Weekly Roundup - 4-20-2007

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, and with so much to cover I thought I would just do a single post that touches on a bunch of the news from the week.

• Microsoft Silverlight - This week Microsoft renamed its WPF/E toSilverlightt and shipped a CTP. I like the name change Windows Presentation Foundation is just too long. Bascially this is competitor to Adobe's Flash enabling rich media content via the web.  Some of the samples look pretty neat, but to be honest I fear these apps more that I like them.  Web developers tend to see these things and think, "COOL" lets do a whole site out of it.  Well, in my experience these technologies are best used to highlight or accent features on a site and shouldn't be used to design a whole sites interface and navigation.
• Windows Home Server CTP- Windows Home Server shipped a new CTP to tester this week. Well technically some had it earlier, thanks to thehotfix, and I am sure many of you saw that debacle. Anyway, This product has me really excited and I hope people respond well to it when it ships.  Some of the technology that this prodct will offer are just awesome. Being able to securely remote into your home machines.  The ability to use DDNS with the server so you have a friendly name to connect to and in my opinion the feature that will be the slickest, but most underated is the drive management and expansion capabilities. The back is seemless and the ability to do a bare metal restore just blow me away...I could go on and on about this product seriously, its the best "new" thing to come out of Microsoft in a while. Paul Thurrott has a gallery.
• Windows Media Center (Codename "Fiji") Beta Signup - Microsoft has begun taking submissions for the next version of Windows Media Center via connect here, no word on planned feature set yet on when we might see this..but we had a good list of thing we would like to see here.
• Visual Studio "Orca" Beta1 - Microsoft also shipped this week Beta1 of the next version of Visual Studio codenamed "Orca". Here is an overview for those that are intrested.

Other News:

• There is a new version of USMT that shipped.
• Windows Live One Care has stared its Perpetual Beta
• Windows Update Catalog has started its beta program

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