Don Dodge, Microsoft's Director of Business Development for emerging businesses, has an interesting post on his blog about how Microsoft approaches acquisitions, the sweet spot of $50-200 million where we've had the most success, etc. He also has a list of the acquisitions over the last year or so. You can get a good sense of some of our strategic priorities from looking at those buys.
I was reading a post on Steve Riley's blog that linked to a couple of very interesting posts by Jeff Jones on his Think Security blog. He goes into quite a bit of detail on Patchguard and also interviews Forrest Foltz who is a Patchguard Architect at Microsoft. They discuss some of the truths and misconceptions around Patchguard, the research reports outlining methods of bypassing it, mitigating factors, etc. Also very interesting were some thoughts about how hypervisor based virtualization, with the addition of patchguard like functionality to the hypervisor could go a long way toward mitigating current methods of bypassing the technology.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
Dowloads available for XP SP2, Server 2003 SP1 both x86 and x64.
Here's a link to a post on the IE team's blog about RC1 installation changes.
One of my current projects is an architecture for an advanced technology demonstration lab. Basically a sandbox environment where the customer is going to test upcoming Microsoft and other vendor's products. The goal is to provide remote access to the lab environment so testers and pilot users can access the services. To this end, we're going to be using ISA Server 2006 to publish Exchange (OWA, ActiveSync Direct Push), SharePoint, and Terminal Services. In putting together my documentation I've collected some good links to share:
Publishing OWA and RPC/HTTP with ISA 2006
Publish Terminal Server
(www.isaserver.org is THE site for all things ISA)
Publish SharePoint
Exchange 2003 Direct Push
Authentication in ISA 2006
Over on the Routing and Remote Access Blog, they list some of the RRAS features coming in Vista and Longhorn including routing compartments, NAP enforcement for VPN clients, IPv6, AES encryption algorithm, and some improved usability features.