A week ago Microsoft opened up its latest data center – this time in Texas (so reports Seattle PI). The facility is on a 44 acre site and will use 8 million gallons of recycled water a month. It also sports solar panels on the roof.

It came in at a cool $550M, which is of course nothing when you’ve got $23.5 billion in  cash and short term investments on hand.

The first of two buildings on the site went live last Monday. What a great feeling it must be to power up something like that. And imagine having to reboot the whole thing.

It will be running the Microsoft Live Search Engine, Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live products.

The SQL Server 2008 Experience site is up. As mentioned here in the Press Release, it features more than 500 videos. This is all part of the ‘worldwide readiness outreach’ that is about to kick off. Brace yourself!

Here’s the site. That red outline on the middle left is highlighting the styling issues the site has in IE8 Beta 2.

Thank God for A-Patch.

We all love Windows Messenger, but those fucking ads drive us insane. Thanks to ars technica we were alerted to the latest A-Patch that gets rid of them right away.

Winston Churchill named his experiences with major depression as his ‘black dog‘.

In a totally unrelated event Steve Ballmer was at the Churchill Club (in Silicon Valley) recently talking about his ‘red dog’ – Project Red Dog that is. Red Dog is basically EC2 for Windows, and is going to be given airtime at PDC in October (here’s Mary-Jo’s notes from April).

He also woffled on about Mobile devices, the threat of Google and how Apple is unlikely to increase market share in the personal computer space because they won’t license their software to others.

Steve rightly worries about Linux in the server space (Especially web servers) with Windows only having 40% of the share.

He has both a red dog and black one on his hands we suggest.

There’s a new Hotmail update coming soon (as in sometime soon, but we’re not sure when), so says the Windows Live Wire blog. Make sure you read the comments, the punters fucking hate it.

[UPDATE: Check out the LiveSide report and the ReadWriteWeb analysis]

Good to see that Microsoft is going to be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio from now on. Scott Guthrie made the announcement earlier:

I’m excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward.  We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.

How on earth with developers cope with the huge additional bloat (all 15kb of it) this adds to the otherwise streamlined VS range?

The DevSta challenge has commenced (as of 3 hours ago).

DevSta is a competition for developers to build something from scratch in under 200 hours (and 8 minutes to be precise).

Here’s the brief (PDF) that was announced this afternoon:

The Challenge
We live in an era of constant re-invention – where what we’ve created in the past inspires what’s happening now – or what’s to come. For this reason – your DevSta {Challenge 2008} is to explore the link between “old school” and “new cool”! This could be as simple as re-inventing something “old” in a new way – or perhaps taking
something new, and tackling it in an “old” way. To get into the “old school/new cool” mindset, think Buddy Knavery and games like Pacman, Lemmings and Space Invaders. Your entry needs to be technically innovative, relevant to the theme and must meet the following criteria

Yes folks, if you look after a development team at work then you may want to check a little closer and see what they’re really working on!

As usual with Microsoft competitions these days there’s a shitload of prizes.

Company sponsored studies are by their very nature completely unreliable. It’s like trusting the medical advice the tobacco companies spun in the 70s.

So, take this latest ‘analysis‘ with a grain of salt. In it Microsoft finds that (amazingly!) it aint cheaper to use Linux than it is to use Microsoft (at least over a 5 year time span). Skills shortage is the main reason attributed (p7) with Linux professionals earning 12.5% more than equivalently experienced Microsoft professionals. Mary-Jo has the rundown.

Of course the numbers only apply to large deployments, so don’t go thinking it impacts any home consumer environment.

When it comes to deploying large numbers of computers to emerging markets (ie poor countries who desperately need to be given access to the right tools for internet-izing their people) why you’d want to go for Linux anyway is beyond us, surely you’d want an operating system that has all the cool Aero graphic capabilities.

Scott Guthrie has blogged about the availability of the Silverlight 2 Release Candidate – well, the developer runtime anyway.

This is a good move, as it gives developers time to play and fix any breaking issues (download the word doc here) between this version and the previous beta, before the official version is publicly deployed (real soon now!)

Tim Heuer also notes a few items, including the ADO.NET Data Services bits being updated.

If you find an issue please log it on the Silverlight forum.

Holy fuck, check out this great list of Microsoft software and services available to almost everyone (some are limited to students for example). It’s an impressive list.

Of course if Google or Apple had a list this full and comprehensive they’d get applauded on all the tech sites. But sadly Microsoft often doesn’t get the recognition they deserve.

Go get some.