Microsoft's top10 New Technologies

1.

On November 18, 2009, at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft Corp. unveiled a Beta version Silverlight 4.

Silverlight 4 delivers a full suite of powerful capabilities to business application developers, bringing the best-of-breed .NET platform to browser-based experiences. Silverlight provides an ideal platform for developing and deploying modern business applications for both customer facing and staff-facing applications. Features include access to webcams and microphones, multi-cast streaming, output protection, and offline DRM support.

For more visit:
http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/

The beta is now available, and the final release is scheduled for the first half of 2010.

2.

The next edition IE9. Internet Explorer 9 will be the first browser to use hardware acceleration to render all kinds of images, videos and text, and provide smoother rendering of animation and video.

IE9 is at best a work in progress. Right now there is no canvas or SVG support, and no real commitment to HTML 5 standards.

3.

Microsoft® Codename "Dallas" is a new service allowing developers and information workers to easily discover, purchase, and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform.  

Dallas is an information marketplace that brings data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources together into a single location, under a unified provisioning and billing framework. Additionally, Dallas APIs allow developers and information workers to consume this premium content with virtually any platform, application or business workflow.

4.

Microsoft introduced Pinpoint and Dallas, two new and important components to their Azure offering.

Pinpoint is an enterprise level cloud based application store for developers using the Azure cloud. Dallas, a subset of Pinpoint, is Microsoft’s “information marketplace,” offering data sets for developers to use inside of their Azure applications.

Pinpoint is the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have.

At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology service providers quickly and easily get software applications and professional services to market—and engage customers who need what they offer.

Pinpoint is the largest directory of qualified IT companies and their software solutions built on Microsoft technologies.

5.

Microsoft will be entering into beta Project Sydney in 2010. The new project will enable users to connect their existing servers inside of their data center together with services that are running with Windows Azure.

Sydney creates a kind of virtual network that ties together pieces of an application or process running at various places so that they all look like one logical system.

6.

AppFabric is an application server layer that includes the cloud and internal servers to provide developers a single, consistent environment for .Net applications.

Windows Server AppFabric provides caching capabilities, formerly codenamed “Velocity”, as well as workflow and service hosting capabilities, formerly codenamed “Dublin”. Windows Server AppFabric is available in beta now.

AppFabric comes in two flavors: Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure platform AppFabric. Beta 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 was released recently and a beta for Azure is expected in 2010.

7.

Microsoft's Live Labs team introduced an experimental prototype application codenamed `Pivot'. Pivot is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that allows users to interact with and search large amounts of data. It is based on Microsoft's Seadragon.

Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.

Pivot is currently undergoing invite only testing.

8.

Microsoft also released the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers.

With the introduction of Office 2010, a 64-bit version of Office will be available for the first time, although only for the Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.

Microsoft has confirmed that Office 2010 will be released in the first half of 2010 (around June), and a public beta was made available in November 2009.

9.

"Oslo" is the former code name for what is now called the SQL Server Modeling CTP. The SQL Server Modeling technologies, presently in CTP, aim to provide significant productivity gains across the lifecycle of .NET applications by enabling developers, architects, and IT professionals to work together more effectively.

"Oslo" is the codename for Microsoft's next generation application development platform. The goal of "Oslo" is to provide a 10x productivity gain across the application lifecycle (design, development, and management). "Oslo" uses domain-specific models, languages and tools to achieve this goal.

10.

Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, announced plans for the formal launch of Windows Azure, the cloud-based operating system that lets developers write programmes that run on servers in Microsoft's data centers. It is expected to be in production for all users starting January 1.

Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.