As many of the internet user knows that Windows 7 Service pack 1 has been leaked to Torrent sites. The leaked Windows 7 SP1 release has the build number 7601.16562.100603-1800 and it was originally distributed to select beta testers, and will expire in-between April – July 2011.

Users, who don’t like to download the leaked Service Pack 1 beta (7601.16562.100603-1800) from torrents and other file sharing sites, can now  officially download Service Pack 1 directly from “Softpedia”.

Links :

• Notable changes in Service pack 1
• Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 KB list
• Download Windows 7 Service pack 1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta build 6.1.7601.16562 (Softpedia)

]]> http://winspark.net/2010/06/27/dwonload-windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-service-pack-1-beta-build-6-1-7601-16562/feed/ 0 http://winspark.net/2010/06/14/bill-gates-supports-the-things-that-steve-ballmer-is-doing/ http://winspark.net/2010/06/14/bill-gates-supports-the-things-that-steve-ballmer-is-doing/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:48:11 +0000 Mr. Spark (admin) http://winspark.net/?p=1700

Microsoft Corp.co-founder Bill Gates said he supports chief executive officer Steve Ballmer, as rival Apple Inc. overtook Microsoft last month to become the technology company with the highest market capitalization.

“I happen to like the things that Steve’s doing,” Gates said when asked if he had confidence in Ballmer, according to the transcript of an interview for broadcast later on Sunday on ABC’s This Week programme. “It’s not my full-time work, but as a board member, you know, I see a lot of great things going on.”

Apple became the most valuable technology firm in the world on 26 May. Cupertino, California-based Apple’s market capitalization was $230.70 billion (Rs10.8 trillion) as of 11 June; Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft’s was $224.90 billion.

Asked why Apple overtook Microsoft, Gates said: “Oh, Microsoft is doing a lot of great stuff,” and that the opportunities in the software industry are pretty phenomenal.

“The way that people think about TV, the way they think about reading, about learning, software is going to revolutionize that,” said Gates.

Asked about the economy Gates said the President can’t just pull the levers and make the economy take off. He said reducing the US budget deficit will be difficult. “It’s a tricky thing, because almost everybody agrees we need to keep spending up, you know, not take all country deficits to zero right away. But over time, you have to move in that direction,” he said.

Gates also repeated his call for the US government to increase spending on clean-energy research and development. “Without such research, the problem we’ll run into is that we’ll have more crises like the oil spill and we’ll have the supply disruption. We’ll start to see more and more effects of the climate problem. The costs will go up because you’re looking for oil in harder and harder places,“ Gates said

Courtesy Livemint(Joshua Zumbrun) June14

Now no more wait, Microsoft has announced the imminent availability of public beta version of Service pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 at TechEd 2010 annual conference held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA (June 7-10 2010).

” Today, at TechEd, we are pleased to announce that by the end of July we will be releasing the public beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. ” - Microsoft Corporation

According to them expectation seems that we will be having SP1 Public Beta in the next one or two weeks.

Current assembly build tag for Windows 7/ Server 2008 R2 SP1 as follows :
6.1.7601.16562.win7sp1_beta.100603-1800 – actual build in win7sp1_beta branch
6.1.7601.16561.win7sp1_beta.100527-1447 – previous build
6.1.7601.16560.win7sp1_beta.100524-1800 – previous build
6.1.7601.16559.win7sp1_beta.100506-1349 – previous build

Over the years of continues improvement of Microsoft Infrastructures and its business tactics, many company choose Microsoft products over Google apps. The saying of some of its consumer is Google is just focusing on its Advertising business and they released Google apps to serve people more advertising. With Hidden Costs. Document Fidelity. Security Concerns. Lack of Roadmap. and no support.

Here are some of the point which has been collected from some of the old Google consumers by Microsoft Itself.

“Google Apps is not an enterprise-class solution. It’s a consumer solution, and we did not want to risk our business on it.” – Credit Immobilier de France

“The Google applications just weren’t robust enough to compete with Office Outlook functionality,” – James C. Nolan Law Firm

“Many of the things you normally expect to be able to do at an enterprise IT management level were not available with Google Apps—things like the ability to easily manage groups and users.” Vinci PLC

“Google has Google Docs and Google Sites, but what’s the point of having Google Docs when everyone is working in Office Word…If I threw Google in the mix, I’d have to code all that integration.“ Kellwood

“The ability to have an archiving solution that integrates more fully with our e-mail system gives us a level of integration that we never had before when we using the Google Apps platform” – Phaeton Automotive Group

“The Microsoft online and offline applications complement each other. Google is online only and posed compatibility and formatting issues” Competitiveness.

“When we looked at the actual difference in price over a 12-month period, and the amount of grief we’d have gone through with Google, sticking with Microsoft was the clear-cut choice.” -SBFI

“Yes, we might have saved one or two dollars per month going with Google Apps, but it wasn’t worth it. Selecting software that makes it more difficult to work is the wrong way to save money.” – SaaS IT

Apart from these there are more companies which values Microsoft Solution effective over Google Apps. – Case study.

It has been 18 months since Microsoft has launched mobile barcode technology, “Microsoft Tag”. In that time, more than one billion Tags have been printed by people and businesses all over the world, more than 20 million magazines with Tags were in the hands of U.S. consumers. Today, Microsoft has made an announcement of its final availability.

This specifically means you will be able to generate and use Tags that link to our standard scenarios and use the reader application at no cost. By simply going to Tag.Microsoft.com, you can create Tags and deliver rich interactive experiences on mobile phones.

Microsoft also has a plan to offer the ability to create richer, more powerful, and more effective solutions and experiences through a variety of value-added services, such as advanced reporting and analytics and real-time location services.

Coming out of beta Microsoft has updated the website, the Tag Campaign Manager and improved our Tag Reader clients and also introduced some cool new features that will enhance customers’ ability to create, execute and track creative Tag campaigns:

• A device ID feature will allow marketers to deliver a more personalized consumer experience across multiple Tags. For example, consumers can now receive customized content, such as a coupon or other offer from a retail outlet, based on Tags they’ve previously scanned.
• A new .tag file format will make it easier to print and manage a large number of different Tags as part of a broad campaign deployment. Developers of professional printing programs can now generate the Tag graphic on the fly as part of their solution
• Tag has always been available worldwide and has been distributed and deployed globally. They have added localization in five new languages which include: French, Spanish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Italian
• They will be introducing a beta Heat Map feature in the next few days, available in the Tag Campaign Manager, that will help companies better measure Tag usage by location and make more informed decisions about their Tag campaigns and overall marketing spend

You can find more about how to implement these features and more over at the Microsoft Tag website. (via MSDN blog)

]]> http://winspark.net/2010/05/27/microsoft-tag-comes-out-of-beta-tag/feed/ 0 http://winspark.net/2010/01/03/how-to-link-online-ids-with-windows-user-account/ http://winspark.net/2010/01/03/how-to-link-online-ids-with-windows-user-account/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:24:04 +0000 Mr. Spark (admin) http://winspark.net/?p=1470

If you have an online account, such as an e?mail account, you can link that account with your Windows user account. Linking these accounts provides the following benefits:

• People can share files with you on a homegroup using your online ID instead of having to create a Windows user account for you on their computer.
• You can use your online ID to access your information on other computers on a network, such as accessing files on a home computer from your work computer.

Follow the Procedure to link Online IDs

1. Open User accounts from Control panel.
2. Click Link online IDs from Left Menu.
3. Next to the online ID provider that you want to link your user account with, click Link Online ID.




4. Type your user name and password for the online ID, click Sign in, and then click OK.

Now a days we feel that for many languages like Hindi, entering text on PC is difficult. And there are many products and tools in market out there today through which we can enter text in hindi by any translation widget. But most products have some barrier – e.g. some require users to know a fixed transliteration scheme; some others allow free form transliteration, but work only on webpages etc.

But Microsoft peoples has made their efforts to create a tool that can bring translations to the desktop such that it can be used to enter text in any application on the PC, and that is a key focus of the Indic Language Input Tool.

Currently it support six languages – Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

By using this tool you can enter text in Indic language in any webpages, Take an example below.

You can download this tool in two different versions through Indic Language tool Homepage.

Some FAQ regarding Indic Language tool.

Q1 : How to Install Web version ?

Ans :

1. Select Language.
2. click on Install Web version Button .
3. Follow the instructions according to your browser.

• Internet Explorer.
  • Right-click on the language name above and select Add to Favorites…
  • Click Yes on the security alert dialog.
  • On IE8: Select Favorites Bar from the Create in drop down.
  • On IE7 or IE6: Select Links from the Create in drop down. Make sure the Links
  • toolbar is visible.
  • Click OK.
• Mozilla Firefox
  • Drag the language name above to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Safari
  • Drag the language name above to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Google Chrome
  • Make sure the Bookmarks toolbar is visible.
  • Drag the language name above to the Bookmarks toolbar.
• Opera
  • Right-click on the language name above and select Bookmark Link…
    Click OK on the Add Bookmark dialog.

Q2 : How to install Desktop version ?

Ans :

1. Select Language.
2. Click on Install desktop version.
3. Click on Install button and download the Setup.

Q3 : How to use it on desktop application.

Ans :

Do the following to use Microsoft ILIT in any application, such as Microsoft Wordpad or Windows Live messenger.

1. Open the application in which you would like to enter Indic text.
2. Change the language using the language bar, which typically appears in the taskbar as follows.
   

   Language Bar

3. You can now start typing in English and whatever you type automatically gets transliterated after a word-breaking character like a space, comma, etc. is entered.
4. Note that this language setting is per application. You may have to repeat the steps above for each application you want to use Microsoft ILIT in.
   

   Live Messenger Chat Box

Links :

• Microsoft Indic tool Homepage
• MSDN support blog

Any developer who is looking for Office customization, SharePoint integration, or who wants to build cool add-ins for Office system, i suggest u to download the training kit and get ahead on the office development ramp.

This training kit is an offline complement to the Office Learning Center and provides you with links to the videos but you’ll have the hands-on labs (HOLs), source code and presentations conveniently available on your machine.

The Office 2010 Developer Training Kit content is designed to help you get started developing solutions, from add-ins to full featured Office Business Applications (OBAs), using Visual Studio 2010 with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as the core platform.

Each of the HOLs in the training kit have a number of exercises to incrementally expose you to the concepts and help build your skills. The labs included in the training kit are:

• Getting Started with Office 2010 Development
  • In this lab, you will build a small add-in for Word 2010. You will then use the Visual Studio 2010 Ribbon Designer to build your own ribbon.
• Office 2010 UI Customizations
  • In this lab, you will explore the different ways in which the Office 2010 UI can be customized to provide a platform for building rich office applications. Here you will see how to use the Ribbon and Backstage together while making use of C# and the Visual Studio 2010 support for Office.
• Client Workflow
  • In this lab, you will build a workflow process using Visio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. The end goal of the workflow process is to approve timesheet submission. The employee will submit an entry. The process will examine several fields and end up with an approved timesheet. At this point, the data is used to generate a Word document containing a printable version of the timesheet.
• Security and Deployment
  • In this lab, you will use the VSTO Runtime 2010 to deploy several add-ins. The deployment scenarios used will represent real world scenarios that require secure deployment of multiple add-ins via SharePoint.
• Open XML
  • In this lab you will create a SharePoint event handler that will automatically mark an Open XML document as finalized when its status has changed to completed. This is a common practice in the final steps of a workflow or other process that is intended to move the document through a specific lifecycle.
• InfoPath and Forms Services
  • In this lab, you will use InfoPath to define custom forms to aid in the entry of time tracking data for Contoso Corporation. This system will use rich InfoPath forms to manage entry of employees and timesheet data. To provide a complete view of the system, the site’s main page contains web parts to provide contextual information to the user.
• Business Connectivity Services
  • In this lab, you will explore the use of Business Connectivity Services to connect external data to SharePoint. You will use two different tools, SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 to build the definitions necessary to connect SharePoint to external data. Once the connections are established, you will extend a simple Outlook Form Region to use the external data offline using SharePoint Workspace 2010 cache.
• Office 2010 Service Applications
  • In this lab, you will use the Office 2010 services applications to build a report generation application. This application uses Excel Services to access an Excel workbook via REST services and generate a Word document based on the data. Word Services converts the Word document into a PDF and XPS file and stores it in a report repository. Finally, you will create a web part that will monitor the printing jobs started in a Printable Document Library. This web part will show the total number of jobs in action and the number of jobs in each state.
• Developing BI Applications
  • In this lab, you will learn about the BI offerings in SharePoint 2010. You will start by performing simple visualization of existing list data using the Chart Web Part. You will then use Excel to analyze external internet sales data and then post your results on SharePoint using excel services. Based on that work you will finish by creating a complete dashboard used to monitor reseller sales and track actual versus expected year to date sales numbers.

Links :

Download : Office 2010 Beta Developer Training Kit

If you are an ISV that’s interested in participating in our early adoption program for Office or SharePoint, please email metroreq@microsoft.com.
via : donovanf’s msdn blog

• Office developers Resource
• Customizing the Office Fluent User Interface with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition
• Customizing the Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers
• Extend The Office System With Your Own Ribbon Tabs and Controls

Take a look to the Microsoft Live labs’ another great experiment “Pivot”. Its nothing but an Internet browser which works on the basis of IE but with the new attractive looks and cool features. Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.

Pivot is currently available by invitation only to a small technical audience to help us explore future scenarios. To learn more about Pivot and our vision for this project, check out this video, share it, embed it, and blog/tweet/post your thoughts about it.

Invite codes for Microsoft Pivot :

• 53BA F928 4F13 67C0
• 10C3 8B53 7123 74C6
• 9BB9 870B A97F 2832
• 36C0 B281 6D74 45C7
• CD83 B193 D775 6087
• FE95 9A79 C189 8D98
• 5E0A 5E6A 82BB 9869

visit @Liveside for updated codes. (Thanks to Ankur Mittal)

Homepage : Microsoft Pivot

I have posted about the availability of office 2010 beta only to MSDN and Technet Subs, now normal users without MSDN and technet can also download the Office 2010 through following link. Both the 64 and the 32 bits are available to the public for download.

Download Office 2010 beta

Office 2010 Beta Homepage

Office 2010 Beta FAQ

Top 10 benefits of Office 2010 Beta

You may use the following MAK key to activate your evaluation copy of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta.

PYMDW-8DFY2-Y68BB-XHDGD-CT443

2PWHY-KT4X6-96PYW-XQR7V-HW2W9

7XD2X-JWJ94-BCHBW-W9WXP-J2WPT

YF79C-7Y4B4-PGM89-6BKGJ-46PBT

Direct download links are also available | 32 Bit (684.47 MB) | 64 Bit (749.87 MB)

After you have installed Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta, please follow these steps:

Step 1: Open Microsoft Word 2010 Beta and click on the “File” tab. This will take you to the Backstage view. Next click “Help” in the set of tabs on the left.

Step 2: Click “Change Product Key” on the right side of the screen.

Step 3: Enter the Multiple Activation Key (MAK) displayed above. Please check the box to activate automatically or restart the app to activate using the activation dialog box.

Step 4: That’s all you need to do. Entering the MAK key in Microsoft Word 2010 Beta automatically activates all the Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta applications. Click on the “File” tab to return to the Document view.