use some pieces of our IntelliSense infrastructure to automatically catalog all parts of our SDK. What are you focusing on now? Mohammad: Performance, Performance, and Performance! The features I owned are close to the bottom of the software stack and used very frequently, so their performance is very critical. Therefore, my focus now is on analyzing performance, and prototyping and integrating various performance improvements. We built things from the start to be high performance, so now we are fine-tuning that performance, given the tons of code that has been written to the infrastructure. How do you validate the work end-to-end? Chris: As part of a team dedicated to improving the application developer experience, it is important that we regularly take off our operating system developer hats and don our application developer hats. This is done in small ways in our everyday work, but one of the most structured forms of this are the application building weeks. Based on the initial application building week that took place during planning, we took the time each milestone to develop an application using the WinRT, with different teams focused on different languages and APIs. Writing apps on a platform that is still in development creates some interesting challenges, and these weeks are a fun change of pace. These app building weeks (some of which included more teams) have resulted in numerous bugs being filed, and have caused us to rethink and change some of our API guidance in order to make each developers experience more natural and familiar. A bug can be anything from a fatal crash, memory leak, or security hole, all the way to a report that something just doesnt seem right. We treat everything like a bug and go through a process of categorizing and prioritizing these reports. The reports come from the groups in Windows building on our APIs, other groups at Microsoft, early partners such as device and PC makers, our interns (as you saw at //build/), and from people in the forums who are building apps now on the Developer Preview. What is the most important lesson you have learned? Mohammad: I got to experience the idea that anything that can go wrong will go wrong given the size and scale of the product, and the large number of users (by the way, we do dogfood our work internally from the very beginning on our primary dev machines). This taught me that paying attention to details and focusing on quality in every line of code is very important for the overall stability of the product. Of course, that is just one of many important lessons I learned so farIm still working my way through my first Windows release and expect to learn a few more things during the upcoming phases of the product. I cant wait. Chris: Me too!! Source: Windows 8 Blog

Microsoft’s SQL Server 2012 has RTM’d. It will be generally available starting April 1. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft’s coming second technology preview build of Hadoop on Azure may result in the product being released later than March 2012. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft has provided some general guidance on when customers of its embedded operating-system versions can expect their Windows 8-based updates. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft’s annual internal TechFest research showcase kicks off on March 6. So what better time to check out Trinity, a graph database research project, from Microsoft Research? Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft slowly but surely is fleshing out some more Windows 8 details of potential interest to IT admins and business users. Source: All About Microsoft

Use this forum to ask all your network or security questions. If you think you're a victim of malware then this is the place to get your Windows 8 computer cleaned.

It's people fishing for open ftp accounts so they can upload to your server. I get these all the time. As long as the user accounts have strong passwords you'll be fine. Just make sure you don't actually have any guest or anonymous accounts and if you do make sure they have strong passwords. Just do as I do and clear the logs. There is no way to stop them unless you unplug from the internet.

Two Microsoft officials gave some very carefully worded answers to questions about Office on iPad and Windows Phone ‘Apollo’ compatibility at industry events this week. Source: All About Microsoft

On the plus side, business users might be able to boot straight to the Desktop in Windows 8. On the minus side, the inability for WOA tablets to join AD domains seems likely. Source: All About Microsoft

Windows 8 Consumer Preview was downloaded a million times in its first day of availability. Source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft is taking some emboldened steps toward bundling formerly separate apps and services in Windows 8. Source: All About Microsoft

Customers on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform are reporting they’ve been down for hours. Source: All About Microsoft