Microsoft has released to manufacturing (RTM’d) the Windows Phone OS 7.0, company officials announced on September 1.

This month saw four of the major web servers gaining hostnames but only two gaining market share. Apache saw the largest increase again this month, gaining over 6.7M hostnames and pushing its share of the market above 56%, its highest share in 3 years. This large growth caused Microsoft to lose nearly 1 percentage point of market share despite gaining over 200k hostnames, mostly at China Telecom. lighttpd has recovered from last month's losses, gaining 600k hostnames. After the massive drop of hostnames at SAVVIS in Australia, they have now partially recovered with the help of 200k new hostnames being served by lighttpd. Additionally iWeb Technologies Inc. have gained 300k hostnames pointing at lighttpd servers. Google's share has dipped this month, losing 300k hostnames and a similar number of active sites.

Internet Explorer's growth slowed once again, and Chrome shook off its slump in August, new statistics show. Although Microsoft made progress in its goal to exterminate IE6 in favor of IE8's more modern and secure design, Internet Explorer overall slipped from 60.7 percent to 60.4 percent of global usage, as measured by Net Applications. Chrome had slipped for the first time in its history, sinking to 7.2 percent in July, but returned to growth with 7.5 percent of August usage, Net Applications said.

The Microsoft® Silverlight™ 4 SDK contains online documentation, online samples, libraries and tools for developing Silverlight 4 applications. Usage of the SDK is subject to the SDK License (included in the package).

Visual Studio 2010 shipped with a new help system - Help Viewer 1.0. Help Viewer 1.0 is built on common standards such as XHTML and .zip file format.

You can see, Arc Touch is all about innovative design. The mouse is not dead as some articles have said recently, but needs are evolving. Most of us now use our PCs and mice in new ways and new places. In talking to notebook PC users, we realized we needed to find a way for the mouse to transition easier from place to place. This mouse completely flattens for portability to easily fit in your pocket or laptop bag, and also bends for comfortable use. This mouse is perfect for the person on-the-go that doesn’t want to compromise on style.

Microsoft is to build another large data center, this time in Virginia, despite scaling back plans for an earlier facility in Iowa. Microsoft will spend US$499 million to build a data center in Mecklenburg County in Southern Virginia, the state's Governor Bob McDonnell announced in a statement Friday. About 50 people will work at the facility.

After more than a month of living with Windows Phone 7, I have to say, Microsoft's new phone operating system is starting to grow on me. Although I liked the general look of the operating system, I suspected its simplicity was only skin deep and that over time I would uncover both annoying glitches and places where the phone was all too much like a little computer. Instead, there are hidden delights. In the past week I've found the cursor, voice recognition, and other things that I missed in my first days playing with the phone. Here are just a few examples of features that I only recently noticed: if you are in an e-mail or other place where one might want a cursor, hold a finger down in one place and a cursor pops up that you can then drag to the place you want to go. Click to the left of an e-mail and it brings up the check boxes that can be used to delete multiple e-mails--one of the most common tasks people do on their phones.

Last week, the Gartner Group made some headlines (including this one from my ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley) with a provocative press release that tried to pin a price tag on the cost of migrating to Windows 7. The press release throws out four separate price tags, ranging from $1,205 to $2,069 per PC, with some confusing percentages to quantify overall IT budget increases. But in their zeal to come up with hard numbers, the press release adds more confusion than clarification to the topic. In some cases, the numbers just don’t add up.

In May this year, we announced Project Hilo and promised a set of cool sample applications written in C++. At that time we had released the first application in the Hilo series. Since then we have published some articles that walk the reader through all the steps that go into developing the Hilo Browser application (Chapter 1 thru 8 on this link). These articles describe the way we implemented the application in C++, our thought process for designing the application, as well as deep discussions on the source code and implementation using C++ and the modern application features in Windows 7.

This security update to Silverlight includes fixes outlined in KB 978464. This update is backward compatible with web applications built using previous versions of Silverlight.

Microsoft has been getting a lot of download love for its Bing app for the iPhone. On August 30, the company announced delivery of a new Bing app — this time for Android.

Microsoft announced on Monday morning that it was increasing the price of an Xbox Live Gold membership by $10, from $49.99 to $59.99 a year, including for existing members in the U.S. starting November 1st. Members in the U.K., Canada and Mexico will also see price increases. The new price, the first time the company has ever raised its rates, represents a 20% increase, which will likely have a significant impact on the revenues of the moneymaking service.

Microsoft has released a beta refresh of its Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP) 1 to selected PC and Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners, company officials confirmed on August 30.

Microsoft Monday took the wraps off Cloud Champions Club, a new cloud-computing-oriented channel program that's designed to help partners follow Microsoft as it stampedes into cloud computing.

With the new three-tier program, unveiled at Xchange Americas 2010 in Dallas, Microsoft is essentially chipping away at the psychological barrier of up-front costs that has kept many VARs on the sidelines of the cloud revolution.

Hotmail is making it easier for you to stay up-to-date and be productive on your phone. Starting today, you can get your email, calendar, and contacts pushed automatically to your phone using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). EAS keeps everything in sync between your phone and Hotmail, so whatever you do on your phone, like delete an email, add an appointment, or update one of your contacts with a new number, will also be reflected on the web, and vice-versa. If you use an email client on your PC that already syncs with Hotmail, like Outlook with the Outlook Connector or Windows Live Mail, what you do on your phone will show up there as well, delivering a seamless experience for managing your stuff between your PC email client, your browser, and your phone.

Windows Server sales rode high as the worldwide midrange server market showed an 11 percent revenue increase in the second quarter, compared with last year's numbers, according to IDC.

"The uptick in the midrange server market shows there was pent-up demand for more scalable servers, through replacement for aging servers and workload consolidation," said Jean S. Bozman, research vice president for enterprise servers at IDC.

Novell has a new best friend when it comes to Suse Linux distribution: VMware.

If you recall, Novell's former best friend for Suse Linux was Microsoft. Microsoft and Novell have a partnership where the two parties had certificates that indemnified Suse users from any intellectual-property liability. In addition, Microsoft officially recommended Suse Linux Enterprise for hybrid Windows/Linux shops.

Download this fully configured virtual machine of the latest release of Exchange Server 2010 SP1. Evaluate the new capabilities of Exchange Server 2010 SP1, which helps you achieve new levels of reliability and performance by delivering features that help to simplify your administration, protect your communications, and delight your users by meeting their demands for greater business mobility.

Initial reactions to the iPad earlier this year may have been mixed, but Apple's elegant tablet PC has since caught fire, racking up a devoted following and monster sales.

Between March and June, over 3 million iPads were sold worldwide, and new data from market research firm iSuppli shows that the iPad will dominate the tablet market by almost three to one until 2012.

Looking to broaden access to its security practices for software development, Microsoft plans to shift the licensing for its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) documentation to the more accessible Creative Commons License, the company said on Thursday.

Microsoft has updated two utilities packaged together and designed for customers running the latest iterations of the company’s Windows platform for the high performance computers.

A new release of the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 and HPC Pack 2008 R2 Tool Pack is now up for grabs from the Microsoft Download Center.

Microsoft has revealed that it is working on a major project with Reading University designed to highlight the energy savings that companies can realise by switching to its latest Windows 7 operating system.

According to the company, Windows 7 operates using about 30 per cent less energy that its previous operating system Windows XP – savings that when multiplied globally are likely to lead to significant cuts in carbon emissions.

Microsoft's Hyper-V is finding a home in the SMB market, but will it grab more second-tier enterprise servers, as virtualization and licensing costs expand? Some analysts say yes, despite VMware's superior management and automation tools.

With all the talk lately on the next iteration of Windows Home Server in the form of Vail and it’s close relative Aurora you would quite understandably think that Microsoft have finished working on Windows Home Server V1. But, today Microsoft seems to have squashed that rumour by releasing an update as Update Rollup 1. This new naming convention replaces the previous ‘Power Pack’ standard that we have come to expect from Windows Home Server and according to Microsoft, has been done to standardise how they name collective updates across the Windows Home Server and Small Business Server product lines.

Sun is the king of unpatched software vulnerabilities followed closely by Microsoft and Mozilla, according to the mid-year security report by IBM's X-Force.

Industry wide, on average 55 percent of software vulnerabilities that were disclosed by vendors went unpatched by those vendors, the IBM study says. That number crept up from last year's average of 52 percent.

Engkoo, a new language assistance search technology released by Bing in China, helps Chinese speakers learn not just English words but the language itself, complete with slang and idioms.

Good news if you're an IT professional; bad news if you're a corporate accountant.

The looming migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 will cause enterprise IT budgets to swell and service rates to spike in the coming two years, research firm Gartner said Thursday. Businesses will likely need to divert money from other projects if they want to complete the migration on time.

Nearly four years after Apple launched the iPhone and two years after Google open-sourced the code for its Android operating system, Microsoft is finally set to re-enter the mobile market this holiday season in a serious way with Windows Phone 7.

It is trying to catch up to those more modern smartphones the only way it can — with cold, hard cash.

The Dynamic IP Restrictions Extension for IIS provides IT Professionals and Hosters a configurable module that helps mitigate or block Denial of Service Attacks or cracking of passwords through brute-force by temporarily blocking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of HTTP clients.

The Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.6 helps customers understand their application compatibility situation by identifying which applications are compatible with the Windows 7® and Windows Vista® operating system and which require further testing. ACT helps customers lower their costs for application compatibility testing, prioritize their applications, and deploy Windows more quickly.

The Internet Explorer 8 Application Compatibility List for IT Professionals is a Microsoft Office Excel-based spreadsheet listing software applications which are compatible or not compatible with Internet Explorer 8, based on public support statements from software publishers, or statements made to Microsoft from software publishers.

Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing sued a bevy of technology companies including AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix and others for patent infringement. Interval Licensing, a research firm hatched in 1992, is suing those aforementioned Internet companies for patent 6,263,507 among others. The patent was issued for an invention revolving around browser navigation in a body of information and audiovisual data.

Hold onto your hats, Windows Live fans. Microsoft is making a bunch of changes to what was going to be known as Windows Live Sync, its competitor to DropBox, that is slated to be part of Windows Live Essentials 2011. Many of the changes, which Microsoft is announcing on August 27, are good ones — and ones that were requested by many of the folks who’ve been beta-testing what was formerly known as Live Mesh for the past couple of years.

Kevin Allison: You have been eagerly waiting, and we have been working hard over the summer to deliver the latest Exchange Server 2010 enhancements as soon as possible. I am extremely happy to announce the availability of Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1, ready for download here.

Microsoft has delivered four developer previews of Internet Explorer (IE) 9 so far, but has yet to show off the new interface for its next-generation browser. That is expected to happen on September 15, during Microsoft’s beta launch event in San Francisco.

Back in 2001 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux a “cancer” that threatened the company, but now the Redmond giant claims to “love open source.” Well, actions speak louder than words.

When the Xbox Kinect was unveiled at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in June 2009 by Microsoft as “Project Natal,” it looked like the future of home entertainment. An unobtrusive device barely bigger than a ruler that not only allows families to play video games without a remote control, but that recognizes each individual users face and voice. Netflix instant streaming video with hands-free browsing, instant photo uploading to Twitter and Facebook, the ability to scan household items like a skateboard for use as a prop in skating games – impressive stuff. Investors were pleased to, since the Kinect would also extend the lifespan of the Xbox 360, originally released in 2005, well passed the five year lifecycle typical of devoted gaming hardware.

Microsoft has added some of missing and requested features to its Webified version of Office, known as Office Web Apps.

Office Web Apps is a bundle of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that is designed as a complement to Microsoft Office. Web Apps provide user with a way to to view, edit, and share files right from a Web browser (Internet Explorer 7 or later for Windows; Safari 4 or later for Mac; and Firefox 3.5 or later for Windows, Mac, or Linux).There is a free and ad-supported consumer version of Web Apps — which users can access via their Windows Live SkyDrive and/or Hotmail — and two paid, SharePoint-centric business versions (one of which is hosted by Microsoft and one hosted by the customers or partners).

Last week, HD Moore, creator of the Metasploit penetration testing suite, tweeted about a newly patched iTunes flaw. The tweet said that many other (unspecified) Windows applications were susceptible to the same issue—40 at the time, but probably hundreds.

This poster provides a visual reference for understanding key Remote Desktop Services technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2. It explains the functions and roles of Remote Desktop Session Host, Remote Desktop Virtualization Host, Remote Desktop Connection Broker, Remote Desktop Web Access, Remote Desktop Gateway, Remote Desktop Licensing, and RemoteFX.

Access to various Microsoft hosted software products for businesses in North America was affected due to a performance issue with its data center in the region on Monday.

The problem lasted more than two hours, between 8:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time, and impacted "some customers in North America" who experienced "intermittent access to our data center," Microsoft said in a statement.

It was 15 years ago that Microsoft had one of its most successful launches ever--introducing Windows 95. The company managed to get people to line up for hours to be among the first to get their hands on a copy.

The company paid to treat people to free newspapers in London, lighted the Empire State Building in Windows' colors, and draped Toronto's CN Tower with a 300-foot banner--all part of a massive $300 million ad campaign that accompanied the product's arrival.

Microsoft has told a researcher that it won't patch a problem that has left scores of Windows applications open to attack.

According to a growing number of reports, crucial Windows functionality has been misused by countless developers, including Microsoft's, leaving a large number of Windows programs vulnerable to attack because of the way they load components.

As Microsoft approaches its fall Windows Phone 7 launch, its evangelists are working overtime to try to build momentum for the platform.

Microsoft officials are announcing on August 23 that there have been 300,000-plus downloads of the beta of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools to date. They said the final version of the tools will be out September 16, but stressed that those interested in writing games and applications using the XNA Framework and Silverlight don’t need to wait for the final.

Although none of the handset makers has officially released details about the devices that will accompany the launch of Windows Phone 7 this fall, we're starting to get a pretty good idea of what's coming.

Photos, videos or details on a handful of models have leaked to the Web including LG's keyboard-enabled c900, the touchscreen-only e900, HTC's Mozart, and Samsung's i917.

The Windows Phone Developer Tools have been downloaded more than 300,000 times, Microsoft said, as the company prepares to offer a new application store and mobile OS.

All of the work of the last six months is certainly paying off, as just about every conversation we have with developers focuses on their strategy for generating more business with Windows Phone 7. It’s amazing to see so many inspired developers looking to create experiences for Windows Phone 7. In fact, to date there have been north of 300,000 downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.

The final tools will likely have some minor breaking changes from the Beta tools, so developers may have to fix some bugs that arise. The final tools will also include several highly requested Silverlight controls which will make it even easier for developers to deliver high quality Windows Phone 7 experiences. Also in the September 16th final release, the panorama, pivot and Bing maps controls will all be available to drop into applications.

The Microsoft Security Compliance Manager provides centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility to accelerate your organization’s ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies.

Microsoft Mathematics Add-in for Word and OneNote makes it easy to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, calculate numerical results, solve equations or inequalities, and simplify algebraic expressions in your Word documents and OneNote notebooks.

F# is a productive, typed functional and object-oriented language for the .NET platform. This CTP release includes the F# compiler and tools, as well as optional Visual Studio integration for F# development.

This applications allows users to join Communications Server hosted meetings they are invited to by providing a display name. The application allows the user to wait in lobby if required by the meeting organizer and get admitted only once the organizer approves.

HealthVault Connection Center is software from Microsoft that you can download for free. It runs on your computer and enables you to transfer measurements from health and fitness devices (such as blood pressure monitors, pedometers, glucometers and many others) via your computer to your online HealthVault account.

It appears that Windows 8 Client and Windows 8 Server will be joined by Windows 8 Embedded. There’s no telling if customers will get Windows Embedded Standard 8, but the next version of Windows Embedded will certainly be based on Windows vNext. No real surprise here, Microsoft is simply doing a repeat of the Windows 7 – Windows Embedded Standard 7 pairing.

There are reports that a new early build of Microsoft’s Office 15 have escaped the Redmond halls. More interesting than the mere existence of these pre-alpha build, however, is another mention of a new application that will become part of Microsoft’s next-generation Office suite.

Microsoft is positioning LightSwitch, codenamed “KittyHawk,” as a way to build business applications for the desktop, the Web and the cloud. It’s a tool that relies on pre-built templates to make building applications easier for non-professional programmers. Microsoft officials have said LightSwitch is designed to bring the Fox/Access style of programming to .Net.

It has become a bit of a cliché: really innovative technology comes from garage-level startups. Once a company gets too large, it focuses its energy on keeping its existing customers happy, and loses its edge. But, for the most part, the technology we rely on for getting things done—providing the hardware and networking infrastructure, for example—comes from mature, profitable companies. So, we thought it might be interesting to take a step back and look at what tech companies are among the most successful at marketing products and services that are widely put to use.

Intel plans to buy security company McAfee for $7.68 billion--the biggest acquisition in its 42-year history.

The chipmaker said Thursday it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy all of McAfee's common stock at $48 per share in cash. McAfee's stock closed Wednesday at $29.93, making Intel's offer a 60 percent premium.

When Microsoft officials talk about syncing devices and services, they can be referring to any number of different Microsoft sync technologies. There’s ActiveSync, Windows Live Sync, Sync Framework, Windows Sync, the synchronization provided via the Zune PC software client… and lots more.

Dryad is an ongoing Microsoft Research project dedicated to developing ways to write parallel and distributed programs that can scale from small clusters to large datacenters. There’s a DryadLINQ compiler and runtime that is related to the project. Microsoft released builds of Dryad and DryadLINQ code to academics for noncommercial use in the summer 2009.

One of Microsoft’s biggest selling points for its cloud platform is that developers can use .Net, Visual Studio and other programming tools they already know to write Azure applications.

Microsoft is keeping a tight lid on any information about "Windows 8." But back in June, leaked slides on the Web indicate that, with its next client OS, Microsoft will push for near-instant start-up times, integrated facial recognition technologies, support for USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 3.0, compatibility across different devices through the cloud, and simpler streaming of movies and TV shows to any screen.