Voice Command transforms your device into your own virtual personal assistant, letting you use your voice to look up contacts, make phone calls, get calendar information, play and control your music, as well as start programs.
SlingPlayer is the screen interface software that works hand-in-hand with the hardware inside the Slingbox to make your TV viewing experience just like that at home. It features an array of innovative features and controls, including a favorites bar, customizable remote controls, and the best streaming video money can buy. The SlingPlayer also comes specially modified for both computers and mobile devices.
MiniMIXA is a DJ application to mix music on Windows Mobile devices.
Windows Live Search for Mobile is a free client available for both Windows Mobile devices and some Java enabled devices.
Get the local and maps info you want faster and easier:
- Easily find local businesses and restaurants; then click to call
- Get maps and directions
- View traffic info in selected US cities
Live Search for mobile is currently only available in the US and UK.
Deepfish is a lightweight client application that leverages a powerful server side technology for delivery of content such as web pages to a Windows Mobile device. Content is displayed in a familiar desktop format that requires no additional work by the content or site author.
Deepfish provides:
- A familiar look and feel of web pages on mobile as seen on desktop.
- Bandwidth optimized rendering for faster content delivery.
- Address bar web navigation.
- Intuitive zooming, panning and cue map for quick navigation and browsing.
- Support for simple link navigation and form submission.
Jason Landridge demonstrates Windows Mobile 6 calendar features.
Microsoft Consulting & Support are currently working on a shared calendars application for Windows Mobile which Jason also demonstrates.
A.U.R.A (Advanced User Resource Annotation) is designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags. With the system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with specific tags. Users can also review the tags and descriptions of the objects they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal. Users may selectively make the items they have scanned public to other AURA users resulting in a collectively authored database rating, reviewing and commenting on a wide range of objects, products and places. Physical annotations can be shared with other users and selected by users’ reputation statistics and other properties.
Dan Arildson & Jason Langridge, Mobile and Embedded Devices team put on a great show for the Windows Mobile Device Extravaganza! I am posting the videos seperately so please check them all out 
On Tuesday I attended a Security talk focused on the changes in Vista Security that are deep inside the product. The talk was an entertaining one but focused a lot on the underlying code and changes rather than an overview of the features of security in Windows Vista.
The talk was held by Michael Howard and Jeffrey R. Jones who are both security guys at Microsoft.
They spoke about the features of security but as this was a dev focused chat this was only brief.
Next the duo described the engineering process at Microsoft for Windows Vista. This was an interesting insight and they stressed that the external reviewers were the key process to helping them spot bugs and weed out security issues.
For the engineering of Vista Microsoft Security banned weak crypto like MD5 and SHA1. MD5 was described as “bust” and SHA1 would be bust very soon so Micrsoft wanted to stop this development.
The partners and external businesses that tested Vista and its security were:
Due to the new security features in Vista several advisories do not affect Windows Vista
Isolation is one of the main ways Vista is more secure by default. It allows processes to run at a lower level priviledge when the system wide default is set to medium. This prevents data being written to the OS by the lower level app. One of these applications is Internet Explorer.
Service hardening allows services to not run as high level SYSTEM accounts anymore. This means services move out of the system and you can describe the access you require for said services. The service control manager will only grant those access rights.
DEP (Data Execute Protection) is the main memory feature of Windows Vista that is now turned on by default. Microsoft had to convince OEMs to enable this feature by default in their BIOS options. DEP cannot be turned off once it’s turned on for a process. Vendors only disabled this because of fears with appliation compatability.
NX is not enabled by default in Internet Explorer 7 for compatability reasons but will be enabled by default in IE8 and onwards.
ASLR is the next major memory defense in Vista. It relies on DEP being enabled and it moved the system around into 1 of 256 slots which change at every reboot. Hackers like predictability so removing this predictability every boot helps a lot.
Finally it was explained that the recent 0-day exploit for DNS did not affect Windows Server 2008 beta 2 because of the following reasons:
On Monday evening I attended the JAM Sessions at Tech-Ed 2007. This years sessions were held at The Groove, Universal Studios. The idea of JAM sessions is to enable “normal” geeks to jump up on stage and play their favourite instrument or sing to the crowd along in a band scenario.
It’s great fun and all in good spirits, sometimes people sound like drowned rats but most of the time you can tell these guys are pretty good! Check out the pics and video from the event below.
The Groove:
On Stage at The Groove:
Inside The Groove:
Universal Studios:
