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<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Ballmer lets out his inner Monkey at Mix08 event Seattle Post Intelligencer - 41 minutes ago ... and it became part of the conversation when he asked Ballmer about the problems PC users have experienced with Windows Vista, the latest version of ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php That guy is a genius. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

What's the easiest way to bind a SQL Command to a select html control? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Seems Windows Live Messenger and a Creative X-Fi Audio card have taken to automatically turning my sound down 75%~ when i speak on the microphone and it is driving me absolutely insane. What's worse is I can't figure out how to turn it off or which of the two applications is the cause of the problem. It is very much automated and only accruing when the sound on my microphone is loud enough. It doesn't happen when Windows Live Messenger isn't running however and I have tried selecting "I am using a headset" in the Audio and Video Settings. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hi all, I am trying to make certain changes to the registry under the HKLM\Comm directory and according to Microsoft these are considered "protected from normal applications" (see below). However, under WM6 Professional, I have no problem making the changes I need to.* Its only on Smartphone WM6 Standard (considered two-tier protected?) that I can't.* I am using the Microsoft remote tools - Remote Registry Editor.* After trying to connect it says, "A connection could not be made because the device actively refused it" or something to that effect.* Any ideas?* Is the only way to get a certificate from the OEM? Thanks in advance Nick From the page titled, Privileged APIs: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa455835.aspx In Windows CE, the following registry root keys and their subkeys are protected from normal applications: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Init HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Services HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\WDMDrivers More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

During my talk at MIX 08, I covered more background and detail behind the new IE8 layout mode that provides greater standards support, particularly with regards to CSS 2.1, and version targeting. I’d like to follow-up that talk with a brief post on both points for those that were unable to attend in person. Clearly there is a lot of momentum behind pushing the web forward (as evidenced, in part, by the lively dialog on this and other blog sites around the web). To this end, we’ve invested in the functionality demanded most by developers and designers – better standards support and cross-browser compatibility. You saw a peak into our progress with the Acid2 announcement a few weeks back. You can see more in the released developer build, which includes support for several CSS 2.1 features not found in previous Internet Explorer releases including the 'inline-table' value for the 'display' property and basic generated content support (more to follow). As you may have heard by now, Internet Explorer 8 will ship with three layout modes – Quirks, IE7 Standards, and IE8 Standards. The saying goes: “put your best face forward” and, true to this, Internet Explorer 8 will use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default when encountering standards content. The behavior looks as follows: Page Content Declaration Layout Mode Known standards DOCTYPEs and unknown DOCTYPEsIE8 StandardsQuirks mode DOCTYPEs (includes the absence of a DOCTYPE)QuirksNote: A brief discussion on DOCTYPEs can be found on MSDN. By displaying standards mode pages with our most rigid interpretation, we get closer to that utopia where content may be written once and expected to work in a similar manner across browser types. Keep in mind, however, that progress is often the result of trade-offs. On the one hand, we certainly want to invest in new features, those innovations that entice our existing customers to move to the newest release (and hopefully win us new customers as well). This force is a “push” – we want to move our product, and the community that uses it, forward. On the other hand, we want to ensure that we don’t senselessly break an ecosystem that has come to rely on the behaviors included in our previous releases. This force is a “pull” – causing us to do constrained innovation that specifically takes into account backwards compatibility. The tag attempts to solve this latter point by providing content developers a way in which to signal the desired layout mode regardless of DOCTYPE. This can be particularly useful as a “stop-gap” measure to provide the time required to build and test the latest standards compliant content. Example: Scenario: A website contains a standards mode DOCTYPE declaration but is actually giving versions of Internet Explorer, including Internet Explorer 8, non-standard content according to the “current” form of the standard. Result: Internet Explorer 8 attempts to display the content using IE8 mode, the most standards compliant layout mode, because of the DOCTYPE declaration. The site fails to display correctly and updates to the site are needed. Actions: Immediately update site content to ensure that Internet Explorer 8 is provided with standards content fitting the DOCTYPE (preferred). Defer the site update until the next scheduled maintenance window / period Use the opt-out to signal that Internet Explorer 8 should continue to display the document in a manner similar to Internet Explorer 7, e.g. ‘. This can be done globally via a host-header or as a per-document edit. This action allows the site to still be usable by Internet Explorer 8 clients. Create site content ensuring that Internet Explorer 8 is provided with standards content fitting the DOCTYPE. Publish the new, standards-compliant content and remove the opt-out. Note: The tag declaration always overrides DOCTYPE. A deeper discussion can be found in the developer whitepaper. Another interesting point about the tag is that it more precisely marks the content of a page than the larger bucket labels: “Standards” and “Quirks”. Regardless of whether a browser chooses to use that information today, it does seem like an interesting data point to have in the future... Scott Dickens Lead Program Manager http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8054269 More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Huch Platt, Operations Manager of the THX Best Practices Lab takes Michael Scherotter*on a tour of the Hollywood facility.* Created as a joint project with THX, Avid, AMD, and Microsoft and with hardware supplied by HP, the lab is a place for the Hollywood community to learn about technology.* I thought it was an amazing facility with some great potential Listen to the podcast(MP3) Listen to the podcast(WMA) Download the Video Watch the Video More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

As Dean mentioned yesterday in his post announcing the availability of the Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for developers , better script performance is of particular interest to the developer community. In conjunction with Dean’s announcement, the JScript Team posted additional information around scripting improvements in IE8 Beta 1 over on their team blog. I encourage you to check it out and follow their blog to learn more about the cool things they are doing for IE8! Kristen Kibble Program Manger http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8076806 More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Since I joined the IE team at the beginning of 2007, it has become clear to me how important it is for web developers to predict how a given browser will work. I’ve certainly heard and read how very important it is to web developers to minimize the cost of supporting each additional browser version. In apparent contradiction to this, everyone needs continued innovation in the browser to create new online business opportunities. One of the most important ways to ease development costs is to support a well-defined set of web standards in all the browsers. This frees up developers’ time to spend on their site innovation rather than porting and testing work. However, sometimes there are ambiguities or optional items in the specifications, such as the behavior of tables. This naturally results in browsers that behave differently. The Internet Explorer team is serious about enabling web developers to be the most effective and efficient as possible. One very important way we can do this is to support and contribute to the web standards. For the Internet Explorer team, we will do this in multiple ways including implementing support for standards and driving to cut the ambiguity in these industry standards’ specifications. I believe the way to cut through the ambiguity is to have a set of tests that can help define how the implementation should actually work. The W3C’s CSS Working Group has a set of 487 tests today in the CSS Working Group’s level 2 revision 1 test suite. We just submitted over 700 tests to the W3C for possible inclusion into the official test suite. We’re providing these using the BSD License. We wrote these to test the CSS 2.1 behavior in IE8 beta 1. The coverage they provide is for both basic property support and the scenarios called out in the CSS 2.1 spec. We strongly believe in the W3C and how its test suites can ultimately help the web developers of the world spend more time creating new web experiences and less time dealing with browser differences. The feedback regarding the first set of submitted CSS 2.1 tests will help us improve these tests and strongly guide our future test submissions to the CSS Working Group and others. The IE Test Team welcomes your feedback about our CSS 2.1 tests including our interpretation of how they test the CSS 2.1 support in IE8 Beta 1. If you’re interested in commenting on the tests, I encourage you go to join the existing W3C’s 2.1 Test Suite Mailing List discussion on the topic. I truly believe that starting with IE8 Beta 1 we’ve begun a journey toward making it easier for you to build the web in a standards-based, predictable way. Thanks a lot, Jason Upton Test Manager Internet Explorer http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8053425 More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Microsoft Strives For 'The Singularity' With New Operating System - InformationWeek <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Strives For 'The Singularity' With New Operating System InformationWeek, NY - 1 hour ago By Paul McDougall Microsoft said it has released to developers a "dependable" new operating system -- and it isn't Windows Vista. The company is developing ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Blog: Vista still looks expensive after cuts New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - 22 hours ago Microsoft has come out with plans to cut the price of Windows Vista around the world and today revealed the New Zealand price cuts for the operating system ... Wal-Mart: Microsoft should kill Vista Home Basic Computerworld Are Vista prices low enough yet? Not compared to Apple's OS-X Computerworld all 11 news articles More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Microsoft Strives For 'The Singularity' With New Operating System - InformationWeek <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Strives For 'The Singularity' With New Operating System InformationWeek, NY - 26 minutes ago By Paul McDougall Microsoft said it has released to developers a "dependable" new operating system -- and it isn't Windows Vista. The company is developing ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Anyone going? Just curious. :-) More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows "Workstation" 2008 Clobbers Vista in Benchmark Testing InfoWorld, CA - Mar 5, 2008 You can read all the gory details over at the exo.blog site. Suffice to say that there's a new option for power users who are fed-up with Vista's ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Some of the first things users may notice in the Beta 1 release of Internet Explorer 8 are new features such as Activities and WebSlice. We recognize that the technology behind Activities and Webslice relies on innovations that have come out of the community, which of course has had a critical role in the development of the Internet. We also appreciate the community’s deep commitment to permissive IP licensing and to ensuring the continued ability to innovate. So with these new features and other initiatives we’re launching in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, we want to highlight the ways in which we’re using new approaches to licensing the various intellectual property components involved. We carefully chose these new licensing models because they are the models, or facilitate the kinds of free and open uses, that the relevant communities have adopted for themselves. While we will still evaluate the most appropriate way to make specifications and test cases available on a case-by-case basis, here we concluded that the Public Domain, Creative Commons and BSD licenses (for copyrights) and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (for patents) are the best vehicles for making these technologies available. In this post I’ll briefly describe how these are all being used, and also point you to links where you can find additional information about them. Creative Commons and Public Domain for Copyrights in the Specifications For the OpenService Format and WebSlice Format specs, we’re using two separate Creative Commons vehicles to allow developers to freely use and build on our work. We’re licensing our copyright in the OpenService Format Specification under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This license lets others copy, distribute, modify and build upon the specification, even for commercial uses, as long as they simply give credit to Microsoft and license their own changes under the same terms. This license is also consistent with the license adopted by the OpenSearch community, whose work relates to the OpenService Format spec. We’re setting a new precedent with the WebSlice Format Specification by dedicating our copyright in it to the public domain using the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, the first time we’ve used a public domain dedication in connection with one of our specs. This allows anyone to freely copy, distribute, modify and build upon the specification for any purpose, without any additional conditions or obligations whatsoever. In this case, our public domain dedication is in keeping with the expectations of the hAtom Microformats community. Our use of Creative Commons solutions in connection with these two specs continues our many years of support for and collaboration with that important organization. In addition to using Creative Commons licenses in conjunction with other other specs (including one used in conjunction with Internet Explorer 7) and on websites, Microsoft and Creative Commons have partnered on the creation of an add-in for Microsoft Office that automates the inclusion of Creative Commons licenses into Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. We’re happy to continue our enthusiastic engagement with Creative Commons with the release of these specs today. For more information about Creative Commons, including how you can use Creative Commons licenses on your own works, please visit http://creativecommons.org. Microsoft Open Specification Promise for Implementations of the Specifications Microsoft has developed the Open Specification Promise (“OSP”) to provide a simple and clear patent promise to reassure the broad audience of developers and customers that a given specification can be used for free, easily, now and forever. The OSP was developed with feedback from customers and the open source community, and we’re happy to be making both the OpenService Format and WebSlice Format specifications available under the OSP. The use of the OSP confirms that that these two specifications can be implemented for free. Please refer to this page for complete information and details concerning the OSP. BSD License for Copyright in the Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 Test Suite Finally, in connection with the Beta 1 release of Internet Explorer 8, we’re also posting a set of tests to validate our interpretation and implementation of the Cascading Style Sheets (“CSS”) 2.1 Specification. In this case, we hope to get feedback from web designers and developers on the tests we’ve submitted to the W3C for inclusion in the W3C’s CSS Working Group Test Suite. We’re licensing this test suite under the BSD License, which allows redistribution and modification of the tests in source and binary forms, subject to a familiar three-paragraph set of conditions. The BSD License is the license the W3C CSS Working Group has proposed using for the rest of its test cases, thus we’re using it here so that our tests can seamlessly transition over to the W3C CSS Working Group. * * * We hope that users, developers, designers and testers all enjoy the new features in IE8 Beta 1. We look forward to your feedback and hope that the permissive IP licensing we are announcing today enhances the web community. Tom Rubin Associate General Counsel Intellectual Property & Licensing Edit: updated hatom Microformats Community link http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8054043 More... 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If you’re like me, you’ve found that it’s pretty hard to keep track of all the new services and sites out there, let alone the ones we use every day. I bookmark my favorite sites and services, but still spend a lot of time trying to find them. A couple of months ago, a friend showed me a service that finds related videos. I ran across a blog that showed a funny video on chinchillas and wanted to see similar videos. I spent 5 minutes looking for the service in my Favorites. When I finally found it, I had to copy and paste the text “chinchilla” (spelling is not my forte) to the site. ARG. I’m happy to share that we have two new features in IE8 that makes this easier: Activities and WebSlices. Activities With Activities, you can access your services from any webpage. Activities simplify the common task of copying, navigating, and pasting into a single action. Just make a selection and click on the Activity button or context menu to view your services. http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/Activities.png An example of a popular Activity is a mapping service. With this Activity, I can highlight an address, select my map service of choice, and see a preview of the location immediately. Clicking on the map opens a new tab to the full mapping website where I can get driving directions, aerial view and more features. Here are some other Activities that you may find helpful: Find products from eBay – View active auctions for the selected product. Lookup website reviews with StumbleUpon – See how other people rate the current website that you’re on. Share with Facebook – Add interesting sites to your Facebook profile for your friends to see. Discovery with Me.dium - Find related sites from your friends and community on Me.dium. Under the hood, an Activity uses a simple XML format called OpenService. Just implement an XML file that describes how your service works with URL templates. The main functions of an Activity are: Preview: viewing a mini representation of the service results on hover of the Activity Execute: opening the service in a new tab when the user clicks on the Activity Here’s one for Windows Live Maps: <A href="http://maps.live.com%3c/homepageUrl" mce_href="http://maps.live.com%3c/homepageUrl">http://maps.live.com Map with Live Maps <A href="http://maps.live.com/favicon.ico%3c/icon" mce_href="http://maps.live.com/favicon.ico%3c/icon">http://maps.live.com/favicon.ico You can provide a button directly from your site for users to add your Activity: Add Map Activity Check out the Activities that are available on the Service Guide and create your own using our whitepaper on Activities. WebSlices WebSlices bring your favorite pieces of the web with you. WebSlices are portions of a webpage that you can subscribe to and view updates directly from the Favorites bar. http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/WebSlice.1.png WebSlices let you subscribe to a portion of webpage to get updates and view these changes without having to go back to the site. Let’s say that you’re an eBay addict like me, and you’ve got your heart set on a 80’s Swatch watch. With WebSlices, I can subscribe to the auction item and know when there is a price change directly on the browser chrome. When a website supports WebSlice, the purple WebSlice icon appears in the Commandbar: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/Webslice.Toolbar.png WebSlices also appear when you are hovering over a WebSlice region within a webpage: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/WebSlice.Webpage.png Clicking on the WebSlice button adds the WebSlice to the Favorites bar. In the background, IE checks for updates on a schedule. When IE finds an update, the item on the Favorites bar bolds. You can click on the item to view the details. Try it out with on the IE8 eBay site! Go to http://ie8.ebay.com and type in a product like “swatch watch” in the search box at the bottom right of the webpage. You can try out WebSlices on these sites, too: StumbleUpon – Get the buzz on latest sites. Facebook – Keep track of your friends’ status. There is a known issue with WebSlices that use cookies for authentication on Vista with Protected Mode on. If you are having issues with the Facebook WebSlice on Vista, delete the Facebook WebSlice from the Favorites bar, run IE8 in elevated mode (right-click on IE8 and select the “Run as administrator” option”) and re-subscribe to the WebSlice. To enable a WebSlice on your site, just add HTML annotations to your webpage. A WebSlice uses a combination of the hAtom Microformat and the WebSlice format. FLASHLIGHT! Unique Swatch … starting bid $44.99 … By adding these three annotations, IE recognizes that it is a WebSlice and treats it like a feed; handling the discovery, subscription, and processing of the WebSlice. You can also add additional properties to a WebSlice, such as expiration, time-to-live value, and an alternative source. Read the specification for these properties and use our whitepaper on WebSlices to get started on your own WebSlice. Activities and WebSlices help you get to the sites and services that you care about. They’re also designed to work with your service as it exists today without having to deploy any client side code. I can’t wait to see what you can do with these new features! Jane Kim Program Manager Edit: Update post time http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8075415 More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hi guys, I have the newest version of Silverlight (version 1 not the 2 beta1 ) installed in my PC. But I am having this problem that it don't work that well when I want to view a video (channel9, channel8 and visitmix) the only sites that it is working with it is silverlight.net and asp.net. It happens that when I want to play a video, it gave the loading dialog with zero percent that it dont go up to 100. And after a min it disappears, then it give me a black window with nothing in it. Please help me and thank you in advance. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Continuing with the Technical Fellow interviews on Channel 9, meet Dave Campbell. From his bio: "David Campbell is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working in the Data Storage Platform division where he is responsible for driving technical strategy and architecture of Microsoft SQL Server and other storage products. He also helps drive architectural alignment across Microsoft’s Server and Tools division. Campbell’s current projects and interests include extreme scale data processing and programmatic data services." Here we chat about David's history at Microsoft, the work he does (and has done) in SQL Server's core processing and storage engines, the history and future of general purpose databases and an introduction to our cloud data services platform (marketing came up with the sexy "SQL Server Data Services" name...). Listen to the podcast(MP3) Listen to the podcast(WMA) Download the Video Watch the Video More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows "Workstation" 2008 Clobbers Vista in Benchmark Testing InfoWorld, CA - Mar 5, 2008 You can read all the gory details over at the exo.blog site. Suffice to say that there's a new option for power users who are fed-up with Vista's ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

does anyone have a problem with .NET 3.5 where it causes my.msn.com to lose its CCS and prevents silverlight from working? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/06/live-from-apples-iphone-press-conference/ First the revolutionary device, now a revolutionary platform for it to operate on. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

'cause if you can read this post it's not! (I think I saw a post where someone said that anyway) More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> New Internet Explorer 8 test beta released IT Week, UK - 7 hours ago Internet Explorer 8 can be installed on Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2008 ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows Vista Hack Circulating InformationWeek, NY - Mar 3, 2008 Software pirates have reportedly hacked Windows Vista so that a stolen copy can run as though it were a fully licensed and activated version. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/03/apple-sdk-019.jpg Yeah it's coming...it's even above .Mac More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds