Today, the Windows Home Server Team has announced the availability of the Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 Release Candidate for download on Microsoft Connect. You can read Charlie Kindel's post announcing today's release on the Windows Home Server Team Blog.

Microsoft Connect: Windows Home Server

Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server contains numerous bug fixes - including the data corruption issue - as well as many new enhancements to Windows Home Server many users will enjoy:

• Support for PCs running Windows Vista x64 editions
• Backup of Windows Home Server Shared Folders
• Easier, enhanced remote access capabilities
• Better energy efficiency
• Improved performance
• Chinese and Japanese versions

I'm currently running the Power Pack 1 Release Candidate on my HP MediaSmart Server and enjoying new functionality Power Pack 1 adds to my Windows Home Server. I recently added several harddrives putting my storage at 1.1TB. Having more storage allows me to utilize Folder Duplication for my Shared Folders. I also have 1 drive setup specifically for backups of my Shared Folders. I utilize my Shared Folders for quite a bit of data storage so I really appreciate having this functionality to ensure the data is safe

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As announced earlier this week during the Tech•Ed 2008 Keynote - Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 has been released. Tech•Ed 2008 for Developers is taking place in Orlando this week with Tech•Ed 2008 for IT Professionals starting next week. Check out the Virtual Press Room for Tech•Ed 2008 for the latest announcements.

On top of today's Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 release comes two new releases also worth taking note of: Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 CTP and an updated build of Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 support.

Because of updates made in Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2, I needed to install the updated build of Deep Zoom Composer and re-publish my Space Needle Deep Zoom Collection to take full advantage of today's Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 release.

Download: Deep Zoom Composer June 2008 Release (Version 0.9.0.3)

Download: Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 CTP

With the new build of Deep Zoom Composer - I was able to choose between JPEG and PNG for the format of my photos within my Deep Zoom Collection. In my updated Space Needle Deep Zoom Collection I went with PNG. However, when you choose JPEG you can set the quality of

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Want to try out for yourself what made Robert Scoble cry? Tonight, Microsoft Research has made available the Spring Beta of WorldWide Telescope.

Download: WorldWide Telescope Spring Release

WorldWide Telescope is an application designed to turn your PC into a "virtual telescope" by stitching together terabytes (soon to be petabytes) of high-resolution images of the universe. Massive amounts of data are generated by the various scientific and research facilities and WorldWide Telescope brings the catalog of that data together for anyone to access using the power of the Internet. This new application is particularly exciting for me being someone really heavy into astronomy.  You can also use WorldWide Telescope and connect an ASCOM-capable Telescope to your PC to watch the night sky.  

WorldWide Telescope lets me connect to Communities, access Collections of celestial objects such as the Solar System or Constellations, or take Guides Tours.

Using my mouse, I can navigate the cosmos zooming in and out to any object in the rich catalog of celestial objects. I can right-click to access quick information on any celestial object.

I can

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We're announcing quite a few new languages available of the Windows Search 4.0 Preview today.

The following languages are available for download for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008:

• Arabic (Only for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Bulgarian
• Chinese - Simplified
• Chinese - Traditional
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (There is no MUI pack for English)
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew (Only for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian - Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

Please take note that the following languages are available on Windows XP/Windows Server 2003 only with an MUI pack:

• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Estonian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Romanian
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Thai
• Ukrainian

Got feedback on the Windows Search 4.0? We've got several places that you can go to leave your feedback:

• For general discussion with Windows Search engineers and team members you can head over to this MSDN Forum.
• For developer discussion, head over to this MSDN Forum.
• For general (no-reply) feedback on Windows Search, you can submit feedback here.

As you may have read, the Beta release of Windows Live OneCare 2.5 is now available on Microsoft Connect for folks to start testing. I of course went ahead and installed Windows Live OneCare 2.5 to give it a spin myself. So what's new with Windows Live OneCare 2.5? After installing the Beta myself, I didn't notice anything different over the non-Beta version. I decided to ping the Windows Live OneCare team to see what we can expect with Windows Live OneCare 2.5. They tell me that the Windows Live OneCare 2.5 release is mainly what they call an "under-the-hood" release. That means that we won't see any big  new features like the great OneCare Circle introduced in 2.0.  Going forward with the Windows Live OneCare 2.5 Beta - continue to expect the improvements and changes to remain "under-the-hood" and not very noticeable in the UI.

In testing the Windows Live OneCare 2.5 Beta, I noticed after installing it on one of my PCs and signing in with my Windows Live ID that contains my OneCare Subscription - it was not displaying my OneCare Circle. This was because

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From the Vista Team blog:
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.

Check out the Vista Team blog here!

 

Go get it!

/Jakob