The Midweek Download: June 8th Edition–Delaware Schools Move to Live.edu plus BUILD, Windows Phone Marketplace, “Windows 8” and TRON on IE9

It’s been a busy week at Microsoft this week, what with the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) going on in Los Angeles and all, but Microsoft made lots of news in the last week not related to E3. Check it out…

Delaware schools adopt Microsoft cloud suite. The Delaware Department of Education announced Tuesday that it is working with Microsoft to bring Microsoft Live@edu, an innovative suite of online communication and collaboration tools, to students, faculty and staff in district and charter schools throughout the state. The Department of Technology and Information (DTI) will initially migrate approximately 20,000 faculty and staff to this no-cost platform in June 2011, with the goal being to move everyone to Microsoft Live@edu, as well as offer it to the more-than-129,000-student population, over the next two years. Read this press release on the Microsoft News Center for more detail.

Fujitsu and Microsoft team up on cloud. Fujitsu Ltd. and Microsoft today announced that the first release of its Global Cloud Platform service powered by Windows Azure, running in Fujitsu’s datacenter in Japan, will be launched in August 2011. The launch of this service is the result of the global strategic partnership between Fujitsu and Microsoft announced in July 2010. The partnership allows Fujitsu to work alongside Microsoft providing services to enable, deliver and manage solutions built on Windows Azure. For more on this story, read this Microsoft News Center press release.

Register for BUILD. Join Microsoft from Sept. 13 to Sept. 16 in Anaheim, California for Microsoft’s first BUILD conference. What’s special about BUILD? It will be the first broad hands-on unveiling of the next version of Windows and its new app model featuring HTML5 and JavaScript. In short, building Web-connected apps for the next Windows is as easy as building for the modern Web. Developers will also learn how to work with the all-new touch-centric user experience to create fast, fluid, and dynamic applications that leverage the power and flexibility of the core of Windows, used by more than a billion people around the world. Read more about it on the IEBlog.

How Windows Phone Marketplace manages bulk app publishing. In recent weeks, a handful of companies have individually published hundreds of apps in a matter of a few days. We call this bulk publishing. While these apps meet our certification requirements and give consumers a wider selection of content, we’re also finding that publishing them in bulk degrades our customers’ experience. By publishing hundreds of apps in a short amount of time, the popular “New” Marketplace list category fills quickly, pushing the other new apps out and reducing the diversity of the shopping experience. To avoid the scenario where bulk publishing crowds out other apps in Marketplace in the future, effective immediately, we are limiting the number of apps any one developer can have certified in a single day to 20. More information is available in this June 2nd post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

I have one word for you: TRON! It took just about one month to build the new Disney TRON: Legacy Digital Book Site, an immersive HTML5 experience built on top of Internet Explorer 9 Hardware Accelerated HTML5. For the rest of the story, read this June 3rd post on the Exploring IE Blog. That’s an image of the TRON digital book below. And, yes, it’s as cool as it looks.

Tron

More “Windows 8” goodness. As you may have heard, Microsoft last week previewed some of the user interface for the next version of Windows, codenamed “Windows 8.” Check out this video posted by Next at Microsoft Blog Editor Steve Clayton that shows Michael Anguilo, corporate vice president of  Windows Planning, Hardware & PC Ecosystem showing off some of the cool upcoming technology from Microsoft at Computex.

That’s it for this edition of the Midweek Download. See you back here on Friday for Weekend Reading.

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

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