Microsoft today released the Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview to the public. The release is meant to demonstrate the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 to Web developers while at the same time providing feedback to the IE9 team. Microsoft says it is committed to updating the Platform Preview to keep a more effective rhythm for discussion, and it will be updated every eight weeks or so. Microsoft will share feedback with standards-setting bodies in addition to using it for internal development.

The Platform Preview is a minimal wrapper: it's not a full-fledged browser. It has no tabs. It has no address bar. It has no back button. So what is included? Everything that Web developers need to see: the rendering engine, of course, as well as the new JavaScript engine, hardware acceleration features, and the developer tools. The IE9 team told Ars that each update will use one of the latest internal engineering builds, at which point the feedback loop will start again.

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Microsoft has been quite explicit on the matter: Windows Phone 7 Series is being designed first and foremost for the consumer market. The result is the emphasis on a strong, consistent, effective user interface, possibly at the expense of functionality; Microsoft wants to have this thing out in time for the "holiday season" this year, so there's a limited window for further development, at least for the initial release.

That said, the phone does have features aimed at the enterprise market. Obviously, there's Exchange support, with ActiveSync, providing push mail, address book sync, and all those features that we know and love. In common with Outlook 2010, Windows Phone 7 Series also seems to support multiple Exchange servers concurrently. I say "seems" because it didn't quite work when we tried, but that seemed to be due to a bad password rather than any fundamental flaw—the phone was happy to accept the configuration and created two distinct Outlook Tiles on the Start page, so it looked like it was doing the right thing.

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The Microsoft Translator team has given up and concluded that "no matter how many machines you throw at translation, it is still impossible to get the correct, error-free, contextually accurate translation every time." Microsoft's solution to this problem is the Collaborative Translations Framework, which supposedly combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation.

At MIX 2010, Microsoft Translator API version 2 was announced. In addition to the collaborative features, version 2 includes a batch interface to translate large amounts of data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL, and a "Translate-and-Speak" feature (text-to-speech functionality). The translation APIs are available at no cost to developers and partners in SOAP, HTTP, and AJAX flavors so that developers can choose the one that best fits their requirements. All you need to get started is a Bing Developer AppID.

Since the Microsoft Translator team works closely on Bing, the Translate-and-Speak functionality will be available on the Bing Translator user site after you hit translate (you should notice a speaker icon that you can click on to hear your translation). Currently, this feature is only available in seven of the 30 languages Bing supports: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.

The Microsoft Translator widget, released just under a year ago, offers real-time, in-place translations on your website into the languages your users choose. Built on top of the new translation API, version 2 of the translator widget also adds collaborative features that help tailor the translations of a website. This means website owners can not only offer their site in multiple languages, but they can also ask their community or professional translators to improve those translations of their site's content.

Each MIX10 attendee received an exclusive invite code in their attendee bags to enable Collaborative Translations features in their widget. If you are not attending MIX, you can add yourself to the Collaborative Translations feature invite list after you get the widget.

Microsoft still plans on polishing the translation widget, toolbar, and alternatives UI as well as analytics for site and app owners based on user feedback. There is also more customizability on the way, such as limiting the number of languages site owners can show as part of the widget. In addition, Microsoft is working on making the Silverlight translator control available as part of the Silverlight toolkit release that will ship when Silverlight 4 goes final.

All this new functionality is still considered prerelease, so you'll want to check out the known issues list before diving in. You can submit bugs and suggestions on the MSDN forums or via mtcont@microsoft.com.

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The big theme at Microsoft's MIX10 developer conference today was developing for Windows Phone 7 Series, and key to this was the new Silverlight 4. For the first time, Microsoft showed off third-party applications for the forthcoming phone platform, and talked about how third-party applications integrate with the platform.

Silverlight is becoming increasingly widely available for the browser, with Microsoft claiming 60 percent of all Internet devices now support it (up from 45 percent in October last year). The new version, available as a Release Candidate today with a final version next month, boasts new features to make it more useful for developing both in-browser and standalone applications, including support for microphones and webcams, printing, and the clipboard.

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The Hotmail sign-in page has been redesigned with Iris, the UI used in Windows Phone 7 Series and Zune. Could Windows Live Wave 4 services end up using the Metro design?

Read More: Windows Live Hotmail sign-in

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Microsoft has released a hotfix for Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 users experiencing crashes with Office applications after installing a non-security update for Office 2007.

Read More: KB980210, Office Sustained Engineering

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Windows Azure platform AppFabric will be commercially available on a paid and fully SLA-supported basis starting April 9, 2010. Microsoft will also start charging for AppFabric.

Read More: Windows Azure platform AppFabric, Windows Azure Platform Pricing Info

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An appeals court has upheld its previous judgment that Microsoft had willfully infringed on i4i's patent with Office Word. Microsoft is on the hook for $290 million in damages

Read More: Canadian Press

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