Visual Studio advances with few missteps: InfoWorld Strategic Developer Martin Heller has discovered a wealth of impressive developments in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, including expanded support for creating SOA, Web 2.0, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight applications. "With few exceptions, users of every level of Visual Studio will find the 2008 release improved. It's a strong upgrade, and a so Visual Studio advances with few missteps: InfoWorld Strategic Developer Martin Heller has discovered a wealth of impressive developments in Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE, including expanded support for creating SOA, Web 2.0, Windows Presentation Framework, and Silverlight applications. “With few exceptions, users of every level of Visual Studio will find the 2008 release improved. It’s a strong upgrade, and a solid foundation for future development,” Heller writes. Read the review in its entirety here. Waiting for Windows 7: Enterprise Desktop Blogger Randall C. Kennedy has been mulling whether or not we’ll see Microsoft crank out Vista’s successor earlier than first announced. His prediction? Yep. “It won’t take a major engineering effort to turn the ashes of Vista (which, despite its reputation, did incorporate some good ideas) into a solid OS that corporate IT actually wants,” he writes. Let him know what you think.Smaller drives nurture green IT: The Test Center’s Storage maven Mario Apicella took at recent peek at storage through a green lens as he reported about Infortrend’s new enterprise-class array based on 2.5-inch drives. Turns out that the smaller size translates to significant green benefits over 3.5-inch models: It delivers comparable performance using less energy and less space. ” So why aren’t more small-drive storage arrays being offered?” asks Apicella. “For the same reason SUVs still mount gas-guzzling engines: Because we didn’t ask vendors to do better.” Technology Industry