By way of introduction, I’m Eric Foster and have recently joined my colleagues on The Windows Blog to write on ‘all things’ security. I thought it only fitting that my first blog be about one of my favorite personal product recommendations, Microsoft Security Essentials.   Not sure how many of you know about the VB100 award but it’s a public test conducted by Virus Bulletin, a highly reputable testing organization in the industry, designed to measure the detection effectiveness and quality of

The IE team seems to be gearing up for presenting their next generation web browser and they seem to be doing it in style.     Veteran Microsoft observer, Ed Bott shared on twitter that he got a bunch of crayons with some indication that it came from the IE team. A few days back, they sent an IE3 t-shirt to a commenter. They’ve been sporting enough to send flowers for the IE6 funeral as well. Here are the contents of the package sent:     In a blog post, the IE team has announced that

Microsoft's business strategies were described at the company's Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday.   The talks by five Microsoft executives, including Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, came on the heels of the company's positive fourth-quarter earnings. Last week, Microsoft announced revenue of $16 billion for the quarter. Peter Klein, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said at the time that all of Microsoft's business segments showed "double-digit growth," quarter over quarter.  

Microsoft announced on Thursday, a record fourth-quarter revenue of $16.04 billion for the quarter ended June 30.   The financial figures are a 22% increase from the same period of the prior year. Microsoft says this revenue growth was driven by a strong performance from Windows 7, which has sold more than 175 million licenses to date. “This quarter’s record revenue reflects the breadth of our offerings and our continued product momentum,” said Peter Klein, chief financial officer. “The revenu

Microsoft releases Fix-IT for Windows Shortcut zero day attacks http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/ms-ships-temporary-fix-it-for-windows-shortcut-zero-day-attacks/6916       Best practices and technical defenses should be used to avoid new attacks related to malicious spoofed Windows shortcuts. Currently these zero-day attacks are not circulating extensively, and have only surfaced in limited targeted attacks. However, this is likely to change as note in articles at bottom, as maliciou

The new Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is now available for download!   MAP 5.0 is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments. This Solution Accelerator performs an inventory of heterogeneous server environments and provides you with usage information for servers in the Core CAL Suite and SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 discovery and assessment

Microsoft's beta release of its Windows Phone 7 Development Training Kit offers several new labs designed to let developers get their feet wet in the new platform.       Described Tuesday in a Microsoft blog, the new beta of the training kit keeps up with the changes found in the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, which also hit beta status this week.   Microsoft has revamped the existing labs in the training kit and added a few new ones.   The lab dubbed "Using Windows Phone Launcher and

Please Note: This early release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta is not available for home users. The SP1 Beta does not provide new end-user features, and installation is not supported by Microsoft.   Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta helps keep your PCs and servers on the latest support level, provides ongoing improvements to the Windows Operating System (OS), by including previous updates delivered over Windows Update as well as continuing incremental updates to t