items tagged with Microsoft

Microsoft, HP and Best Buy are fighting back against those ubiquitous Apple ads. Check out this new commercial which started airing last night. Apparently, Lauren doesn't want to pay the Apple tax for her next 17-inch laptop...

While at the PDC Underground TechZulu’s Geoffrey Emery got a chance to talk with Scott Hanselman about what it takes to grow and maintain a large audience. Scott’s blog is currently generating around 35,000 feed subscribers and he has a diverse amount of content including podcasts, tutorials, multi subject blog posts. One of my favorite parts of this interview is when Scott brings up the point about not posting bile. I really like this statement and the keeping the web positive not that this means that you need to not be critical but there is definitely ways you can state things that allow you stay positive and relevant. Scott continues to lay down some great knowledge by bringing up the point of saving key strokes. If you think that the email would serve to help more then just the person then make it a blog post. I couldn’t agree this statement more. Get the information out there and let the search engines index it that way when someone needs it today or two years from now it will be there. All this and more in a great interview.

Scotts Blog - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

AT&T chooses Microsoft PlayReady content access and protection technology to enable next-generation entertainment services across its mobile and in-home offerings.

As part of this collaboration, Microsoft intends to add support for PlayReady into its Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV software platform, enabling access to PlayReady-based content through AT&T U-verse TV set-top boxes.

“We’re committed to offering compelling entertainment experiences across a wide variety of platforms and devices,” said Brian Shay, senior vice president of Converged Services, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “PlayReady will help us give customers broader access to compelling content.”

“AT&T’s vision of converged entertainment services is something we share, and our collaboration on the use of PlayReady technology for content access and protection represents a significant milestone toward the future of integrated entertainment across multiple screens,” said Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president of the TV, Video and Music Business Group at Microsoft. “Through the power of software such as PlayReady and Mediaroom, AT&T will bring its customers an exciting new range of services and content.”

PlayReady is designed to enable digital entertainment services across devices and software applications, with a specific focus on meeting the needs of mobile and network operators, service providers and device manufacturers. PlayReady supports a broad range of business models that can be applied to almost any type of digital content and a wide range of formats. PlayReady also provides features such as service domains and embedded licenses specifically designed to make it easy for consumers to enjoy content on all their registered devices without the need of an active connection.

* AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

There is also some really cool work going on around the iphone and Uverse. Stay Tuned

About Billy
Billy Hollis authored many of the earliest books on .NET, and has been working with WPF and Silverlight for over three years. He is a regular speaker at conferences such as Tech·Ed, PDC, VSLive, and DevConnections, and his two sessions at Tech·Ed 2009 were both rated in the top twenty sessions for the conference overall. He has a consulting practice in Nashville, TN, focusing on healthcare applications, advanced rule-driven architectures, and advanced user interface prototyping and development. He also offers introductory and advanced training classes on WPF and Silverlight. He is the author of a forthcoming book on WPF.

Stuff Billy recommends you check out this summer:

• WPF videos
• Silverlight videos
• LINQ
• Azure
• Jesse Liberty's Silverlight Blog
• Beatrice Costa on Silverlight and WPF
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
• .NET Rocks TV
• Developers Intro to XAML – Part 1
• Developers Intro to XAML – Part 2
• MSDN Blogs
• Billy's blog: http://www.dotnetmasters.com/

   In one of out last interviews at the PDC Underground Techzulu’s Geoffrey Emery get in touch with two of the members of the windows mobile team Loke Uei and Lillian Eng. In this interview we talk how developers can Build Cool Stuff for windows mobile using the Windows Mobile Developer kit. Its amazing that you can use just this one developers kit to develop apps for so many great phones on the market like the black jack 2  and the htc touch pro, and the Palm treo just to name a few.  One of the newest things that has come out for the windows mobile device the mesh environment where uses can sync files and folders from the phone to their computer using there data plan on the phone or the wifi network. Microsoft open its Live Mesh mobile portal to the public, available at http://m.mesh.com, the website provides access to the basic functionality of Live Mesh through the browser, albeit without the ability to automatically synchronize folders that comes with a native client application.

Here’s our quick walkthrough:

•  First you’ll need to sign in with the LiveID you use for Mesh. While it can be a bit cumbersome to enter the first time around, the username + password tend to get automatically saved between sessions.
• Once you’ve logged in, the homepage shows the aggregated news feed for all your folders, including new people joining your Mesh and new files/folders that have been created. Across the top of the page there are two tabs, News and Folders
• The folders page does exactly what it says, listing out all the directories from your existing Mesh along with the individual news feed and the members of that folder. Functionality such as adding a folder and file is built-in, along with the ability to get at files already in your Mesh – great for getting that important piece of work you didn’t want to email to yourself.

All this and more in a great interview..

Check out live mesh in action.

Loke’s Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/lokeuei/

Microsoft Mesh – http://www.mesh.com

TechZulu's Geoffrey Emery interviews Microsoft Architecture Evangelist David Chow at the PDC Underground. What is a Architect Evangelist? ITs a person who specializes in a  Microsoft Technology and helps other Architects in the business world find the right answers and the right people for the job at hand. David’s current Technology Platform is Microsoft Cloud Computing project known as Azure.  David describes to us how the cloud will help us extend out our current architecture from the internal data center out onto the cloud giving the enterprise environment more flexibility and a robust disaster recover model. He also explains that by taking our datacenters to the cloud we are given the ability to scale horizontally instantaneously with only minor costs increases. David firmly believes that this form of computing will democratize the way the internet works allowing everyone to host and scale as if they were a Amazon or EBay size webiste. It is truly a exciting time for the internet community as cloud computing is bringing in a age of cheaper hosting and easing designing for a architecture of scale. Look for this and more in this very exciting interview.

Topic Links

Microsoft Azure – http://azure.com

Microsoft Silver light – http://silverlight.com

Microsoft Public Devoloper Confrence – http://microsoftpdc.com

Davids blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou/

PDC Undergound - http://underground.socalcodecamp.com/

This release is pre-alpha, and intended to get the product into the hands of early adopters in order to get feed back and bug reports. In order to focus our efforts on getting this release out, we have targeted only one device, the HTC Touch Pro. This has a number of user interface implications, including graphics designed for a 300 dpi screen, control layout intended for a vga screen and reliance on a hardware keyboard for text input.

Keep in mind, this is what Mozilla is calling a milestone build. It's not a beta. It's not even a public alpha. It's a "working, usable browser," but that's about it. There's no support for updates, plug-ins, or software keyboards. But many of the bugs that users found in the pre-milestone version should be gone by now.

Installation

You can install this on your HTC Touch Pro by navigating to the cab installer with your existing browser. This will download the cab file and kick off the installation process. Or you can download it to your PC and use ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center to copy it to your phone.

Microsoft Office Live Small Business is a web hosting service that gives you a domain name (any available .com, .net, .org, or .info), email, business management tools, collaboration tools, and more, for a surprising price tag: $0.

Despite the Small Business moniker, the service doesn't appear to be limited only to businesses—meaning you could probably use the service as a personal site (as CNET suggests). Check in with the Microsoft Office Live Small Business video tour for a closer look at what you can expect if you decide to sign up. The service is free for one year, after which you'll need to pony up a still-reasonable $15/year. If you've used it in the past, share you experience in the comments.

Alternately, if you're not keen on Microsoft's hosting offer, check out the most popular reliable and affordable web hosts according to Lifehacker readers.

The MSN Mobile site has recently been updated to include a lot more content, most notably additional videos from MSN Videos. The new videos section of the MSN Mobile site is now offering both high and low quality streaming videos in addition to a download option which you can use to save the videos onto your device. The videos can then be streamed anytime, even offline, with Windows Media Player. Within the videos section, you’ll find videos in several different categories including News, Sports, Music, Movies, TV, Comedy, Viral, Latino, and Lifestyle, as well as a “What’s Hot” section at the top. From your mobile device, go to home.mobile.msn.com to see the new content.

Windows Live Mail or Hotmail is beginning to roll out free POP3 access for users in the U.S. now. Hotmail POP3 access was previously only available on premium accounts. Other countries including Canada, the UK, and most western European countries also now have free POP3 support. Microsoft is very late in opening free POP3 access to everyone, various email services including Google’s gmail was offering the feature since its launch. Yahoo remains the biggest player who does not offer free POP3 access right now. Hopefully Yahoo will also follow Microsoft here. One important feature Hotmail now needs to offer is the ability for users to forward their email to any domain they wish, including gmail. Still, users can only forward email to hotmail.com, msn.com, or live.com domains.