Hoy inicio la PDC y Ray Ozzie anunció oficialmente Windows Azure o la Azure Services Platform definida como:

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Los componentes clave de la plataforma son:

Sin duda un esfuerzo muy importante que ve uno de sus primeros milestones con este lanzamiento y de lo que seguramente estaremos hablando mucho en los siguientes días.

Más info:

http://www.microsoftpdc.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

Afortunadamente alguien se dio cuenta de que el logo de .NET no era precisamente algo que reflejará y comunicara lo que es .NET. Gratamente hoy veo que aparentemente hay planes de corregir esto y el nuevo logo es en mi opinión mucho más agradable a la vista y al parecer verá la luz junto con la nueva versión del framework: .NET Framework 4:

VIA y VIA

Los Microsoft Research Labs introducen este nuevo servicio de traducción a Windows Live Messenger que permite tener una conversación de personas escribiendo en distintos idiomas, mientras que cada uno de los participantes de la charla reciben los mensajes en su idioma preferido.

Para lograr esto, basta con agregar a tus contactos a TBot, cuya cuenta de Messenger es mtbot@hotmail.com, y después agregarlo a la conversación que deseas sea traducida.

Los lenguajes soportados hasta hoy son:

• English to/from:
• Arabic
• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian (Russian to English only)
• Spanish
• Chinese Simplified to/from Chinese Traditional

También pudes conversar con Tbot para probar como traduce:

Blog del equipo de Microsoft Translator

Microosft Research Machine Translation (MSR-MT) Team Blog

Windows Live Translator

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Hace ya algún tiempo hablaba de Photosynth, un proyecto que desarrollaban los laboratorios de Microsoft Research. Pues bien, hace algunas horas fue liberado para uso general, y ya es posible crear tus "synths" y/o colaborar con tus imágenes:

http://photosynth.net/

The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.

Algunos ex – ingenieros de Google y varios otros han creado este nuevo buscador Web llamado Cuil que rompe paradigmas. Escrito desde cero, Cuil se enfoca en el contenido y trata de determinar los distintos contextos dentro de los cuales es utilizada una palabra para después agrupar esos contextos para evitar tener que pensar una forma distinta de realiza una búsqueda específica. Estos contextos distintos se convierten en tabs en la página de resultados. Todo esto se engloba en su filosofía resumida en 4 puntos:

• Size matters
• Popularity is useful, but not always important
• Organization is fundamental
• Cuil analyzes the Web, no its users

Otra cosa que llama la atención, es que Cuil afirma tener un índice que es 3 veces mayor que el de cualquier otro buscador existente. Obviamente no es posible confirmar este dato ni tampoco revelará Cuil la forma en que lo logran, pero teniendo en cuenta esta pequeña cita de su sitio no es difícil de creer:

Cuil’s technology was developed by a team with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Mr. Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM; Ms. Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team. They refused to accept the limitations of current search technology and dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with Russell Power, Anna’s former colleague from Google, they founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential

Enhorabuena a las nuevas alternativas:

http://www.cuil.com/

http://www.neltelcel.com/

http://www.geekologie.com/2008/06/looking_good_lego_walle_is_cut.php

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Seguramente es parte del deployment de los tan rumorados temas o skins para Gmail (y por lo visto Google Reader) que estan próximos a ver la luz siguiendo los pasos de iGoogle.

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Hot Fix Details

You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download).  Below is a list of the issues it fixes:

HTML Source view performance

• Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
• “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
• Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
• Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
• The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

• Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

• Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
• Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

• When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

• Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.

Installation Notes

For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here.  In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you’ll see an access denied error).

To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item.  Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’. 

If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".

Summary

Obviously it goes without saying that we would have liked to have shipped without any bugs.  Hopefully this hot-fix enables you to quickly solve them if you are encountering them.  Thank you to those who helped us identify the causes of these issues, as well as to the group of customers who have helped us verify the above fixes the last few weeks.

Note: If you do encounter issues with VS 2008 features for web development in the future, I recommend always asking for help in the VS 2008 Forum on www.asp.net.  The VS Web Tools team actively monitors this forum and can provide help.

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Ayer 4 de Febrero, se anunció que el Service Pack 1 de Windows Vista ya está en producción, es decir, ya se liberó la versión RTM (Release To Manufacturing). Las fechas estimadas de disponibilidad:

Here’s the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:

• In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com.  Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1.  If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1.  Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
• In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically.  That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically.  As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1.  The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
• The remaining languages will RTM in April.

Aunque aquí no lo menciona, seguramente en pocos días estará disponible la descarga para los suscriptores del MSDN.

Más detalles:

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx