All about Microsoft

Another week, another Windows 7 slate is cut from the list of those slated (pun intended) to ship in time for this holiday season.

It was 15 years ago today, August 24, that Microsoft launched Windows 95. Since then, a lot has changed, to put it mildly.

Microsoft officials announced August 23 said there have been 300,000-plus downloads of the beta of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools to date.

There are reports that a new early build of Microsoft’s Office 15 have escaped the Redmond halls. More interesting than the mere existence of these pre-alpha build, however, is another mention of a new application that will become part of Microsoft’s next-generation Office suite.

What’s this ‘personal cloud’ that Microsoft execs are promising will be all the rage later this year? Here’s my attempt to figure out whether it’s just rhetoric, rather than reality.

Microsoft is making the first beta of its LightSwitch development tool available to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers today, according to an August 19 Microsoft blog post.

Microsoft is planning to move its Dryad parallel/distributed computing stack from Microsoft Research to Microsoft’s Technical Computing Group and deliver a final version of that technology to customers by 2011.

One of Microsoft’s biggest selling points for its cloud platform is that developers can use .Net, Visual Studio and other programming tools they already know to write Azure applications. But that’s not the end of the story.

When Microsoft and Yahoo announced their search partnership plans just over a year ago, there were a number of unanswered questions about Yahoo’s future search-development efforts. On August 17, Yahoo answered a number of those questions via a blog post on the Yahoo Developer Network site

As expected, Microsoft is making a new beta of its Windows Live Essentials 2011 (known currently as “Wave 4″) available for download on Tuesday, August 17.

Microsoft is reconfirming, on the eve of Gamescom 2010, that it is making sure the Windows Phone 7 platform will be a game-centric one.

Microsoft volume-license customers and partners are voicing concerns — and more — about the fact the company’s Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) has been down for a few days with little explanation.

It’s not just a new preview build of Windows Home Server Vail that is going to testers this month. The promised test builds of Microsoft’s “Aurora” small-business server also is available for download by anyone who wants to kick its tires.

Microsoft has released an updated preview build of its Windows Home Server “Vail” product to selected testers.

Windows Azure Appliances aren’t the only ways for Microsoft customers to create private clouds. They also can assemble a number of on-premises components, including the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Self Service Portal 2.0.

On August 12, Microsoft made available the first version of a tool designed to help customers migrate from MySQL to SQL Server and/or SQL Azure.

I’d think there could be a whole lot of celebrating going on in Redmond today, the day after Oracle announced it is suing Google over alleged patent infringements involving Java in the Android mobile operating system.

Microsoft is inviting selected members of the press and “VIPs” to a September 15 event in San Francisco where it will launch the beta of Internet Explorer (IE) 9.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure development engine is chugging along, following closely the original path the team outlined for its cloud operating environment. But the marketing and positioning of Azure isn’t tracking as smoothly.

Microsoft is preparing to deliver a second beta of the next version of its Windows Live Essentials suite next week.