This week, Microsoft served up a cornucopia of goodies to test, including a beta—yes, the real deal—of Visual Studio Orcas.
The biggest beta of the bunch is Orcas. The long-anticipated Visual Studio test build is essential to Microsoft's broader cross-product feature integration strategy—or "Integrated Innovation." Orcas anchors Microsoft's "Smart Client" strategy, where Office is positioned as a replacement for other clients or Web browsers for accessing back-end data or Web services.
Microsoft has put forth that Office's familiarity makes it a more natural user interface for consuming and also creating information stored on servers. However, Office 2007's radically redesigned user interface blows a hole in the familiarity argument.
Orcas also has deep ties to Windows Vista, through .NET Framework. By the way, the beta comes with .NET Framework 3.5. But what the heck is going on with the name! In his blog post announcing the beta, S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, called the Framework .NET FX 3.5. Microsoft did the renaming last summer, but Framework has been the more common shorthand until now. Microsoft does way too much rebranding.
Silverlight, better known as WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), is the other piece some developers will want with Orcas. The Silverlight beta is due for release in about 10 days at Microsoft's MIX07. Silverlight is more rebranding action.
The Orcas beta is available as ISO image for MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscribers or as a virtual image.
In conjunction with Unisys, Microsoft is offering a free trial of Exchange Server 2007.
On Wednesday night, I got an e-mail announcing that Windows Home Server CTP (Community Technology Preview) is available. The release means that people testing the software can talk about progress to date. Microsoft continues to accept beta applications. I will more fully discuss the software in a future post.
In the future downloads department, Microsoft is soliciting testers for the next version of Media Center, which presumably would be available with Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
The exhaustive list of downloads would take an afternoon to write up, so we've picked out best of the week. Commenters, please point fellow Microsoft Watch readers to other Microsoft downloads that you think are important. But, please, keep your links to one per comment, or the junk comment filter might snatch it away.
No comments:
Post a Comment