Today, Microsoft Live Labs is announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a

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• Microsoft Jokes for Christmas
  A version of ‘12 Days of Christmas’ that mentions Vista, though it could really apply to any OS.
  (tags: Humor )
• One year later: Where are the killer Vista apps?
  After a year, Mary Jo asks the same question. Could it be that the answer is ‘There aren’t any’? It’s not suprising that business isn’t pushing hard to adopt Vista, there currently are few good reasons to upgrade, but for some, many reasons not to.
  (tags: Software Compatibility )
• Yahoo Messenger for Vista finally launches
  Long Zheng describes the disappointing, long awaited release of the new Yahoo Messenger. I may not even bother downloading this one…
  (tags: Yahoo Software Compatibility )
• Oh So Shiny Yahoo Messenger for Vista Released
  A year after being announced, a weak version of Yahoo’s Vista optimized messenger (no video or audio) is released. Why bother…
  (tags: Yahoo Software Compatibility )
• Vista SP1 will deliver big network speed boost
  Ed Bott does some network copy tests with the SP1 RC code, and sees up to 300% increase over the RTM release.
  (tags: SP1 RC )

The Microsoft Security Response Center today announced what to expect in the December 2007 Security Bulletin, due next Tuesday ‘at or around 10 a.m. Pacific Time’. Included in the Security updates are six for Windows and 1 for IE. There will also be non-security updates released, which will include 6 released through Microsoft Update (likely non-Windows related), and 1 through Windows Update (likely Windows related).

I suspect at least two (one for Windows Vista, one for IE7) will be related to the vulnerability announced earlier this week. Outside of that, it’s hard to tell how many will affect Vist, as in the past many that do relate to XP or 2003 are not issues in Vista. So, we don’t know how much to expect, but using a term that’s become popular recently, get ready to receive some ‘bits’ on Tuesday!

Today we’re making available the release candidate (RC) of Windows Vista SP1 via Microsoft Connect, and tomorrow subscribers to TechNet and MDSN will have access to those RC bits too. In addition, the RC will be available to the public next week via Microsoft’s Download Center. The release candidate phase of beta software is typically the final phase before the RTM (release-to-manufacturing) of a product and indicates that the code has attained a significant level of performance and stability.

Let me call out several changes made since the Beta release of Service Pack 1 — many of which came about as a result of direct feedback from our Beta-testing community (thank you!):

• The size of the standalone installers have decreased significantly. For example, the standalone installer packages consisting of all 36 languages (x86 and x64 chip architectures) are smaller by over 50%. The standalone installer packages consisting of just the 5 languages (again, x86 and x64) slated for initial release are more than 30% smaller in size.
• The required amount of disc space for SP1 installation has also decreased significantly. Furthermore, with the RC, if more space is required to install SP1, an error message will now display exactly

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Microsoft has announced the release of Windows 2008 RC1 beta.

This release candidate is open to the general public for testing. You can download a 30 day evaluation from any of the links below:

Windows Server 2008 Standard RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Server 2008 Datacenter RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Web Server 2008 RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems RC1

Not all of the links above were working at the time I wrote this. They should be within the next 24 hours. If you are still having trouble…visit this download page