Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer, today celebrates its fifteenth birthday as the Redmond-based giant prepares to unveil the next version, Internet Explorer 9.   The web browser, the world's most used (but arguably most hated) according to recent NetApplications figures, was born on the 16th of August, 1995 when version 1.0 was made available to the public. The first version of IE was based off Spyglass's Mosaic application -- which Microsoft originally licensed but was eventually use

Ah! Patents, nothing like them to update my blog.   That big Windows 8 leak and some patent applications show what Microsoft planned for Windows 8, my recent finding is titled ‘Direct Computing Experience’. The patent goes describes that how sometimes a laptop is used for watching movies on DVD but since the laptop is more than the DVD players available in the market, the experience is different.   Microsoft plans to make the computer go into reduced functionality mode or in a sand boxed mod

By way of introduction, I’m Eric Foster and have recently joined my colleagues on The Windows Blog to write on ‘all things’ security. I thought it only fitting that my first blog be about one of my favorite personal product recommendations, Microsoft Security Essentials.   Not sure how many of you know about the VB100 award but it’s a public test conducted by Virus Bulletin, a highly reputable testing organization in the industry, designed to measure the detection effectiveness and quality of

The IE team seems to be gearing up for presenting their next generation web browser and they seem to be doing it in style.     Veteran Microsoft observer, Ed Bott shared on twitter that he got a bunch of crayons with some indication that it came from the IE team. A few days back, they sent an IE3 t-shirt to a commenter. They’ve been sporting enough to send flowers for the IE6 funeral as well. Here are the contents of the package sent:     In a blog post, the IE team has announced that

Microsoft's business strategies were described at the company's Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday.   The talks by five Microsoft executives, including Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, came on the heels of the company's positive fourth-quarter earnings. Last week, Microsoft announced revenue of $16 billion for the quarter. Peter Klein, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said at the time that all of Microsoft's business segments showed "double-digit growth," quarter over quarter.  

Microsoft announced on Thursday, a record fourth-quarter revenue of $16.04 billion for the quarter ended June 30.   The financial figures are a 22% increase from the same period of the prior year. Microsoft says this revenue growth was driven by a strong performance from Windows 7, which has sold more than 175 million licenses to date. “This quarter’s record revenue reflects the breadth of our offerings and our continued product momentum,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer. “The revenu

Microsoft releases Fix-IT for Windows Shortcut zero day attacks http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/ms-ships-temporary-fix-it-for-windows-shortcut-zero-day-attacks/6916       Best practices and technical defenses should be used to avoid new attacks related to malicious spoofed Windows shortcuts. Currently these zero-day attacks are not circulating extensively, and have only surfaced in limited targeted attacks. However, this is likely to change as note in articles at bottom, as maliciou

The new Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now available for download!   MAP 5.0 is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments. This Solution Accelerator performs an inventory of heterogeneous server environments and provides you with usage information for servers in the Core CAL Suite and SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 discovery and assessment