When developing Windows 8, Microsoft made changes to the user interface in an apparent bet that most of its customers will be foregoing their traditional laptops and desktops in favor of tablets. This is probably a valid prediction for home users, but for businesses planning to stick with keyboards and mice for a while, there may be more user training than with Windows 7.

The underlying core of the Windows 8 operating system is polishing the code from its predecessors. Microsoft advises that legacy devices and applications should migrate fairly easily to Windows 8 and, in fact, a lot of them will simply work as-is, without an update. With all that being said, what is really new in Windows 8?

I’ve been to Las Vegas before when I attended Cisco Live 2011, but this is my first time attending the Interop IT Expo and Conference. Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, and Interop — what a combo.

Like the majority of folks attending, as we walk by the slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels, I’m looking forward to learning more about emerging IT topics such as cloud computing and virtualization, data center and storage, and wireless and mobility, as well as security and risk management.

Tablets are apparently the future of computing  –  versatile, lightweight, truly portable, and crucially, cool. It seems though that Microsoft is not falling for the marketing hype.

They have instead allowed one of their Applied Science teams to invest some serious time and effort into developing an entirely new way of interacting with computers. If you are reading this on a desktop or laptop computer, you will have your keyboard at the front, mouse to the side and 2D screen at the back. Not for much longer though.

The whole SQL world is an interesting place, part Database Admin, part Developer, and part system administrator all rolled into one neat package. Well, knowing some of them, maybe not so neat. Theirs is a difficult world because of the different areas they must master – back up the database, write cleaner and more efficient and secure code, come up with new queries, study for the new SQL 2012 exams coming out in June (oops, didn’t want to slip that in too soon).

Microsoft certification is a widely respected, multi-level program that recognizes the skills of professionals who design, install, and operate Microsoft environments. Microsoft certifications bring valuable, measurable rewards to IT professionals, their managers, and the organizations that employ them.

PowerShell, like most Microsoft technologies, gives us more than one way to do the same thing. Sometimes that’s good news: it’s nice to use software that can compensate for differences in style from one user to another. Other times, it creates an issue. Sometimes one way to do something is less effective than another — sometimes in subtle ways. The wrong choice might add a few extra seconds to a job that takes a few minutes and many minutes to a job that might take hours. Those small changes add up over time. Which question do you want your boss to ask: “How does she manage to get everything done with time to spare?” or “Why is he always running behind schedule?”

In this post, we will explore just some of the new features under each theme to give a feel for the capabilities of the upcoming release. Other features and a pre-release version of the software are available on the Microsoft web site.

The virtualization market is made up of a few dominant, long-standing players and, due to increased adoption, a constant stream of smaller niche companies. VMware is the recognized leader due to both its server virtualization dominance with its commercial product, vSphere, as well as its desktop-level virtualization tools.

Citrix and Microsoft represent two other major virtualization players. Although VMware controls a majority of the market, Citrix and Microsoft continue to gain in market share. Citrix has made strides in application and desktop virtualization using its Xen product. In the case of Microsoft, the company has recognized the importance of virtualization and gradually produced a number of diverse resources, even including virtualization tools in the latest version of Windows 7. In addition, Hyper-V, its non-Linux, hypervisor-based platform, remains one of the core functions of Windows Server 2008.

Virtualization fundamentally changed computing in a way that was unforeseen as recently as five years ago. Every area of the economy that utilizes computing has been impacted, from financial, telecom, and healthcare sectors to retail, manufacturing, media, and government. In addition to improving key data center processes, such as Business Continuity (BC) and High Availability (HA), virtualization provides companies with flexibility, cost savings, and disaster recovery options critical to their success.