We love seeing what comes up next on the Microsoft PressPass feed. And today was a bumper haul. Yes ladies and gentlemen, make sure you have a seat handy in case you are bowled over by the enormity of this announcement.

Microsoft are releasing a special edition 120GB ‘Gears of War 2′ Zune. So, go flush that special edition U2 iPod you bought a few years ago down the loo – because this Zune creams all over it.

Is that image a little hard to make out. No problem, just go check out this hi-res version.

Actually, I have to admit it – I really want one.

Great news from Amazon. Only 2 months or so to go before they publicly roll out Windows Server and SQL Server on Amazon EC2.

As the blurb from their site notes, this will be ideal for ASP.NET web sites:

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.

There’s a private beta currently in play. No pricing information appears to be available as yet.

The strange thing about this is that Amazon seem to have beaten Microsoft the party on this one. Why hasn’t Microsoft attempted to offer this already (other than alluding to Red Dog)? Perhaps they are too caught up with the SQL Server data services model instead.

Hands up all those people who use Live Search. Yeah we thought so. But that’s all gonna change.

Scene at Microsoft HQ

• Live Search Program Manager: We seem to have a problem with Live Search
• Drone: What’s that?
• Program Manager: It doesn’t seem to be very popular
• Drone: No shit, Sherlock.
• Program Manager: What can we do about it?
• Drone: Nothing. Face it you’re fucked. You couldn’t even pay people to use it.
• Program Manager: You’ve just given me a great idea.

You get the picture. With absolutely no traction in getting people using Live Search, Microsoft has turned to its last resort: pay the punters to use it.

That’s right: with SearchPerks you get credits for using Live Search (we’re not kidding). Next April (yes we checked if it was April 1 – it aint) you can start redeeming these credits for all manner of goodies including music downloads, plane flights and even an Xbox controller.

It’s limited to the first million to sign up (and only in the US – sorry O/S readers – you obviously already use Live Search and don’t need to be bought off).

Madness.

Ever wondered how Microsoft staff are appraised? And in particular someone in an evangelist or community focused role. It’s an interesting process. But basically it comes down two things:

• Creating & delivering content
• Increasing Community involvement

Charles Sterling, a program manager on the VSTS team has given a good, honest reveal of his role and the KPIs. (For the uninitiated NSAT stands for ‘net satisfaction’)

It is refreshing to see such transparency coming from the various teams. So whilst on one hand you may not like that they are strategically focusing on increasing user groups (you thought they were just being benevolent in their community involvement didn’t you?), on the other it shows that you can count on some support in that area.

This is good news for some, since if the rumours are true there was an outcry down in Australia when a pizza budget for user groups got the chop recently.

With all the Visual Studio 2010 announcements and hoo-hah you may be wondering what the fuck this Oslo thing is they keep referring to. Don’t worry, you’re not alone – we’re all confused here at Microsoft Confidential too.

Hoping for some relief we turned to Darryl Kaft who has a good overview. Then to Don Box, the main man at Oslo HQ, who gives his thoughts here:

We’re building “Oslo” to simplify the process of developing, deploying, and managing software. Our goal is to reduce the gap between the intention of the developer and the actual artifacts that get deployed and executed. The approach we’re taking is to move more of the definition of an application into the world of data, where we (and you) can more easily make queries as to the developer’s original intent.

Clear as  mud right? He goes on:

With Oslo, we’re doing two things:

1. We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.

2. We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.

Thankfully though, we then stumbled onto the Microsoft SOA site.

Basically, it seems Oslo is a visual modelling tool that stores the details in SQL Server so you can query against it. Microsoft’s D Language sits in there somewhere too.

A few screen shots and some clear explanation would have been nice, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until PDC to get the lowdown.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, is visiting Korea at the end of October to conclude an MOA (memorandum of understanding) on a new research and development center in Korea. The center will be built on the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology University (KAIST) campus.

From the report:

Joint research will be carried out by researchers from Microsoft and professors and students from KAIST who will focus mainly on computer operating systems, databases application software and mobile computing.

The latest beta was released a few weeks back – go here for details – with the final release scheduled for sometime this year. Kathleen has a few more details.

If you’ve ever wondered what the Game Studio is, here’s a nice summary from the site:

Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0, which enables hobbyists, academics, and independent game developers to easily create video games for Windows and the Microsoft Zune digital media player using optimized cross-platform gaming libraries based on the .NET Framework.

Of the many new features and enhancements, these two stood out:

ClickOnce packaging support for distributing your XNA Framework games on Windows.

Support for .NET language features like Linq

Announcing you have expanded the routes on your bus service won’t get you many front page articles, but perhaps it should. Hiding away at the end of this report is the note that the Microsoft bus service has reduced Microsoft single-occupant vehicles from 66% to 62%.

This is a good thing. Amid the concern over all those fucking big data centers sucking up all the power and water in the world, little tidbits like this are welcome news.

A new release of Live Search Maps made it out last week. Chris Pendleton has a full run down of the awesome feature set.

We had a play with it, using just the simple features that you’d want to use it for (ie no bullshit community junk), and found it all in all pretty ho-hum. In fact it was so lame we couldn’t help feeling that we were stuck in some cached old version. We’ll check again in another week.

Just getting simple directions from here to there is still much simpler in Google.

Yes, you’ve all heard the Visual Studio 2010 news by now. If not, the you may want to check out the following links:

MS Press Release

Mary-Jo Foley analysis (and note that jQuery is going to be part of VS2008 as well as the MVC downloads – her article is a little unclear)

Joe Wilcox opinion (in which he rightly puts together the links with BizTalk Server 2009 and Oslo as well as a look at how this fits in with the upcoming PDC sessions.

However, the best articles to read are Somasegar’s announcement and this MSDN article. In particular the latter which has some cool screen shots:

There’s also some nice Visual Studio 2010 videos coming over on Channel 9, starting with this 34 min piece from Norman Guadagno covering the key enhancements.

Norman Guadagno: Announcing Visual Studio Team System 2010

There will be a controlled spilling-of-the-beans over the next few weeks leading up to PDC, however the main point being hammered home in the first few days is the serious focus VS2010 has on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) (Wikipedia explanation here)