Jeffrey Richter, Jeff Prosise, John Robbins and Walt Ritscher of Wintellect along with Pennsylvania's own Rachael Appel at Devscovery NYC

Social Desktop

Microsoft Research demoed a concept for bringing the social web and it's power for collaboration directly to your desktop from the cloud.

The Social Desktop blends the Web and PC by embedding Web oriented sharing inside your desktop,  allowing every document to have the ability to have a backing social URL for sharing without having to upload or copy or move it from it's natural location. This url provides access not just to the file, but to a built in social experience which includes a rich preview of each item, comments, related items, tags, etc. Whenever friends comment with this social link via the web browser, the conversation is also available directly in Windows, and vice versa.

The social preview is a Silverlight web page which is accessible via a url, and so any mechanism for distributing links to your friends can be used such as Twitter, Digg, Windows Live Messenger, etc.  Previews and/or files are stored on the web using Windows Azure.

Social networks have become our public square and market place as the traditional office disappears. You can find me on Twitter and engage me in real-time, or you can send an email and wait for my response. Microsoft hasn't embraced social networking, they still live in an email culture

CPU Auxiliary Cores

Parallel computing is not an add-on or a library that we use. It goes much deeper into the system design and architecture. The quest has begon to discover a system model that's a design pattern for parallel processing. A collection of multi-core system architecture design pattern has begon at the Asynchronous Operations community site.

Engineering Windows 7

The first issue to untangle is about the difference between malware making it onto a PC and being run, versus what it can do once it is running. There has been no report of a way for malware to make it onto a PC without consent. All of the feedback so far concerns the behavior of UAC once malware has found its way onto the PC and is running

The Microsoft Security Response Center monitors the ecosystem for security threats and manages the response to any threat or vulnerability related to Microsoft products.

Internet Explorer 8 has also introduced many new features to thwart malware distribution.

Much of the recent feedback has failed to take into account the ways that Windows 7 has improved the ability to stop malware before it's installed or running on your PC.

Windows Live Messenger translation bot now available!

The Microsoft Translator team from Microsoft Research has released new translation bot into the wild for Windows Live Messenger.

This Messenger bot does translations when you add mtbot@hotmail.com to your contacts. You can do one-on-one conversations with the bot for your own translations, or you can invite a friend from a far off land to chat as the bot translates your conversation. 

As always when it comes to machine translation you’ll need some familiarly with the language you are translating to, this is where my High School French let’s me parler comme un natif.

The translator bot is localized into all of the languages supported at www.windowslivetranslator.com