Microsoft officials announced at TechEd South Africa on August 6 that SQL Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing. Microsoft officials said last month to expect the product on August price lists. SQL Server 2008 is available as of today to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be available for evaluation download on Aug. 7, company officials said. SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server Compact editions are available for free download today, as well.

SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Server Tools Windows Installer (MSI) file installs replication components on the computer running the Internet Information Services (IIS) for synchronizing data with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 for devices Windows Installer (MSI) file contains the CAB files and the DLLs for installing SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 on the Windows mobile devices.

The Feature Pack is a collection of stand-alone install packages that provide additional value for SQL Server 2008. It includes the latest versions of: Redistributable components for SQL Server 2008. Add-on providers for SQL Server 2008. Backward compatibility components for SQL Server 2008.

Download SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007. This package includes two add-ins for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 (Table Analysis Tools and Data Mining Client) and one add-in for Microsoft Office Visio 2007 (Data Mining Templates).

With Microsoft having just released to manufacturing SQL Server 2008 — the last unshipped piece of its updated application platform — it’s time to look ahead as to what’s next for Windows Server. In the very near term, Windows Essential Business Server (Centro) and Windows Small Business Server 2008 (Cougar) are due to ship this fall. Microsoft has said both products will be available by November 12. Both families are based on the Windows Server 2008 code base, and given that SQL Server 2008 finally hit RTM, are likely to include the latest version of Microsoft’s database, rather than SQL Server 2005 (which was the contingency plan if the SQL Server team didn’t manage to RTM soon enough).

Microsoft Corp. today announced the release to manufacturing of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, the new version of the company’s acclaimed data management and business intelligence platform. This version of SQL Server provides powerful new capabilities such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis services. SQL Server 2008 provides the trusted, productive and intelligent platform necessary for business-critical applications.

SQL Server 2008 is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be available for evaluation download on Aug. 7, 2008. SQL Server 2008 Express and SQL Server Compact editions are available for free download today at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver. As previously announced, pricing for SQL Server will not increase with SQL Server 2008. More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/sqlserver.

We are pleased to present a technology preview of Deep Zoom Composer, a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature currently being previewed in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. The new Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight allows users to see images on the Web like they never have before. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing should be. High resolution images need to be prepared for use with Deep Zoom and this tool allows the user to create Deep Zoom composition files that control the zooming experience and then export all the necessary files for deployment with Silverlight 2.

Download the latest road construction data to keep your Streets and Trips and MapPoint 2009 maps current.

After a brief blip of news following the mid-July release to manufacturing of Microsoft “Fiji,” it’s back to radio silence again. But the quiet shouldn’t be interpreted as all is well. In fact, a number of Fiji testers who asked not to be named and with whom I’ve communicated are not happy with how the test process for Windows Media Center TV Pack (Fiji) was conducted or the product that resulted. In fact, one tester made a convincing argument that Microsoft is doing more harm than good with Fiji, by sending mixed messages around whether users should wait for Windows 7 or upgrade now to Windows Vista coupled with Fiji.

Don’t worry Windows 95 Plus! enthusiasts, Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about you and your themes. A recently updated MSDN Library document shows that Microsoft hasn’t just brushed themes under the carpet, but instead dusted it off, added some new polish and is even putting it under the spotlight.

Since the primitive 4004 chip first designed for a line of calculators, Intel has been a processor company. And in all of the company's decades of processor design and fabrication, Intel has seen only one truly disruptive change in the basic microarchitecture of its processors: the Pentium Pro, which dramatically improved on the performance of its predecessor, the Pentium, by introducing an execution model that dynamically reshuffled the instruction stream for optimal execution.

Intel's forthcoming Larrabee product, which the company revealed in an extended briefing on Friday, is the second major disruptive change to Intel's core processor business since the Pentium Pro. I'll justify this claim at a later date with a more extended treatment of Larrabee, but for today I'll cover the highlights from the Friday briefing.

Federated Media Publishing (FM), Microsoft Corp. and Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival today announced CrowdFire, an online and onsite destination where music, culture and technology enthusiasts participate in a massive, crowdsourced act of digital media creation.

The CrowdFire experience begins with an online community in which participants share their favorite images, video and text with each other. In continuing the collaboration, Outside Lands concertgoers will have the opportunity to participate in the CrowdFire experience by uploading their digital content to CrowdFire pavilion kiosks. Through a variety of content creation and social networking tools available at the kiosks, participants’ creative output will be fused into a real-time digital media mashup displayed on both screens at the festival and on the CrowdFire Web site.

Angus and dev.live.com announced on the 28th July 2008 that the July refresh of the Windows Live Tools would include the release of the much anticipated Virtual Earth ASP.NET control.

The control is a complete drag and drop experience from within Visual Studio 2008. Drag the map from your toolbox onto your design surface and resize to suit. As you would expect all Virtual Earth 6.1 properties can be set as properties of the control, there are a full set of server side and client side events for the map and a range of very cool client side extenders.

Through a series of videos we take you through the full experience of installing the control and coding with its basic features. Each video is fairly detailed and runs for about 5-7 min. They are hosted by Silverlight Streaming so you will need to install the latest Beta2 Silverlight Client or download the wmv file directly.

After nearly two years of outright lying about Vista compatibility, Creative has finally released official X-Fi drivers that add support for Dolby Digital and DTS decoding in Microsoft's newest operating system. Originally, Creative claimed that fundamental changes to the Windows sound driver model made it impossible for the company to offer certain features that were available under XP, including Dolby Digital and DTS decoding. Creative's user community wasn't happy with that answer, however, and various driver modding projects began, including one by infamous modder Daniel_K.

NVIDIA will launch a new version of its ForceWare graphics drivers in September, and its unusual name is causing some ripples. GPUCafe claims to have information on what the new update will include, and if they're right, it will be quite an update indeed.

The new release, properly called ForceWare release 180, is being referred to in NVIDIA documentation as "Big Bang 2." This name evokes an earlier driver launch, Big Bang, which first allowed multi-GPU support on the GeForce 6000 series. The name implies that this driver release will be similarly huge, and the declared feature list is pretty compelling. GPUCafe says ForceWare release 180 will bring the following features:

• Multimonitor support for SLI
• Display Port support
• OpenGL 3.0
• Hardware video transcoding
• GPU PhysX support
• Performance optimizations

A few hours ago, we released another update to Deep Zoom Composer. Some of the major new features outside of the usual bug, performance, and stability changes include Panoramic Stitching and PhotoZoom Upload.

Now this is cool. Jeff Weir and John Lynn work in the Microsoft Live Labs team (that's the group that created Photosynth). They also have a couple of Surface units in their office. So the two of them came up with an idea to build a little application called Shadow Box (or unofficially "nightmare box") that 'burns' in and out images of what the infrared camera inside the surface sees. The end result is both awesome and spooky! Check out the video of Shadow Box in action.

The session list published for PDC 08 just doubled, with a note that it will double again before the conference begins. Of course most of the good stuff is still under wraps, but there are a few gems, even this early:

Just when you thought the Surface was the coolest thing since sliced bread... enter the Sphere! This product is still in proto-type mode but even at this stage, you can't help but be impressed. At the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit I grabbed some one on one time with Hrvoje Benko, the lead on this project and found out all the details. It's just so cool, enjoy.

David Worthington: At the risk of undercutting one of its core product lines, Microsoft is carefully conceptualizing a way to move millions of users away from the existing Windows codebase and onto Midori, a legacy-free operating system that it is currently incubating in its skunk works.

SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that reveal the company’s preference of an orderly replacement strategy rather than breaking sharply with its past.

The company is acutely aware that Windows is installed on the majority of the world’s computers and has a broad legacy of applications and devices—one that carries with it a lot of value.

But heritage comes at a price: Evolving Windows to meet new opportunities is a costly proposition. “Legacy support is a huge anchor on Windows,” remarked Larry O’Brien, an independent analyst and consultant who writes the Windows & .NET Watch column for SD Times.

Microsoft alleges that a rival maker of computer mice has wrongly made use of its patented hardware technologies and refused to license them.

Scott Bradner: The obvious thought came to me while writing last week's column ("SCO Group: Its future is all used up") that about the only folk (other than the deluded and amoral management of the SCO Group) that want the SCO Group effort attacking Linux and other open source initiatives to succeed is Microsoft. So I decided to explore that side in this follow-up column, but a bit of reading led me to the conclusion that things are not as simple as they appear.

For years Microsoft has been claiming that Linux has been stealing its intellectual property rights (IPR, i.e., patented technology).

Microsoft sold more than 18 million Windows Mobile software licenses in its recently completed fiscal year -- about 2 million short of its widely publicized 20 million-unit target -- the senior vice president in charge of the business acknowledged this afternoon.

However, Microsoft was still able to increase Windows Mobile's overall share of the worldwide mobile-phone operating system market, despite increased competition from Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's BlackBerry and others, said Andy Lees, senior vice president of the Redmond company's Mobile Communications Business, in an interview.

Chris Flores: There appears to be a shift taking place in the PC industry: the move from 32-bit to 64-bit PCs.

We've been tracking the change by looking at the percentage of 64-bit PCs connecting to Windows Update, and have seen a dramatic increase in recent months. The installed base of 64-bit Windows Vista PCs, as a percentage of all Windows Vista systems, has more than tripled in the U.S. in the last three months, while worldwide adoption has more than doubled during the same period. Another view shows that 20% of new Windows Vista PCs in the U.S. connecting to Windows Update in June were 64-bit PCs, up from just 3% in March. Put more simply, usage of 64-bit Windows Vista is growing much more rapidly than 32-bit. Based on current trends, this growth will accelerate as the retail channel shifts to supplying a rapidly increasing assortment of 64-bit desktops and laptops.

Joe Wilcox: Maybe I'm getting soft on the Softies, but just because Vista marketing blows hot air doesn't mean Microsoft is a constant screw-up. The company actually is having a remarkably good month.

I've picked 10 of the most important things Microsoft has done in July. I am focusing mostly on product announcements and acquisitions in the list. Not to be overlooked: Microsoft's annual financial analyst and partner conferences and the company's attendance at Comic-Con and E3. Microsoft had a busy July.

Microsoft Corp.'s Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving's door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open-source world as Microsoft's representative. And on top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises.

Ramji's Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland, Ore., at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week's LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco.

Thom Holwerda: I have written about if before: updating programs on your computer - if you're not using a Linux distribution, that is - is a total and utter mess. On Windows and Mac OS X, there are roughly four ways of updating applications. The application notifies of new updates, and then downloads them when you click 'yes', the application updates from within the application itself, or the application requires a special update program running in the background. These are all quite annoying, since they interfere with your workflow (as opposed to, say, running "apt-get upgrade" every morning). The fourth method is the official vendor channel, Windows/Microsoft Update in Windows and Software Update in Mac OS X. Paul Ellis argues that to alleviate the mess, Microsoft should open up Microsoft Update for everyone else - and similar arguments are made concerning Apple's Software Update.

With Beta 2 of the Web browser due next month, Microsoft is looking to sign up more official testers for Internet Explorer 8, saying it's the only way for individuals to directly file bug reports.

Like with Beta 1, the second beta of IE8 will be made available for public download. Still, there's good reason to become a participant in Microsoft's IE8 Technical Beta program. In addition to filing a direct