Microsoft confirmed today that downloads of the Office 2010 beta have hit 1 million in just two weeks.
Microsoft introduced the Office 2010 beta during its now annual Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles late last month. Company officials demonstrated various new features during a keynote on November 18 including social networking integration into Outlook 2010, and Office Web Applications that allow you to read, edit and save documents in the browser.
Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division stated he was “very proud” of the download achievement in a message posted to his official twitter account. Earlier this week a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the software giant will be making Office 2010 available in June 2010. Office 2010 will be released in six different flavours, including a free version that includes Microsoft Word and Excel, but comes with limited functionality and includes advertisements. The editions of Office 2010 will come in Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, standard, Professional and Professional Plus. No official pricing for the full version or upgrade edition of Office 2010 has been announced yet. Although the retail store date is scheduled for June 2010, users should be able to get their hands on a download-able version through TechNet and MSDN earlier than the street date.
Microsoft have just announced Silverlight 4 beta today at PDC09, that is available for download today. Silverlight 4 promises to enhance the overall user experience, improving speed, performance and rendering for browsers.
Silverlight 4 was demonstrated today with some practical applications that are able to take pictures and modify the image in real-time, using a web-based service. The service lets you take a picture of yourself and modify it in real-time to adjust your appearance, and even change the colour of your shirt.
Microsoft released some statistics on Silverlight 3, being installed on 33% of all computers and mobile phones during summer 2009. Silverlight 3 is now installed on approximately 45% of all computers and mobile devices around the world today.
Silverlight was also demonstrated with Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing, where it was able to split the image into a puzzle and scatter the image around. This application was also used with a YouTube video, being able to scatter the page and still being able to play the video in real-time.
A new desktop Facebook application using Silverlight was demonstrated using a drag and drop feature for images, including folder groups. The application demonstrated smooth scrolling through images and comments without any interruption.
Silverlight also showed off a video on-demand video third-party video application that allows the user to rewind, fast-forward and even pause live or recorded TV, all using your browser. Microsoft also showed off a demo of a football game that allowed multiple camera angles, even available for a live broadcast.
Microsoft today demonstrated an early, three week old, build of Internet Explorer 9 at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2009.
IE 9 will take advantage of the power of the GPU for all page rendering and developers can exploit this using CSS, DHTML and javascript. In just three weeks Microsoft believes performance has increased for IE9 resulting in smoother rendering and improved performance. Interoperability and standards support is increasing and features such as rounded corner CSS support will be built in. A new JS engine will also be built into Internet Explorer 9.
Microsoft offered no time lines or indications as to when a build of Internet Explorer 9 will be available publicly. Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division, mentioned that Microsoft had only begun working on Internet Explorer 9 three weeks ago, according to our sources the latest internal build is labelled 7658.0.091116-1745.
Microsoft’s Channel 9 team have posted three demo videos, check them out below.
Microsoft announced today at PDC09 here in Los Angeles that they will be opening the .NET Micro Framework source code and also release the next version, 4.0. The release will be available under the Apache 2.0 license, something that is already being used inside the community.
Developers will be able to gain access to the Base Class Libraries that were implemented into the .NET Micro Framework and CLR code.
Both the TCP/IP and Cryptography libraries are not included in the source. Colin Miller told the developers that the reason behind Microsoft not releasing the available source code was because they use a third-party from EBSNet and do not have distribution rights.
Microsoft is opening discussion of how to improve their .NET Micro Framework for developers through their community, including Microsoft developers and external partners to make improvements on their open source development.
