My Weblog - Pat Ramadass - emediaIT

My Dell M1730 and a Mini 9

IE8 available for download

The much spoken about IE8 is now available for download from here.

Outlook Keyboard Shortcuts

The other day I had some text in my clipboard and somehow managed to press 2 keys which automagically created a new email in Outlook 2007 and inserted that text into the body. After trying to recreate this anomaly I figured out that it had been shift-insert that had done it and that it also works for some of the other Outlook Item types. I often copy and paste text to start a new email, so this is pretty useful to me, but a full list of the Outlook Keyboard Shortcuts can be found at...

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP012303961033.aspx

...Open the Flag for Follow Up dialog box to assign a flag.  CTRL+SHIFT+G is also quite useful.

European Commission Double Standards

Google has recently managed to seal their bid to buy DoubleClick, which now makes it the largest provider of online advertising by quite some way. There was a bidding war over DoubleClick between (you guessed it) Microsoft and Google. My question though is how could the European Commission possibly allow the largest competitor to Google in terms of online advertising to be bought over by them, while Microsoft keeps getting nailed with Anti-Trust law suits due to alleged anti-competitive behaviour?

The same or similar could be said about Verisign's acquisitions of both Thawte and Geotrust, their major competitors. Are there a different set of rules and regulations that apply to Microsoft that don't seem to apply to everyone else?

Microsoft SSDS - SQL Server Data Services

Microsoft has started offering an on-demand data service in free beta described as follows...

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services. Built on robust SQL Server database and Windows Server technologies, these services provide high availability, security and support standards-based web interfaces for easy programming and quick provisioning.

Unlike Amazon's SimpleDB it is intended to give Microsoft's enterprise services and products a service delivery mechanism. One of the more interesting aspects I noticed about the service is that it is integrated with Microsoft's Sync Framework, which will enable SSDS to be a central hub for synchronisation of data form multiple and possibly very different devices to provide offline/online or "occasionally connected" functionality.

The Register has a good article on it at...

Microsoft reveals its database for the cloud

...and users can sign up for the free beta  at...

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx

It's still fairly early days in terms of all these service based offerings, but it is good to see that Microsoft is serious about providing quality offerings on this front.

Singularity - Microsoft's research OS built on fully managed code

One of the more interesting projects I have come across lately has to to be Microsoft's research into creating an OS that is completely built on managed code. The project's official homepage can be found at...

http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/

The page above includes some incredibly interesing articles/information including...

Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack

Singularity: A research OS written in C#