A View from the Application Platform Team

As you may know, I am pursuing a new leadership opportunity within Microsoft. Effective March 3rd I will be transitioning into a new role as Corporate Vice President, OEM Division. This will be a cool opportunity for me to lead the OEM group through its...

A key focus area in our platform strategy is business intelligence. Our goal is to provide all individuals, teams and entire organizations with BI solutions that drive bottom line performance and operational excellence. This was reiterated by Steve Ballmer...

Today Windows Server 2008 released to manufacturing and will be available for purchase to new customers on March 1 st . This is a critical milestone in our platform strategy as it will bring new levels of security and reliability to both enterprise and...

In case you missed it yesterday….. Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will join Scott Guthrie on stage as a keynote speaker at MIX08 on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. Ray will discuss Microsoft’s continued investment across the platform to...

We are doing some cool things to support our forthcoming Heroes Happen Here launch on 2/27 in LA. Check out the Daily Comic Series . A new comic strip will be available Monday – Friday. Sign up for the RSS feed here . The content and storylines in many...

Notice something different today? Yes, we have updated the look and feel of the blog. I think I am hearing a sigh of relief from all of our readers. :-) We are also expanding the blog to bring in more news, opinions and topics from across the entire application...

Today, registration opens for Tech·Ed U.S 2008 at www.microsoft.com/teched . Tech·Ed is Microsoft’s premier technical gathering for IT Professionals and Developers worldwide. Tech·Ed provides both audiences with top-notch technical education, connection...

Twenty years ago we announced the first version of Microsoft SQL Server. This year we’re working towards launching SQL Server 2008, as part of the biggest enterprise launch in our company’s history. We ship more units of SQL Server than Oracle and IBM...

Today we have a guest blogger to share some insights - Carol Dullmeyer, Director of Application Platform Communications In my role on the Microsoft Application Platform team, I spend a lot of time speaking with industry analysts and customers...

Happy 2008 to everyone. Hope you all had a good holiday. Last year, we talked a lot about Web technologies and this year will be no different. The Application Platform team kicked things off with Silverlight taking front and center of Microsoft’s CES...

Or at least the end of the year, which for me means time with the family and friends. I hope everyone has a quiet and relaxing holiday and uses technology for fun and relaxation and not solving “real world” problems J There have been some posts recently...

While it might be hard to believe that Silverlight has only been on the market since September and it is already being used to stream the first ever studio-backed full-length feature film – Jackass 2.5. For those of you 17 or older, you can see the movie...

Check out Soma’s blog entry about the Community Content feature in the MSDN Online Library. This feature came online one year ago and now it has been extended to over 3.3 million topics of documentation, covering 8 languages, in the MSDN and TechNet online...

I’m really excited about a couple of great new products to help developers be more productive in their day-to-day lives: the Entity Framework Beta 3 and the ASP.NET Extensions Preview. With today’s Beta 3 release of the ADO.NET Entity Framework...

Seems like a strange question, but it’s been a topic of discussion in different forms within Microsoft recently. It might not be as much fun as trying to make them a unique audience, but it might be a more realistic view of the fact that the web has permeated...

You’ve heard me talk numerous times about the data management capability investment area of our Application Platform. We are gaining momentum in this space and the SQL Server team just launched a new blog – The Data Platform Insider blog – which looks...

Microsoft has continued to innovate on its Web development capabilities, one of the five core capabilities in our Application Platform portfolio, to better align with our customers’ business needs. Some of the products in this area are Silverlight, .NET...

I spent several years in the early 2000’s working on Microsoft’s overall TV strategy in line with our acquisition of WebTV, the early hype on HDTV (which finally works), “Interactive” TV and other incarnations of how digital technology would impact television...

It’s the day before a major U.S. holiday “Thanksgiving” so with luck things will be quiet for a few days. For those of you celebrating the holiday I wish you a “Happy Thanksgiving” and just a great day to everyone else. I’ll be out the next few days enjoying...

At Microsoft we’ve always recognized that developers are essential to the success of our business. Steve Ballmer’s assertion about our commitment to developers is rather famous. So I when I read a recent poll from GigaOm that asked: “Technology platform...

Today we have a guest blogger to share what’s going on in the SQL Server world— Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President for the Data and Storage Platform Division. Steve, thanks for the invitation to guest blog. This is great timing because we...

We are doing some really exciting things to provide more access to Microsoft for developers and IT Pros. Here is an update from the folks on the TechNet and MSDN teams….. Exciting news today about the revamp of the MSDN and TechNet communities for...

I just got back from a great weekend in Vegas. I was there to give the opening keynote for DevConnections , a premier event for Microsoft developers, Database administrators, and IT Professionals. Of course in Vegas there is always more than one show...

I hear from press, analyst, customers, partners, and even friends that Microsoft can be a bit noisy in the marketplace with product launches, betas, CTPs, RCs, etc. and sometimes it’s hard to make sense of it all. We understand and do in fact put a lot...

As you know the topic of Software + Services provides a lot of fodder for discussion these days. There is as much noise out in the market as there is code, and opportunity combined. That said, I continue to believe we are doing some of the core work necessary...