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<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Just the net, please guardian.co.uk, UK - 8 minutes ago The Eee Box runs Windows XP Home, but it has a simple Linux-based front end called Express Gate (bit.ly/aj0042), which lets you surf and run Skype without ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows XP downgrade deadline extended to July 31, 2009 engadget, CA - 37 minutes ago ... something to do with the fact that some folks don't want to move to Vista at all. Take your pick. Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. ... More...

Microsoft is known to have code names for their products and eventually changing its name a few months before its release. For the successor of Windows Vista, named Windows 7, it most likely that Microsoft is going to create another name for it since “7″ doesn’t cut it because they have never named Windows in [...] More...

Microsoft has again extended the life of the Windows XP media to large OEMs from the current January 31, 2009 to July of 2009. A Microsoft spokesman contends that they are doing it to help companies become confident in using Windows Vista and allow them to have a painless transition. But given thatWindows 7 is expected to [...] More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Vodafone BlackBerry Storm FAIL: Apple iPhone UI Geekzone, New Zealand - 56 minutes ago ... yet strange how there's no mention of Weta!?... sharmon on The Windows Mojave experiment results: I have started using Windows Vista about 2 mos ago. ... More...

In the latest installment of the Windows Vista Feature Focus series, I look at Windows Ultimate Extras, a Windows Vista Ultimate perk that hasn't lived up to expectations. More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Will Windows 7 get a new name for its release? ZDNet - 12 minutes ago Windows XP is going to be popular for a long, long time, whereas Windows 2000 has almost vanished. Windows Vista was version 6.0, with a new major version ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Know what to do when Check Disks malfunctions in Vista TechRepublic, KY - 49 minutes ago In this edition of the Windows Vista Report, I’ll show you what to do when Check Disks malfunctions in Vista. This blog post is also available in the PDF ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows Vista outlook gets cloudy GCN.com, DC - 11 minutes ago A blog posting Monday from ZDNet’s TechRepublic editor, Jason Hiner, suggesting that IT departments are ignoring Windows Vista, stirred up fresh debate on ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Warm your widgets, tune your Twitter to zero in on the candidates Pioneer Press, MN - 39 minutes ago "Widgets" or "gadgets" are available for the Mac OS X and Windows Vista operating systems. These miniprograms are handy for pulling in Web info, ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Warm your widgets, tune your Twitter to zero in on the candidates ... Pioneer Press, MN - 4 hours ago "Widgets" or "gadgets" are available for the Mac OS X and Windows Vista operating systems. These miniprograms are handy for pulling in Web info, ... More...

Sunava Dutta here, a program manager focused on improving AJAX in the browser! Now that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is out, I want to write about some of the latest rounds of enhancements we’ve made. As many of you may recall, back in March we discussed a set of developer experiences in AJAX across scenarios such as client-side cross-domain data access, local storage, and navigation state management among many others. The good news is our team has been working since Beta 1 to tweak and update our implementations based on feedback from developers (thanks for your contributions!) and ongoing updates to the W3C standards drafts on which most of these implementations are based or have been submitted for consideration. Not content with doing just that, we also added a few new features for developers. More on that later… The AJAX updates we’ve chosen for Beta 2 focus on maintaining cross-browser compatibility and the feature sets that developers have thought would be the most useful. Without further ado, here they are. XDomainRequest (XDR) This is an object built from the ground up to make client-side cross-domain calls secure and easy. To reduce the chances of inadvertent cross domain access, this object requires an explicit acknowledgement for allowing cross domain calls from the client script and the server. Additionally, it reduces the need for sites having to resort to the dangerous practice of merge scripting from third parties directly into the mashup page. This practice is dangerous because it provides third parties full access to the DOM. All this comes with the added benefit of improved client-side performance and lower server maintenance costs thanks to the absence of a need for server farms for proxying. During the Beta 1 timeframe there were many security based concerns raised for cross domain access of third party data using cross site XMLHttpRequest and the Access Control framework. Since Beta 1, we had the chance to work with other browsers and attendees at a W3C face-to-face meeting to improve the server-side experience and security of the W3C’s Access Control framework. As a result, we’ve updated XDR to be explicitly compliant with syntax and directives in the sections of Access Control for requesting simple public third-party data anonymously on the client! (Section 5.1.3 in the Access Control Process Model) The updates to XDR from Beta 1 allow IE8 to request data from the domain's server by sending an Origin header with the serialized value of the origin of the requestor. IE8 Beta 2 will only return the response if the server responds with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, instead of allowing the XDomainRequestAllowed: 1 header as we did in Beta 1. Other changes include support for relative paths in the open method, and restricting access to only HTTP and HTTPS destinations. Cross-document Messaging (XDM) Cross-document messaging is another powerful cross-domain feature that I’ve blogged about in the past. Rather than make a backend request to a remote Web service, this allows sites hosting third-party IFrame-based "gadgets" or components to communicate directly with the parent, without unsafely violating the same site origin policy. This has advantages including improved performance and reliability, as developers don’t have to resort to workarounds that behave differently between browsers and have unwanted side-effects. This technique also removes the need for embedding third-party script in your page, lessening the chance of potential information disclosure vulnerabilities like the disclosure of your sensitive data (such as information in your social network profile) to third parties without your consent. Beta 2 updates here include moving the onmessage handler from the document object to the window object to better align with the updated HTML 5.0 draft. window.attachEvent("onmessage", HandleMessage); We also replaced e.URI with e.origin, which is serialized form of “scheme” + “host” + “non-default port”. This is far safer as the URI can carry potentially sensitive information from the origin site that is not needed by the recipient for the decision to grant or not grant access. if (e.origin == 'http://www.contoso.com') { // process message text } Finally, the HTML 5.0 draft also mandates that the targetOrigin parameter for the postMessage method now be made a required parameter, as opposed to an optional one. This will make it difficult for developers to make errors by requiring an explicit acknowledgement of the target destination of the message by specifying the origin or wildcard . frameOther.postMessage("This is a message", "http://example.com"); DOM Storage Today, web pages use the document.cookie property to store data on the local machine. Cookies are limited in capability by the fact that sites can only store 50 key/value pairs per domain. Furthermore, the cookie programming model is cumbersome and requires parsing the entire cookie string for data. While cookies are useful for marking transitions and changes on the client to the server as they are sent with the request headers in chunks of up to 4KB, IE8 brings better alternatives for scenarios involving persisting data on the client and distinctly maintaining sessions in different tabs. The W3C’s HTML 5 DOM Storage objects provide a much simpler global and session storage model for key/value pair string data. Sites can store data for the life of a tab or until the site or user clears the data. Updates for Beta 2 include changing the name of the persistent globalStorage attribute to localStorage and the removal of the need to specify the domain when writing to the localStorage // Store a key-value pair. localStorage.setItem("FirstName","Sunava"); Finally, we also included improved support of the updated onstorage HTML 5.0 event returned when the storage is changed. We now return the URI when the local storage is changed, so that handlers for pages can know who carried out the latest transaction in the storage space in addition to providing the source to the window of the origin. Furthering the good news, the HTML 5.0 Working Group has incorporated the clear method, which we shipped in Beta 1, into the draft. This essentially allows for script to clear all items accessible in its storage space without having to iterate though the keys. Connectivity Event The navigator.onLine property and online/offline events now work on Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. The work to enable this was not trivial, as connection awareness in Windows XP is not quite as advanced as Windows Vista. That said, this will be extremely beneficial for developers, who we believe shouldn’t have to worry about OS differences. The value of connectivity events is particularly appealing when used in conjunction with the localstorage, where data can be cached in case of network loss! XMLHttpRequest Introducing the XDomainRequest object in IE8 hasn’t diverted our attentions from constantly tweaking and improving XMLHttpRequest, which will continue to be our flagship object for same-domain communications. Post-Beta 1 energies here have focused on a few bug fixes around reliability and working with the Web Apps Working Group to clarify and improve the draft specification, our compliance with it, and W3C public test cases. A timeout method introduced here in Beta 1 for the convenience of developers is currently being evaluated for adoption in the XMLHttpRequest spec. // Sets timeout after open to two seconds. xhr.timeout = 2000; ToStaticHTML, to JSON, and fromJSON What do you do with the strings returned from third parties using XDomainRequest or Cross-document Messaging? In today’s world of increasing script injection and Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks, having the option of passing these through a safe parser comes as a welcome relief. As detailed in Eric Lawrence's post on Comprehensive Protection for IE8 Security, toStaticHTML provides a powerful way of sanitizing your strings by purging potentially executable content. //Calling: window.toStaticHTML("This is some HTML with embedded script following... !"); //will return: This is some HTML with embedded script following... ! In addition, IE8 Beta 2’s toJSON and fromJSON methods provide improved performance as opposed to non-native Javascript deserializers and serializers. Our implementation is based on the ECMAScript 3.1 proposal for native JSON-handling which uses Douglas Crockford’s json2.js API. In addition to the performance benefits of going native, the JSON parser provides a safe alternative to the eval() method, which has been a common and dangerous way to revive JSON objects, and could allow arbitrary script functions to execute. Other Features AJAX Navigations has undergone minimal changes since Beta 1. We’ve got some new code samples and overview documentation on this for Beta 2 on MSDN. Improved connection parallelism per host has also undergone a few tweaks and will command its own post soon. Summary We’ve worked in standards to make the AJAX experience for developers better. Beta 2 implements the changes mentioned above. Moving forward, we will continue to partner with members in the W3C on a variety of topics including advancing draft specifications. Strong developer adoption of these features is a priority and we’re focusing on help sites transition to integrating these features. For code samples for the AJAX feature set, please refer to our IE8 AJAX Beta 2 Hands on Labs. In case you’ve wondered who the ‘we’ in the AJAX core development team is, below is a photo (unedited, red eyes included) that puts a few faces to the names that pop up occasionally on blogs and mailing lists! Enjoy! Sunava Dutta Program Manager http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/ajaxteam2.jpg From top left: Sharath Udupa (Developer), Gideon Cohn (Test), Zhenbin Xu (AJAX Senior Developer, Alex Kuang (Test) and Karen Anderson (Test) From bottom left: Sunava Dutta (Program Manager) and Ahmed Kamel (Developer)Missing from this photo are Françoise Louw (Test), Adrian Bateman (Program Manager) and Gaurav Seth (Developer) http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8979422 More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Fake Boy Band Ushers In Windows 7, Makes Vista Years Seem Classy Gizmodo Australia, Australia - 14 minutes ago Apparently, a simple blog post about getting Windows 7 early by attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in October or the Windows ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsft Extends Windows XP Life By Another Six Months CRN, NY - 18 minutes ago By Jack McCarthy, ChannelWeb Microsoft is extending again the time period for which PC makers can use 'downgrade rights' to switch from Windows Vista to ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Easily transfer files from one PC to another Sync, Canada - 17 minutes ago Chances are your next computer will be powered by Windows Vista, but many PC users will be unfamiliar how to transfer files from their existing PC to the ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Lots of Details on the Xbox 360 Dashboard NXE Via Rare Seattle Post Intelligencer - 23 minutes ago The preset menus do help finding the content much easier now, obviously though having a search system similar to Windows Vista would improve the experience ... More...

In the latest episode of the Windows Weekly podcast, Leo and I discuss Paul's Windows 7 presentation, Microsoft's upcoming "Windows Cloud OS," future versions of Office Live, Hyper-V Server 2008, and Windows Vista Secrets SP1 Edition! More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Photosynth does amazing things with photos Digital Arts Online, UK - 16 minutes ago You'll also need to use Windows XP or Windows Vista as your operating system, and have a PC configured with at least 256MB of RAM (1GB is recommended) and ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Just announced, the THX certified.......Door! Digital Post Production, CA - Sep 13, 2008 PRODUCT FEATURES: Built for Microsoft Windows Vista World's first DirectX 10 GPU with full Shader Model 4.0 support delivers unparalleled levels of graphics ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft programming contest hacked, defaced iTWire, Australia - 2 minutes ago Contest entries can be coded for Microsoft Windows desktops, Microsoft-based web servers, Windows Mobile, Windows Vista’s Sidebar or Silverlight web apps. ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> That Web 2.0? We are so over that Seattle Times, United States - 37 minutes ago I was not involved in establishing the requirements computers must satisfy to qualify for the Windows Vista Capable program. ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> The Insider: It's no laughing matter at WaMu Seattle Post Intelligencer - 1 hour ago A CLASS-ACTION WINDOWS UPDATE: Plaintiffs' lawyers in the "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit hope to notify the estimated 15 million potential class members in ... More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=TUKUBVG50hQJ&imgurl=www.chattahbox.com/images/Gates_Seinfeld.jpg width=74 height=80 alt="" border=1> ChattahBox <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft ads are still shoulder-tapping. OK. OK. I’m listening ... ZDNet - Sep 12, 2008 in the official Windows Vista Blog and he presents a good, well thought-out counterpoint that I think offers some valid points, including: When you set out ... Bill Gates Does The Robot In Latest Windows Ad InformationWeek Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today WinInfo Short Takes: Week of September 15, 2008 Windows IT Pro VNUNet.com - Electronista all 163 news articles More...

In the third part of my Zune 3 Review, I examine the superior Zune 3 PC software! More...

Here's an early look at the Live Services activity center, a central location for all of my articles about cloud computing! As with the Vista activity center, this will be updated over time. More...