Anith Gopal

Introducing the future of security baseline management: Accelerate, customize, deploy, and comply. The Solution Accelerators Team is pleased to announce the release of the Security Compliance Manager. This new tool is designed to help organizations plan, deploy, operate, and manage their security baselines for Windows® client and server operating systems, and Microsoft applications.

I was spending some time responding to Connect bugs the other day when I ran across this suggestion : “It would be nice to have a clip board history window that could be next to the control toolbox as a nice utility window. (Often in presentations I see Microsoft presenters using a custom clipboard tool for such a purpose). Many times I wish I could go back to something I copied & pasted just a few minutes ago, then to have to go and copy the same text all over again.” Turns out that Visual Studio already has this “hidden” feature.  It’s called the Clipboard Ring .  If you copy a number of items to the clipboard, pressing [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[V] will paste the last text that was copied, but it will also highlight the pasted phrase.  Continue holding down [Ctrl]+[Shift] and press [V] again.  This will cause that highlighted section to cycle through the other items on the clipboard.  This is extremely useful when you have to copy multiple lines of separate text to a new document.  Now, you might be saying, “Great, but what if I want to save a piece of code that I use frequently in multiple places?  I don’t want to have to cycle through the clipboard ring every time.”  Well, there’s also a feature for that !  If you highlight a section of code (or text) and drag it to the Toolbox, VS will create a "snippet” (not to be confused with code snippets ) that can be dragged into the VS editor.

We are happy to share that starting April 9, 2010, Windows Azure platform AppFabric will be commercially available on a paid and fully SLA-supported basis.   In order to help you get familiarized with AppFabric billing, we released the AppFabric Billing Preview yesterday March 9. With this billing preview, you will be able to download a usage summary from the AppFabric Developer Portal , with information similar to that of the “daily usage summary” currently available to you for Windows Azure and SQL Azure. If you are already using AppFabric, we will begin charging as of April 9, 2010 at 12:00 AM GMT.

Maintaining a live application After your application has gone live on the HealthVault platform, there are a few Best Practices that you can follow to keep your application running optimally. SDK Lifecycle and updates (.NET applications only) If you built your integration on top of the Microsoft HealthVault .NET SDK then you should read our official policy on maintaining, supporting, and eventually retiring each version of the .NET SDK

Here’s a ‘Thank You’ to all our customers and partners, for creating a Windows Azure platform AppFabric commercial account. The trust you have placed in the Windows Azure platform is tremendously appreciated. As you may remember from our previous announcement , AppFabric will become fully SLA-supported in April, and your account will begin to accrue charges.