Unhandled Perception

Skype will be integrated into Microsoft devices and systems such as Xbox and Kinect, Xbox Live, the Windows Phone, Lync and Outlook, Microsoft said in a statement. The company has pledged to continue supporting and developing Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms as well.

Does this spell doom for Skype?

Link: http://mashable.com/…

From what we can tell from a brief Reuters report, Microsoft is in talks with HBO and Showtime to broadcast and sell a la carte video through the XBox. Microsoft already offers ESPN through XBox Live.

Link: http://techcrunch.com/…

AS the sun rose over the mountains circling Los Reyes, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one morning in March 2009, a caravan of more than 300 heavily armed law enforcement agents set out on a raid.

All but the lead vehicle turned off their headlights to evade lookouts, called “falcons,” who work for La Familia Michoacana, the brutal Mexican cartel that controls the drug trade. This time, the police weren’t hunting for a secret stash of drugs, guns or money. Instead, they looked to crack down on La Familia’s growing counterfeit software ring.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…

Perhaps you read the news late last week or this past weekend that Microsoft is shifting their strategy when it comes to Silverlight. Essentially, they indicated that they were commited [sic] to using it as the development platform for Windows Phone, and for certain media applications (like Netflix), but for a true cross-platform strategy, they’re going to shift their focus to HTML5.

Sounds like it to me.

Jumping on the MS bandwagon is a dangerous, and costly, thing to do as a developer.

Link: http://techcrunch.com/..

Microsoft holds a lot more trademarks than I had thought.  Surprised by a few of them:

• Backstage
• Freelancer
• Hohm - Something I’ve never heard of from MS
• Rare
• Vine

Some very generic phrases that they’ve attached the trademark to.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal…

Microsoft Office 365 delivers the power of cloud productivity to businesses of all sizes, helping to save time, money and free up valued resources. Office 365 combines the familiar Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of our next-generation communications and collaboration services: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

Office 365 is simple to use and easy to administer – all backed by the robust security and financially-backed, guaranteed reliability you expect from a world-class service provider.

Link:  http://office365.microsoft.com/

It’s very simple to get entered.  Just leave a comment on this blog post saying why you want Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and what you’ll do with it.  That’s it.

On July 31st I’ll choose a winner

Here’s what I am giving away: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio…

Please consider following Veign on Facebook too.

-=Closed=-

Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet cafe, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them.

Windows SteadyState Features:

• Getting Started – Provides the initial steps to help you during your first time use of Windows SteadyState.
• Windows Disk Protection – Help protect the Windows partition, which contains the Windows operating system and other programs, from being modified without administrator approval.Windows SteadyState allows you to set Windows Disk Protection to remove all changes upon restart, to remove changes at a certain date and time, or to not remove changes at all. If you choose to use Windows Disk Protection to remove changes, any changes made by shared users when they are logged on to the computer are removed when the computer is restarted
• User Restrictions and Settings – The user restrictions and settings can help to enhance and simplify the user experience. Restrict user access to programs, settings, Start menu items, and options in Windows. You can also lock shared user accounts to prevent changes from being retained from one session to the next.
• User Account Manager – Create and delete user accounts. You can use Windows SteadyState to create user accounts on alternative drives that will retain user data and settings even when Windows Disk Protection is turned on. You can also import and export user settings from one computer to another—saving valuable time and resources.
• Computer Restrictions – Control security settings, privacy settings, and more, such as preventing users from creating and storing folders in drive C and from opening Microsoft Office documents from Internet Explorer®.
• Schedule Software Updates – Update your shared computer with the latest software and security updates when it is convenient for you and your shared users.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…

Post a comment with any must have Outlook 2010 addins.  What makes your life easier and takes advantage of the power of Outlook 2010.

(please only post addins specific to Outlook 2010)

Long story short, these slide decks are chock full of internal thinking on Windows 8 — everything from customer target audiences to the Windows 8 developer market to the Windows 8 product cycle and much, much more. As a preface, I’ve taken many screen shots of relevant slides for inclusion with this article

I’m still on WinXP.  As soon as things slow down the upgrade to Win7 will occur, just not sure when that will be.  Have you jumped from XP to 7?  How did it go?

Link: http://msftkitchen.com/…

Install multiple apps at once without toolbars or clicking Next.

1. Pick your favorite software below.
2. Click “Get Installer” and run it.
3. You’re done!

Excellent way to get your system all setup for web design / development.  Click through the applications you want, download the custom made installer and install the apps.  Couldn’t be easier.

Link: http://ninite.com/

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Outlook 2010 looked good enough for me to upgrade, finally, away from Office 2003.  The experience so far has been positive.  Little bit of growing pains, can you say ribbons, but overall a very good experience so far.

Here’s the few features that I like:

• Quick Parts – Quick Parts are pieces of text that you store to later reuse in your email.  As your typing your email you can easily and quickly insert a standard piece of text by selecting the Quick Part.  What makes this even more powerful is as you’re typing you can start typing the Quick Parts name to insert it without the need to select from the toolbar. (tutorial: Living with Outlook 2010: Quick Parts)
• Signatures - Simple, basic, makes sense, yet it took this long to work this way.  Signatures are now a recognized block of text within the email.  Switch the Send From account and your signature updates.  Select a new signature from the toolbar and the signature block updates.  This little enhancement along saves me when sending emails – I have 9 email account, with 9 signatures.  No more sending the wrong signature.
• Conversations - Emails can now be grouped by a conversation.  Its not perfect, looks at the subject line to determine a conversation.  Still a decent feature.
• Look and feel – Outlook 2010 just feels better.

In tests displayed on the Internet Explorer 9 testing center Microsoft is claiming IE9 beats all other browsers in every test they performed.  Why do I doubt that.  MS tweaked the tests to ‘allow’ IE9 to perform better.  Yeah, I think I’ll wait for some independent tests.

Link: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

The fact of the matter is, many of us don’t need the insanely powerful feature set offered by Office 2010 (or even older versions of Office) for the basic document creation and spreadsheet editing we do from day to day. (Hell, you can even tackle mail merge with Gmail and Google Spreadsheets.) What’s more, absolutely free, open-source tools like OpenOffice.org provide many of the more powerful features you’d want from a desktop office suite.

Did you upgrade?  Will you upgrade?  I will when things slow down.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5537569/…

Microsoft is pushing really hard to get you to scrap IE6 and start using their latest browser, IE8.

When Internet Explorer 6 was launched in 2001, it offered cutting–edge security – for the time. Since then, the Internet has evolved and the security features of Internet Explorer 6 have become outdated.

With the latest state–of–the–art security features, Internet Explorer 8 is designed to cope with today’s modern cyber crime. In fact, research studies prove it.

In fact there is an entire website for the push.  I know its Australia but I couldn’t find a US counterpart and figured the push is going to be worldwide at some point.  Veign still sees about 16% of our IE visitors using IE6.