Microsoft Developer

Microsoft has put out public betas of Office 2010, the SharePoint-dependent Office Professional Plus 2010 with its browser-based, Google Docs-offsetting Office Web Apps for business (this time with editing in Word and OneNote), Visio 2010 and Project 2010, both Office extensions, Exchange Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as well as Office Mobile 2010 with its mobile apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010.

As a defensive surprise, something called Outlook Social Connector has been added to Office 2010 to display feeds from social networking sites in Outlook starting with LinkedIn. Users won't have to abandon Outlook to network. Naturally there's a Social Connector SDK.

The code is in seven languages - English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, French and German.

Final release is towards the middle of next year.

Unseen except as a demo is Microsoft's IE9 browser; work on it reportedly started only three weeks ago; Microsoft wants to improve the performance of the eight-month-old Firefox-beset IE8 with hardware-accelerated text and graphics.

Silverlight 4 also went to beta.

See www.microsoft.com/2010.