Microsoft has announced retail pricing for Windows 7 that includes an option to preorder the operating system at a substantial discount.
From today through July 11, U.S. consumers can preorder an upgrade from XP or Vista to Windows 7 Home premium for $49 or Windows 7 Professional for $99. However, XP customers must do a clean installation of Windows 7.
Also starting today, buyers of new PCs with Vista installed will receive a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available.
Retail boxed copies of Windows 7 go on sale October 22. Microsoft plans to charge $119 for Home Premium, $199 for Professional, and $219 for Ultimate.
In Europe, the EU’s anti-trust ruling has forced Microsoft to ship a special “E” version with the Internet Explorer web browser removed. Therefore, the European launch will be delayed, and all users must perform a clean installation, even if purchasing an upgrade.
Early reviews are generally positive and indicate that Windows 7 is much better behaved than Vista was when it was first released.
Story at CNN
Microsoft Entity Framework Feature CTP 1 for the .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 is now available. This Feature CTP provides the following features:
- Better N-Tier Support with Self Tracking Entities
- POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) entity code generation via the POCO Template
- Writing only code and having it work with the Entity Framework via code only.
Download
Microsoft has announced that System.Data.OracleClient will be available in the upcoming 4.0 release of .NET Framework; however, it will be marked as deprecated.
This will have no impact to existing applications and these applications will continue to work as expected. Developing new applications which use OracleClient will be supported; however, warnings will be raised if the applications are compiled against .Net 4.0. Once compiled, no warnings or errors will be generated while running these applications.
Microsoft strongly recommends that customers use partners’ ADO.NET Provider for Oracle instead of continuing to use Microsoft’s OracleClient for new application development.
Microsoft will continue to provide hotfixes for critical issues in OracleClient as per the standard support policy for .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft will also continue to make critical bug fixes in future service packs for .Net Framework 4.0.
Read official announcement
If you create software development tools, you’ll want to consider building on the Visual Studio Shell. A streamlined Visual Studio development environment, the Visual Studio Shell provides the core foundation so you can focus on building your application’s unique features. Flexible customization options help you deliver optimized experiences for specific markets. Note that the Visual Studio Shell is royalty-free for building and deploying applications.
The key benefits of the Visual Studio Shell:
- Faster development. The Visual Studio Shell accelerates development by providing a base integrated development environment that can host custom tools and programming languages.
- A familiar environment. Developers can build on the Visual Studio platform and provide end users a familiar user interface, speeding the learning curve for both.
- Optimized for languages and tools. Created in response to requests from our partners, the Visual Studio Shell gives you the option of integrating your tools with Visual Studio or creating an isolated, custom-branded application.
Visual Studio Shell
The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly.
The IIS SEO Toolkit includes the Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module, which let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps files.
The first beta of this new free tool is now available.
IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Home
Detailed Usage at ScottGu’s Blog
