Microsoft Forefront codename “Stirling” is an integrated security suite that delivers comprehensive protection across endpoint, servers and the edge that is easier to manage and control.

By delivering simplified management and providing critical visibility into threats, vulnerabilities, and configuration risks, Forefront codename “Stirling” helps you protect your business with greater confidence and efficiency.

“Stirling” suite includes:

• A central management server and dashboard
• The next generation of Forefront Client Security
• The next generation of Forefront Security for Exchange Server
• Forefront Online Security for Exchange
• The next generation of Forefront Security for SharePoint
• Forefront Threat Management Gateway (Next generation of ISA)

Microsoft just released the first Beta version of Exchange Server 2010, formerly code-named Exchange Server “14″.

Microsoft Small Basic is a project that’s aimed at bringing “fun” back to programming. By providing a small and easy to learn programming language in a friendly and inviting development environment, Small Basic makes programming a breeze. Ideal for kids and adults alike, Small Basic helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.

• Small Basic derives its inspiration from the original BASIC programming language, and is based on the Microsoft .Net platform. It is really small with just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.
• The Small Basic development environment is simple, yet provides powerful modern environment features like Intellisense™ and instant context sensitive help.
• Small Basic allows third-party libraries to be plugged in with ease, making it possible for the community to extend the experience in fun and interesting ways.

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available. You can use these packages to upgrade any SQL Server 2008 edition.

The release notes can be viewed here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=147331

“Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, high-performance applications. It can be used to cache any common language runtime (CLR) object and provides access through simple APIs. The key aspects of Velocity are distributed cache performance, scalability, and availability.

Microsoft project code named Velocity provides a highly scalable in-memory application cache for all kinds of data. By using cache, you can significantly improve application performance by avoiding unnecessary calls to the data source. Distributed cache enables your application to match increasing demand with increasing throughput by using a cache cluster that automatically manages the complexities of load balancing. When you use Velocity, you can retrieve data by using keys or other identifiers, named tags. Velocity supports optimistic and pessimistic concurrency models, high availability, and a variety of cache configurations. Velocity includes an ASP.NET session provider object that enables you to store ASP.NET session objects in the distributed cache without having to write to databases, which increases the performance and scalability of ASP.NET applications.

For community technology preview 3 (CTP3), Microsoft project code named Velocity offers several enhancements and a new API. The enhancements include a cache notifications feature, performance improvements, security enhancements, and new cluster management options. There are also updates to the installation program. Perhaps the most material change for the Velocity administrator is that your options for editing the cluster configuration settings have been decoupled from your options for storing the cluster configuration settings. For more information, see the What’s New for CTP3 topic in the product documentation.

Microsoft released the final version of the Internet Explorer 8 today.

Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the familiar web browser you are most comfortable using, helping you get everything you want from the web faster, easier, more privately and securely than ever before.

• Faster Internet Explorer 8 is more responsive with new pages and tabs, opening up fast and reliably. You can now get to the information you care about most, in fewer steps; one click access to your webmail, favorite news sites or other online services.
• Easier Reduce the steps to accomplish many common tasks, and automate your access to real time information updates. You can keep track of your favorite sports team, news, weather with a single click.
• More Private Helps protect your privacy and confidential information where ever you go on the web.
• More Secure Helps protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC, and makes it easier to detect when a website is an imposter.

Expression Blend 3 Preview is a major new release, taking the product in a number of new, important directions, such as explicit support for prototyping, interactivity through behaviors, and on-the-fly sample data generation.

With Expression Blend 3 Preview, you can create Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications for the desktop and Microsoft Silverlight 3 applications for the web.

Expression Blend 3 Preview is a step on a long journey towards tools that are meant to empower designers to participate in the process of software creation in deep, meaningful, and creative ways.

Using Expression Blend 3 Preview, you, the designers, can make computers easier and more fun to use, and can delight customers with great applications and great content.

This CTP is a preview of the set of features Microsoft is considering shipping with the next version of ADO.NET Data Services. This CTP targets the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and extends the functionality Microsoft provided in v1.0 of ADO.NET Data Services by providing additional features. The features in this CTP may not be included in the .NET Framework 4 or Silverlight 3 when they ship.

As this is a CTP release, you should not install this release on your primary development computer. Also, be aware that the features that ultimately ship with the final release of v1.5 may be different than the features included in this CTP.

The features included in this CTP are:

• Row count
• Feed customization (aka “web-friendly feeds”)
• Data binding for WPF and Silverlight 2
• Enhanced blob support
• Server-driven paging
• A new “Data Service Provider” interface for custom providers
• Various bug fixes to V1.0 features

Install Notes:
This release is separate from the Project Codename “Astoria Offline” Alpha Preview released earlier this month. Installing this CTP on the same system as the Offline release will cause a conflict and is not supported. You should not install them together.

It is possible to use this CTP with the Windows 7 Beta; however, design time support integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition will not be available on Windows 7 Beta. Using DataSvcUtil.exe for client-side code generation will also not be available on Windows 7 Beta. You will receive a warning if you use the setup on a system with Windows 7 Beta installed indicating a file is locked but the setup will not fail.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

“Astoria Offline” is designed to provide an end-to-end solution for authoring of offline applications that use data from data services, either within a corporate network or across the Internet. This download provides the tools and runtime components necessary to create the client and server components of the system and create sync-capable databases (or adjust existing database schemas with sync capabilities).

The download contains a “Using Astoria Offline” document that gives a step-by-step walkthrough to create an offline-enabled application. The walkthrough provides an exploration of the infrastructure and how it can be used to build applications. Additionally, a complete example of an offline-enabled application is included in the download.

This release is built on top of the ADO.NET Data Services v1.0 release and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. This is an early “preview” release, as such, it is not supported and should only be used for prototyping and investigating. As this is a preview release, it is strongly recommended that this release be installed in a test-only environment; a virtual machine is recommended. Please read the included README for more information on support and limitations of this download.

Note: This release is separate from the ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP1 release that will be available soon. Installing this offline preview release on the same system as the v1.5 CTP1 is not supported and it is strongly recommended that you do not install the two releases on the same system.