The Midweek Download: June 22nd Edition–Windows Phone “Mango” Reviews, plus the Internet of Things, Windows Azure, IE9 and World IPv6 Day

Today’s edition of the Midweek Download has new reviews of Windows Phone “Mango” and a few other news bits from all around Microsoft. See what you think…

Windows Phone 7 “Mango” reviews are in! PCMag says this about the next version of the Windows Phone mobile platform: “Windows Phone 7 takes a genuinely different approach to communication than its main rivals.” Here’s what Gizmodo writes: “Pending some killer Nokia hardware or radical Android redesign, I think the choice this fall for all but the nerdiest of nerds is going to be very simple. iPhone or Windows Phone. Nothing else is that pleasant.” To see what others are saying about “Mango,” check out this list of top stories in the Windows Phone news room.

The Internet of Things. In this Monday post on the Next at Microsoft Blog, editor Steve Clayton sets the stage for a series of posts in which he will cover the Internet of Things, which he describes as “the promised land of web services, sensors networks and cloud computing all wrapped in to one.” In the coming days, Clayton will write about “things” that are increasingly connected in our world. He’ll cover a wide landscape this week that reaches from the home, to the rainforest and the city. Check it out.

Get ready for a more beautiful mobile Web. If you’re a Web developer and want to see what your sites will look like on IE9 Mobile, you can download the Windows Phone developer tools today and try it out for yourself, since Microsoft includes IE9 Mobile with the default emulator installation. In fact, Microsoft has been pretty busy getting ready for the upcoming Mango release too, and would like to share some of the work we’ve done with the community in preparation for Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Phone “Mango”. Read this June 16th post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog for more detail.

IE 9.0.1 available via Windows Update. The June 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update. This security update resolves seven vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that were disclosed in coordination with Microsoft. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user visits a malicious, specially crafted Web page using IE. Check out this June 14th post on the IEBlog for the whole story.

World IPv6 Day comes off without a hitch.World IPv6 Day was on June 8th and was a resounding success. It was a one-day test of IPv6 support, with dozens of websites across the technology industry enabling IPv6 access for a 24-hour period. Here at Microsoft, we provided IPv6 access to www.microsoft.com, www.bing.com and www.xbox.com as well as Microsoft advertising services, without any incident. Want the whole story? Read this June 17th post on the Official Microsoft Blog.

Introducing Windows Azure AppFabric Apps. Last October, at the PDC 2010 keynote, the Windows Azure team shared its vision of building, running and managing applications reliably and at scale in Windows Azure. Since then, the team has been heads-down to make the vision a reality, and last month at TechEd 2011, it announced that it’ll soon be releasing a rich set of new capabilities to build AppFabric Applications using AppFabric Developer Tools, run them in the AppFabric Container service and manage them using the AppFabric Application Manager. On Monday, the team announced that the day has come when it can publicly share the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of these capabilities in Windows Azure.

Want more Microsoft news? Need more Microsoft news? Then tune in here on the Official Microsoft Blog for another round up this Friday (and every Friday) for a little Weekend Reading. Thanks for stopping by!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

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