Internet Explorer 9 will not be broadly rolled out on Windows Update until the end of June. We do this because we have hundreds of millions of business customers that rely on Internet Explorer and require an appropriate window of time to plan and test their deployments. We also have a responsibility, as the most popular browser on the planet, to ensure that IE9 is introduced in a timeline that allows web site developers to have the chance to ensure their site is 100% ready.

Dear Mr. Miller, your article is quite refreshing! Thank you.

Where's my phone update?

 

This table provides update status for Windows Phone customers outside the U.S. First, look up your mobile operator on the table. Then check to see what stage the update process is in. (If your operator isn't listed, look for "All other operators" to check status.) Here's what each term means:

Stage 1: Testing
The software update is undergoing mobile operator network and quality tests.

Stage 2: Scheduling
Operator testing is complete, and Microsoft is scheduling the update for delivery. This phase typically lasts 10 days or less.

Stage 3: Delivering update
Microsoft has started to send out the update. Because updates are typically delivered to customers in batches, it might take several weeks before you receive notice that an update is available for you.

You can learn more about installing updates on our Phone updates page. To discover what's included in an update, visit the Update history page.

Where's my phone update?

 

This table provides update status for Windows Phone customers outside the U.S. First, look up your mobile operator on the table. Then check to see what stage the update process is in. (If your operator isn't listed, look for "All other operators" to check status.) Here's what each term means:

Stage 1: Testing
The software update is undergoing mobile operator network and quality tests.

Stage 2: Scheduling
Operator testing is complete, and Microsoft is scheduling the update for delivery. This phase typically lasts 10 days or less.

Stage 3: Delivering update
Microsoft has started to send out the update. Because updates are typically delivered to customers in batches, it might take several weeks before you receive notice that an update is available for you.

You can learn more about installing updates on our Phone updates page. To discover what's included in an update, visit the Update history page.

Internet Explorer 9 has now been downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours since its Monday night release.

The Visual Studio LightSwitch Training Kit contains demos and labs to help you learn to use and extend LightSwitch. The introductory materials walk you through the Visual Studio LightSwitch product. By following the hands-on labs, you'll build an application to inventory a library of books.

The more advanced materials will show developers how they can extend LightSwitch to make components available to the LightSwitch developer. In the advanced hands-on labs, you will build and package an extension that can be reused by the Visual Studio LightSwitch end user.

The Training Kit includes the following content:
- LightSwitch Overview
- Demo: Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch
- Hands-on-lab: Simple Book Store Application
- Hands-on-lab: Enhancing the Book Store Application
- LightSwitch Advanced Features
- Demo: Building Your First LightSwitch Application
- Hands-on-lab: LightSwitch Control Extensions
- Hands-on-lab: LightSwitch Data Source Extensions

Microsoft today is releasing the second beta of LightSwitch, a software tool aimed at developers who want to build business applications that run as both native and Web applications.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The new version, which becomes available MSDN subscribers today, and everyone else on Thursday, adds a handful of new features from the previous beta, all aimed at increasing what can be done with the software.

The first is support for publishing applications to directly to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud services platform. This is joined by a tool for Visual Studio Professional (or higher) that lets users make LightSwitch application extensions. Examples of these include things like data sources, screen templates, and themes, all of which can be thrown in to speed up application development.

Besides the new features, Microsoft has also announced language support for German, which joins English. When the final version of the software hits later this year, Microsoft says, it will be available in an additional eight languages, matching the 10 that are supported in Visual Studio.

Since the release of the first LightSwitch beta back in August, the software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, according to Microsoft. LightSwitch continues to play a larger part in the company's initiative to let businesses and developers get a taste of the full Visual Studio experience, offering them a chance to bring projects to the more feature-fulled development platform if they outgrow the original intent. A full breakdown of the differences between LightSwitch and Visual Studio Pro can be found here.

Performance: “screamingly faster”

Last week, my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols benchmarked the performance of Google’s just-released Chrome 10 and called it “screamingly fast.” That conclusion was based on a set of benchmarks that mistakenly compared the unoptimized 64-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 to the 32-bit version of Chrome. When he re-ran the tests, IE 9 came out ahead. I guess that makes the new Internet Explorer “screamingly faster” and, at least for now, dethrones Chrome as the speed king.

Screamingly faster :-)