Microsoft surprises itself with six-month late Hyper-V beta
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Easy to impress Microsoft surprised itself this week by delivering a delayed beta of its Hyper-V virtualization software, less late than once expected.â¦
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The release of the trial versions, which come on the heels of Oracleâs unexpected entry last month into the market for virtualization software, is bad news for VMware.
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Microsoft's decision to pare back features of the upcoming OS is not bad news, some say.
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Microsoft announced Monday that it had completed its Windows Home Server (WHS) software and released the code to its OEM partners, just six months after unveiling the project.
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It may be missing a few features, but the OS will be worth the upgrade, Microsoft says.
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Data released Thursday by a security executive at Microsoft appears to show that six months after Vista's release, the company has more vulns sitting open that it did at this point in XP's history. Jeff Jones' report was an effort to show how Microsoft's software development methodology, called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), is yielding dividends.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft released the beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to a private group of testers, taking one step closer to the anticipated official launch in the first quarter of next year. In late August, Microsoft for the first time offered a release schedule for the long-awaited SP1. At the time, the software giant said the beta would become available this month to between 10,000 and 15,000 testers. One beta tester, Brandon LeBlanc, author of the Windows Experience blog, has already written about his experience with SP1. In addition to a couple of minor user interface changes, he has noticed improvements to the overall responsiveness of his PC and laptop, which both got the beta software. He particularly noticed that resuming activity after the machines hibernate and copying files from one directory to another work faster. LeBlanc also reported improved battery life on his laptop. SP1 also appears to have solved some wireless networking issues he had, which caused his computer to lose connectivity often, especially after the laptop was hibernating. Since he installed SP1, that problem has gone away, he said. Microsoft had promised that SP1 would include a speedier resume function following hibernation. It also said the update would include improved performance of Internet Explorer 7, particularly for Web sites running AJAX. Microsoft will distribute SP1 via Windows Update, its automatic update service. Alternatively, corporate administrators can use a standalone version of SP1 in conjunction with other programs they may use to distribute software to computers. Also on Monday,Â Microsoft released the initial Release Candidate (RC0) of Windows Server 2008, code-named Longhorn. That means customers can download and try out the latest version of Windows Server 2008, including for the first time a preview of Viridian, Microsoftâs virtualization technology. The release of the RC0 means that development and testing are progressing and that the server code is entering the final stages of testing, Microsoft said. Last month, Microsoft pushed back its forecast for the release of Windows Server 2008 from this year to the first quarter of next year.
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TechWeb - The software will ship this summer. It had been scheduled for February, along with major upgrades of Windows Server and SQL Server.
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After more than five years of  development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6  billion investment and a few headaches, Microsoft Corp.'s   Windows Vista finally reaches consumers this week.
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Microsoft on Friday set late 2006 as the deadline when it will ship Longhorn, the next major version of Windows. But to make that date, it had to delay the full implementation WinFS, an ambitious file system
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InfoWorld - A Microsoft security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP.
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After 14 months of work and a $100 million investment, Microsoft rolled out a test version of its new search engine late Wednesday night.
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Microsoft is refreshing the beta release of its Visual Studio 2005 developer tool platform to feature the full range of technologies planned for the companyâs Team System application life cycle management system, Microsoft representatives acknowledged on Friday.
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New features included in Beta 2 of the software are support for AMD's virtualization technology, as well as new integration with Active Directory, Microsoft said.
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Microsoft has launched the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment public beta.
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Microsoft releases a refresh of its first service pack for Vista to beta testers, indicating the final release might be near.
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(InfoWorld) - A Microsoft security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP. In total, Microsoft has patched 12 out of 27 disclosedÂ Vista vulnerabilitiesÂ in the six months after it first shipped last November. During XP's first six months, Microsoft's security team patched 36 out of 39 known bugs. The data was published by Jeff Jones, a Microsoft security strategy director, who said that overall, Vista was doing better than XP. "Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer high-severity vulnerabilities at the six month mark compared to its predecessor product, Windows XP," he wrote. Jones didn't address the larger number of unpatched vulnerabilities, but he did note most of the unpatched Vista bugs were not critical. Microsoft had left only one high-severity Vista vulnerability unpatched during the period. At the end of XP's first six months, there were two high-severity bugs that were unpatched. Microsoft patched 23 high-severity XP bugs during its first six months, compared with only one high-severity Vista flaw. Jones argued that Vista had a lower number of vulnerabilities than competitive operating system products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Mac OS X. He published the data in an effort to show how Microsoft's software development methodology, called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is yielding dividends. But his method of comparing Windows to Linux and Mac OS X is problematic, according to some. "This is an apples-to-oranges comparison," said HD Moore, one of the hackers behind the popular Metasploit penetration testing toolkit. "If you want a more accurate view, try comparing the number of flaws between Microsoft-developed software and vendor-X-developed software. Most Linux vendors don't actually write the majority of the packages they include," he said via e-mail. "Alternatively, force Microsoft to include all vulnerabilities in common third-party software," he added. "For example, the thousands of exploitable ActiveX controls that... vendors include with a Windows system." According to Randy Abrams, director of technical education with antivirus vendor Eset, it will be more interesting to look at vulnerability statistics once Vista becomes more popular than XP, and the target of more hackers. But Microsoft has stepped up its security practices, he added. "I think their Security Development Lifecycle initiative has improved the quality of the code," he said. Â