Today we're announcing plans to release a security update to address the vulnerability discussed in Security Advisory 2286198 on Monday, August 2, 2010 at or around 10 AM PDT. We are releasing the bulletin as we've completed the required testing and the update has achieved the appropriate quality bar for broad distribution to customers. Additionally, we're able to confirm that, in the past few days, we've seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability. We firmly believe that releasing the update out of band is the best thing to do to help protect our customers.

Microsoft critics tend to knock the company for being either too reliant on its cash cows (Windows and Office) or too scattered, chasing too many nonprofitable businesses.

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner made the bold statement this morning during the company's annual FInancial Analyst Meeting. "One of the most exciting things about our cloud strategy is that 70 percent of the wins in the cloud that we had in Q4, ladies and gentlemen, were new Microsoft customers," Tuner told financial analysts. "Yeah, new Microsoft customers. They were IBM Lotus Notes customers, Novell e-mail customers. They were all this other stuff, in addition to the Microsoft customers, that we're actually able to grow our portion of the pie this next year in a very dramatic way, because we can explode worker productivity."

Microsoft is readying a beta of its Internet Explorer (IE) 9 browser that it will roll out in September, according to Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.

Microsoft has five main competitors when it comes to the enterprise market, COO Kevin Turner said today at the annual Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond. They are:

Few companies have the research depth to build something like Kinect, Microsoft's forthcoming Xbox add-on that allows a user to control a game through body movements -- in fact, Microsoft itself initially thought it would be impossible, its top research executive said Thursday.

One of the most pressing questions on investors’ and shareholders’ minds about Microsoft is how the company plans to respond to Apple’s iPad.

We are really excited to announce the availability of the Hyper-V Linux Integration Services for Linux Version 2.1. This release marks yet another milestone in providing a comprehensive virtualization platform to our customers. Customers who have a heterogeneous operating system environment desire their virtualization platform to provide support for all operating systems that they have in their datacenters. We have supported Linux as a guest operating system on our virtualization platform from the days of Virtual Server and continue to enhance our support in that regard.

Has the cloud awakened a sleeping giant at Microsoft? The cloud is the future of IT and Microsoft’s Server and Tools business has the company poised to cash in on that opportunity. Server and Tools is now Microsoft's third largest unit, approaching parity with Windows and Office

Microsoft recently made another one of its in-house-only admin tools available for download: Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) was released publicly as Version 2.2. This tool was created by a developer on the Live Experiences Team to overcome the relative inflexibility of the native Remote Desktop Connection Client to handle multiple Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections. As usual for this type of tool, Microsoft's site says that RDCMan was developed internally and that it isn't supported. MS Download Link - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4603c621-6de7-4ccb-9f51-d53dc7e48047&displaylang=en

Google's StreetView technology, which is embedded into the Google Maps product on the browser, and on mobile phones like the iPhone and Android, has long wowed users with its option to view the road inside a 360-degree panorama. But Microsoft Research's latest effort, which is being unveiled at this week's Siggraph computer graphics conference, approaches viewing streets from a different direction. Literally. Instead of having users venture from one "bubble" of captured imagery to the next, as is done in Google's StreetView and Microsoft's Streetside, the new technology, called "Street Slide," stitches together multiple panoramas into one, large strip that users are able to scroll through side to side. And in place of putting information overlays on the imagery itself, things like street signs and business information are placed below, and out of sight of what was captured.

Wow, Microsoft will be giving away a lot of phones this fall, about 90,000 of them. That's one way to make sure that Windows Phone 7 gets off to a fast start, for both users and developers. Given that Microsoft is far behind, it's something they need to do if they want to compete against iPhone and Android.

Threat modeling is a core element of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) As part of the design phase of the SDL, threat modeling allows software architects to identify and mitigate potential security issues early, when they are relatively easy and cost-effective to resolve. Therefore, it helps reduce the total cost of development.

We're thrilled to announce that starting today, tracking your energy use got a little easier. When you buy Blue Line’s PowerCost Monitor and WiFi, your real-time home energy use will be wirelessly uploaded into your Hohm profile. You no longer have to wait for your electricity bill – you can make a significant difference in your monthly energy use today. By enabling devices like the Blue Line PowerCost Monitor to connect into Hohm, you will receive more detailed energy use information than what you are currently getting on your monthly bill. And with our easy-to-use graphs, you can quickly see how to save the most energy and money.

If you're cranking the air conditioner a lot this summer, a product bundle using Microsoft Hohm will tell you a lot about your upcoming energy bills--maybe even more than you want to know. Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it has tied its Hohm Web home energy-efficiency application to an electricity monitor called PowerCost Monitor. The combination, which uses a home broadband connection, lets people view home electricity from the Web or from the tabletop electricity monitor. Whole-home electricity monitors show you how much electricity a house is using at a given moment and how much it's costing you--sort of like a dashboard with a home speedometer and cost per mile.

Microsoft is none too pleased about a newly minted four-year search pact between Google and Yahoo in Japan. Yahoo Japan on Tuesday said plans to use Google’s search engine and search ad-delivery system. It’s worth noting, as NewsFactor did, that Yahoo owns 35 percent of Yahoo Japan, while distributor SoftBank owns another 39 percent. Financial terms of the four-year, non-exclusive partnership were not disclosed.

We are pleased to present Deep Zoom Composer, a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight 3. 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 3.

The same powerful and easy to use Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE) handles design and testing of Windows Phone 7 phone applications.

ASP.NET MVC 3 is a framework for developing highly testable and maintainable Web applications by leveraging the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The framework encourages developers to maintain a clear separation of concerns among the responsibilities of the application – the UI logic using the view, user-input handling using the controller, and the domain logic using the model. ASP.NET MVC applications are easily testable using techniques such as test-driven development (TDD). The installation package includes templates and tools for Visual Studio 2010 to increase productivity when writing ASP.NET MVC applications. For example, the Add View dialog box takes advantage of customizable code generation (T4) templates to generate a view based on a model object. The default project template allows the developer to automatically hook up a unit-test project that is associated with the ASP.NET MVC application. Because the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 4, developers can take advantage of existing ASP.NET features like authentication and authorization, profile settings, localization, and so on.

The MOF Technology Library provides guidance and best practices to help you better understand how to use MOF with Microsoft technologies. The newest component of the library is the first Technical Service guide and workbook. These resources provide the knowledge, specific tasks, and schedules needed to keep technologies running smoothly so IT can deliver the services an organization expects.

MOF 4.0 is practical guidance for IT organizations. With the release of version 4.0, MOF now reflects a single, comprehensive IT service lifecycle—it helps IT professionals connect service management principles to everyday IT tasks and activities and ensures alignment between IT and the business.

As you see from the ActiveWin.com Review of the Lenovo ThinkCentre a70z All-In-One PC (Windows 7), this system is great for any home or office. ActiveWin.com has teamed up with Lenovo and Ivy Worldwide to give away the review unit provided to us. This system is valued over $750 and will be sent via Fedex to the lucky winner chosen by us. The contest will be today (7/22) through Monday (7/26). Here is how you enter:

In addition, some of "friends" of ActiveWin.com are also hosted (we are the last) giveaways of the Lenovo ThinkCentre a70z All-In-One, here are the sites below:

Contest is open to United States & Canada residents only, and entries are limited to (1) per person. Good luck!

Microsoft Communicator 2010 Attendee is a meeting application that facilitates joining Communications Server hosted meetings.

Microsoft Web Farm Framework for IIS7 enables administrators to provision, scale and manage their web infrastructure

Reference posters for the default keybindings in Visual Studio 2010 for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual F#

Thank you for joining the Microsoft® Security Essentials Beta. We are confident that you’ll find Microsoft Security Essentials to be easy to install and use. The Microsoft Security Essentials Beta is a fully functional anti-malware application with ongoing updates to help protect your PC from viruses, spyware and other malicious software throughout the course of the beta. In addition to ongoing virus and spyware definition updates, we will be providing software updates to the beta for download through Microsoft Update on a periodic basis. To have these updates installed automatically, you must be subscribed to Microsoft Update with preferences set to automatically download and install new updates. Learn more about automatic updates through Microsoft Update.

However, the tool, like a manual procedure that Microsoft recommended last week, is only a makeshift defense, one that many users may resist applying since it makes much of Windows, including the desktop, taskbar and Start menu, almost unusable. The company posted a "Fix it" tool on its support site that automatically disables the displaying of all Windows shortcut files. Microsoft stepped users through the same technique last week in its initial security advisory, but told them then that they had to edit the Windows registry. Most Windows users are reluctant to monkey with the registry, since a single error can cripple the computer.

This is an update to Microsoft Office Word 2007. Generally, customers who purchase or license Word 2007 from Microsoft after January 10, 2010 for use in the United States and its territories must use updated software that does not include a particular custom XML tagging implementation.

But Cooke reiterated that iPhone 3 GS returns were greater than for the iPhone 4, and also that “the ones for this specific issue are extremely small.” “We are selling every unit we can make currently,” Cook replied emphatically to a question about customer reaction to the issue. “My phone is ringing off the hook from people who want more supply,” he said when asked again in a slightly different way. Asked if Apple was afraid that the iPad might cannibalize computer sales, Cook said the question was “one we do talk about internally.”

Many of the Microsoft watchers and customers I know have been expecting Microsoft to ship the first service pack (SP) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 before the end of 2010. But according to a newly published Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document on the Microsoft TechNet site, Microsoft is planning to release SP1 in the first half of 2011. Let me say upfront that this statement doesn’t necessarily mean that Microsoft won’t deliver SP1 this year. The Windows team is still chanting the underpromise/overdeliver mantra. With recent Windows releases, the team has provided estimated delivery dates that were considerably later than what they expected they could achieve, in order to make sure there were no (public) missed ship dates. So despite the latest proclamation, it’s still hard to say for sure if SP1 will be a 2010 or a 2011 deliverable.

Visit the ActiveWin.com facebook page, which will be apart of the giveaway for the Lenovo a70z All-In-One later this week (details coming soon). Also do not forget our Twitter page.

Chris has posted his review of the Lenovo ThinkCentre a70z All-In-One. Here is an excerpt:

The ThinkCentre A70z comes nicely packaged in a relatively small box. The fact that we are dealing with an all-in-one system makes setup a snap. Interestingly, the computer itself comes wrapped in a reusable bag, that actually comes in handy when moving the system from place to place. Also, the all-in-one system has a convienient handle on the back side which makes carrying the system around easy. Setting up the system consists of plugging in the USB keyboard and mouse (or wireless receiver for the optional wireless desktop set), and plugging the power cord. The power button is located on the lower front corner of the PC. It's about as simple as setting up a PC can get. After a few steps to create a username and password, you're at the Windows desktop. This model came with Windows 7 Professional 32-bit edition.

Stay tuned for our next giveaway/contest details later this week for this great machine!

Microsoft is moving two of its development languages — IronPython and IronRuby — as well as the company’s Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) to an Apache open-source license, company officials acknowledged on July 19.

"All you do is open a device/network share/WebDav point that has the shortcut, and boom! It runs whatever you tell it to," said Sophos Senior Security Advisor Chester Wisniewski. "It is downright simple to exploit. Any criminal with the most basic of skills can take advantage of this flaw. We have not seen much activity in the wild yet, but now that a proof of concept is posted it is likely to become a major issue as the week rolls on." During the weekend of July 17, a security researcher going by the moniker Ivanlef0u published a working exploit for the flaw, which was already being used to infect computers via USB drives with malware known as Stuxnet.

Apple has a chance to surpass rival Microsoft in revenue this week, if the company continues its tradition of handily beating revenue projections for the quarter. Apple, which reports results on Tuesday, is expected to report $14.62 billion in revenue, according to a survey of analysts Thomson Reuters conducted. Microsoft, according to the same poll, is expected to report revenue of $15.25 billion. High and low estimates from each overlap one another, however, proving that at least some analysts believe that Apple could top Microsoft in revenue.

Forefront Endpoint Protection simplifies and improves endpoint protection while greatly reducing infrastructure costs. It builds on System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2, allowing customers to use their existing client management infrastructure to deploy and manage endpoint protection. This shared infrastructure lowers ownership costs while providing improved visibility and control over endpoint management and security

By now you've probably read our in-depth blowout of Windows Phone 7 (and if not, what are you waiting for?). But what you haven't seen yet is our exclusive sit-down with Microsoft's Joe Belfiore, wherein we talk about the ins and outs of the new mobile operating system. We grill the Windows Phone corporate VP about a whole stack of items, and do our very best to make him start crying like a Barbara Walters interview subject (spoiler alert, he doesn't cry). Still, we think there's some good insight here into what the company thinks of its odds in the smartphone wars, and what kinds of features we will (and won't) see when these devices launch this fall. Take a look at the video after the break -- you won't regret it.

Microsoft still has a few months before it intends to get the first volley of Windows Phone 7-based products to the marketplace, but we've recently been provided with reference hardware -- a not-for-retail Samsung called "Taylor" that's closely modeled on the Symbian-based i8910HD -- to get a feel for where they're at as the clock ticks down. Is this shaping up to be a killer platform for the next generation of high-end smartphones? And more importantly, can it win customers? Read on for our first take.

There was a time when I disagreed with the idea that the core of Microsoft's next major operating system, Windows 8, would be a hypervisor, or virtualized machine monitor. Now, however, I see the beauty of this approach, especially for consumers.

This package includes all of the scoping tools necessary to prepare and qualify your environment to receive a Risk and Health Assessment Program for Windows Desktop (WDRAP).

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 is the newest version of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, a Solution Accelerator for operating system and application deployment. MDT 2010 Update 1 supports deployment of Windows 7, Office 2010, and Windows Server 2008 R2 in addition to deployment of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP.

The PivotViewer Extension for Reporting Services provides an application generator that enables users to effortlessly build dynamic PivotViewer Collections on top of Business Intelligence data, inside SharePoint 2010.

Next to Windows Millennium, Vista, the Office 2007 Ribbon, and the Kin bombshell, this is the worst marketing decision Microsoft has ever made. If these other four major blunders have not already soured you on Microsoft, this new upgrade policy will surely make you sick. Maybe this is a good time to dump the software king and start looking for other options.

"This talk is a little bit insane," confided Peter Molyneux, the head of the European games division of Microsoft, as he prepared to demo a game called "Milo" at the TED Global conference in Oxford on Tuesday. He asked audience members to cross their fingers as they waited to see if the live demo would work. "Milo" is a story-telling game about a little boy who's unhappy because his family has moved from London to New England and his parents are too busy to listen to what's on his mind. Molyneux said his goal with the game, which is still under development, is to recreate the feeling he had as a 4-year-old child when his father told him a story about a robot.

Meanwhile, there is a real possibility that Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's upcoming smartphone OS, could be Microsoft's Vista -- again. This isn't a perfect comparison either -- Vista was a heavily revamped version of Windows XP while Windows Phone 7 is a ground-up overhaul -- but similarities abound.

“We are the undisputed leader in commercial cloud services,” Turner claimed during his July 14 morning keynote. “We are rebooting, re-pivoting, and re-transitioning the whole company to bet on cloud services.”

Microsoft knows its volume-licensing is going to need an overhaul if and when its customers and partners really start going gung-ho for for the cloud. In the company’s fiscal 2011 (which runs from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011), Microsoft will be doing the ground work for an overhaul of its volume-licensing infrastructure and policies. But don’t expect any actual new programs during that period, according to Joe Matz, the Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Licensing and Pricing. Matz spoke at a session at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference on July 13 about the company’s Large Account Reseller (LAR) program.

The Windows Help and Support Center vulnerability that was patched with yesterday’s MS10-042 bulletin was under active attack by malware miscreants, especially in Europe where Microsoft tracked about 25,000 attempts to exploit the vulnerability. According to Microsoft’s Holly Stewart, the attacks escalated significantly when the company announced the issue would be fixed in this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Call him the 12th man: but this one was unusual, because according to the US authorities, Alexey Karetnikov – who was deported to Russia as part of the "spy ring" earlier this week – was working for Microsoft. According to details released by the US, Karetnikov entered the US in October and had been living in Redmond, the city in the north-western state of Washington where the software giant Microsoft has its headquarters – and according to his Facebook page, he was working for Microsoft and for Neobit, a Romanian-based software company.

A top Microsoft executive today compared Apple's iPhone 4 to his own company's problem-plagued Vista operating system. "It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that," said Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, in a keynote speech at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which runs through Thursday in Washington, D.C.

This CTP is a an early preview of the Code First Programming Model and Productivity Improvements for Entity Framework 4 (included in .NET Framework 4).

This update provides fixes and improvements to graphics, media foundation and print for Windows Vista platform. KB971512 should be installed before installing this update.

Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile is a unified communications client for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Communicator Mobile runs on Microsoft Windows mobile 6.0 (or higher) software for Pocket PC and smartphone devices.

Microsoft is announcing today that it has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the streams of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world. Last year, Microsoft launched Outlook Social Connector, a plugin that syncs social networking feeds with your Outlook contacts, giving you immediate data on what they are doing and thinking. It started last year with LinkedIn integration, but soon the company announced MySpace and Facebook were coming.

High-resolution images and interactive tours of Mars are now available online via a virtual telescope created by NASA and Microsoft. NASA now has added new interactive tours of Mars -- including footage of NASA scientists -- to WorldWide Telescope through a new Mars experience viewer that's been added to the application.

Microsoft isn’t going to sit idly by and let slates from Apple and various Android backers run away with this market. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the 14,000 partners during his July 12 keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference to expect new Windows 7 slates before the end of this year. Microsoft and its existing PC partners, including Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony, will all be fielding Windows 7 slates in the coming months, Ballmer said. These slates will be available at a variety of price points and in a variety of form factors — with keyboards, touch only, dockable, able to handle digital ink, etc.

On the eve of Microsoft pulling the plug on support for Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 2, company officials announced they are extending downgrade rights for Windows XP. Originally, downgrade rights — the sanctioned ability of Windows volume buyers to apply their new Windows licenses to older versions of the product — were due to expire around 2011 for Windows XP. But on July 12, the Softies gave XP yet another reprieve.

Microsoft was not planning to hold a Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year. But company officials changed their minds and announced this week that they will hold PDC10 in Redmond at Microsoft headquarters on October 28 and 29. This isn’t going to be a traditional PDC. It will be focused almost entirely on cloud computing, rather than Windows, for one. Secondly, it will be a combined live and virtual event. It sounds like live attendance is going to be limited to about 1,000 or so people, with the rest of those interested being told to watch the keynotes and sessions via Webcast. Developers and IT pros are still the intended audience for this year’s PDC, as they typically have been for previous ones. But the emphasis of this year’s event will be on developing applications that can run on-premises and/or in the private and public cloud.

Report Builder 3.0 introduces additional visualizations including maps, sparklines and databars which can help produce new insights well beyond what can be achieved with standard tables and charts. The Report Part Gallery is also included in this release - taking self-service reporting to new heights by enabling users to re-use existing report parts as building blocks for creating new reports in a matter of minutes with a “grab and go” experience. Additionally, users will experience significant performance improvements with enhancements to the ability to use Report Builder in server mode. This allows for much faster report processing with caching of datasets on the report server when toggling between design and preview modes.

Bing travel helps you Know When To Buy™, When To Fly™, and Where To Stay™ - all based on a huge volume of airfare and hotel rate data that we process every day. The Bing Travel add-in makes finding the lowest fare faster and easier because it’s available anytime in Outlook.

Windows Phone 7 promises to be an amazing mobile phone operating system given its innovative user interface and functionality, as well as its great development platform upon which you can quickly and easily build games and applications. With a myriad of new devices, a powerful and immersive software platform, and a new marketplace to attract developers and provide easy access to applications, consumer demand for Windows Phones will be high, and developers will quickly adopt the Windows Phone platform to capitalize on this growing mobile marketplace. This Training Kit will give you a jumpstart into the new Windows Phone world by providing you with a step-by-step explanation of the tools to use and some key concepts for programming Windows Phones.

The same powerful and easy to use Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE) handles design and testing of Windows Phone 7 phone applications.

First things first: go get the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta. It has arrived!

The term “Beta” is understood to mean that things are close to being finished. Well, that’s what we mean anyway. This Beta release represents the near final version of the tools for building applications and games for Windows Phone 7.

Since the initial CTP release of the tools just this March, the Windows Phone Developer Tool CTP has been widely embraced by the community, and they have shown what’s possible on our new development platform.

It’s time to get serious about building the actual apps and games for Windows Phone 7 that consumers will be looking for starting this holiday season.

This early release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta is not available for home users. The SP1 Beta does not provide new end-user features, and installation is not supported by Microsoft. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta helps keep your PCs and servers on the latest support level, provides ongoing improvements to the Windows Operating System (OS), by including previous updates delivered over Windows Update as well as continuing incremental updates to the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 platforms based on customer and partner feedback, and is easy for organizations to deploy a single set of updates.

Hello and welcome to EasyBCD 2.0!!

It's rather hard to believe, but EasyBCD 1.7.2 has been out for over 2 years now, and we've been working on Version 2.0 ever since. In that time, a lot has happened. Windows 7 has shipped, ext4fs is the new cool kid on the Linux block, GRUB2 is finally seeing some adoption, VHDs are the new wow, and everyone and their grandmother want a dual-boot between Windows 7 and Windows XP.

The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is an annual gathering for the Microsoft partner community to learn about Microsoft’s roadmap for the upcoming year, network and build connections, share best practices, experience the latest product innovations and learn new skills and techniques.

Make sure you check out the website to watch live keynotes, and check out other information going on at the show.

Maybe you didn't get the memo: Tomorrow marks the end of patches for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). And you're still running the nearly-six-year-old edition. But XP SP2 won't shudder to a stop. Although Tuesday marks the support retirement of the service pack -- a date that some have called a "red alert" for people running SP2 -- that doesn't mean your copy of Windows will suddenly refuse to run. It does mean that, after tomorrow, Microsoft will not offer any security patches, no matter how severe the vulnerability, no matter what part of Windows or associated component is involved. No more Windows patches -- and no more patches for Internet Explorer (IE), no patches for Windows Media Player, no patches for Outlook Express.