Microsoft announced their latest operating system, Windows 8.

The Windows Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. These downloads include prerelease software that may change without notice. The software is provided as is, and you bear the risk of using it. It may not be stable, operate correctly or work the way the final version of the software will. It should not be used in a production environment. The features and functionality in the prerelease software may not appear in the final version. Some product features and functionality may require advanced or additional hardware, or installation of other software.

Read more to obtain an ISO copy of Windows 8 Developer Preview.

For Windows Live Mail users, it may be the doom day today. Because when you try to login to the Windows Live Mail, the browser reports that the mail domain cannot be found !

Error 105 (net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED): Unable to resolve the server’s DNS address.

Funny huh ? Microsoft has no response yet . Hope the emails are not affected , though .
One more reason to choose GMail instead.

UPDATE @ 2:30PM GMT+8 : Windows Live Mail is back ! Time to migrate to GMail before it’s too late !

It’s about the time for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), a 10-year-old browser, to retire.

Microsoft created a website, The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown , to illustrate the percentage of population still using IE6. From the statistics, China is the world’s leading IE6 usage country ( 33.6% of population is using IE6 ), probably due to the use of pirated Windows and unable to update their browsers as Windows Genuine Advantage blocks the way.

Yes, Raptor Talks suggest all the visitors to upgrade to latest Internet Explorer version, or even better, switch to Google Chrome / Mozilla Firefox . This site does not support Internet Explorer 6 .

Hello programmers , if you are interested in stepping into app development industry, these stats may help you decide which platform you should go. iOS & Android are the most popular platforms, Windows Phone 7 followed. WP7 is still young in terms of its API coverage, hardware support and development environment. For me, I am an iOS developer, as the IDE tools and iOS API are very complete ( though sometimes tiny bugs in API can be annoying ). Make your decision now, or it will be too late. Read more for more statistics.

It is well-known that Microsoft Windows are the majority in operating system choice. As you can see from above chart , Microsoft still dominates operating system’s business, with 78.6% market share and 8.8% growth in 2010.

It is noteworthy that Oracle has 7682.8% growth (what?!) after it acquires Sun Microsystems, thus allowing the company to hop to the 4th place of OS market share. Apple and Red Hat are gaining their place with >15% growth.

Yet, this chart does not show the whole picture. There are still some popular operating system that does not charge users money, such as Ubuntu. For full press release, read more.

I attended MSDN Seminar 2011 in Hong Kong last night. Around 100 IT guys attended the seminar; Microsoft had 3 speakers to speak in the event.

The seminar covered the following highlights:

Internet Explorer 9
WebMatrix – the free web development tool for Windows
Microsoft Surface 2.0
Kinect SDK updates
UI Coded Test in Visual Studio 2010
Next version of Windows Phone 7 Mango
Release of free Microsoft Marketplace Tokens

Last , the event does not mention anything about Microsoft Azure .

There are a lot of new stuff released to public this week :

• Google Chrome 10 – March 9
• Speedtest.net new layout – March 9
• Apple iOS 4.3 – March 10
• Apple TV 4.2 – March 10
• PalmPre webOS 2.1 – March 10
• and for next week … Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 – March 14

Service Pack 1 of Windows Server 2008 R2 is now available today! Here is the list of changes…

Service Pack 1 of Windows 7 goes live today! It is available through Windows Update, integrated DVD & standalone download. Here are the important changes…

Windows Phone 7 Connector is now available at Mac App Store at no cost .