Following reports by users of problems resulting from new Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 installation prerequisite update - which Microsoft pushed out via Windows Update last week — Microsoft has halted availability of those prerequisites.

Microsoft announced on February 19 via the Vista Team Blog its decision to stop the distribution of the Vista SP1 prerequisites.

Vista Product Manager Nick White posted the following update:

“Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.
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Cosmos is a set of operating system legos written completely in C# that allow developers to easily build custom OSes with little OS experience by simply selecting new project in Visual Studio, then pressing F5 to build, deploy, and debug.

Cosmos is an independent project from Microsoft. I’m a former Microsoft FTE (full-time employee) myself and still heavily involved with Microsoft as I am Microsoft Regional Director, but Cosmos is independent. Cosmos is licensed under the BSD license though, so generally there are no issues….We are free to support anything we want.

Read more about Cosmos: An open-source .Net-based micro kernel OS

nb1 writes:  

Microsoft on Thursday is expected to release a new set of developer tools for products that improve the Internet's accessibility for people with disabilities. The tools, called UI Automation, can be used royalty-free, according to Microsoft's Windows Accessibility lead Norm Hodne, as long as the resulting applications are built to perform within all platforms, e.g. Windows or Linux.

Microsoft formally donated the UI (user interface) Automation developer tools to the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), an engineering working group that the software giant helped form last November in partnership with tech companies like Oracle, Novell, Hewlett-Packard and Adobe Systems, as well as assistive-technology developers like GW Micro. The working group's mission is to pave the way for standards in the industry for text-to-speech software, screen readers and other assistive products


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By Kevin McLaughlin, CMP Channel
4:02 PM EST Wed. Dec. 19, 2007
Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Tuesday unveiled the first release candidate for Windows XP service pack 3 (SP3), moving the long awaited final batch of tweaks and fixes for XP closer to reality.

Originally slated for release in 2006, XP SP3 has been pushed back on numerous occasions, and this marks the first time it has been available for public download.

Earlier this month, Microsoft launched the first release candiate for Windows Vista SP1. Microsoft plans to launch Windows XP SP3 sometime in the first half of next year, with Vista SP1 due in in the first quarter.

XP SP3 includes all of the fixes Microsoft has released since launching XP in 2001, as well as some minor new features that are part of Windows Vista. These include: support for Microsoft's Network Access Protection security technology; 'keyless activation', which lets IT administrators install SP3 without entering product keys for each copy; and detection of so-called 'black hole' network routers that can slow network performance.
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According to SitePoint Tech Times #156, based on these 2 articles from Microsoft, Word 2007 HTML and CSS Rendering Capabilities in Outlook 2007,

,"Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007."

The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are described in detail in the article, but here are a few highlights:

* no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
* no support for forms
* no support for Flash, or other plugins
* no support for CSS floats
* no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
* no support for CSS positioning
* no support for animated GIFs

In short, unless your HTML emails are very, very simple, you're going to run into problems with Outlook 2007, and in most cases the only solution to those problems will be to reduce the complexity of your HTML email design to accommodate Outlook's limited feature set.

Read the full article at SitePoint

Monday, 16 October 2006, 12:21 AM CET

Microsoft agreed to make it easier for customers of its forthcoming Vista operating system to use outside security vendors, such as those who make popular antivirus and anti-spyware programs.

Until now, Microsoft had planned to block those companies from installing their products in the deepest levels of the new operating system, which is scheduled for release early next year.

Read More at the Washington Post.