News Thursday: Expression Encoder and Rackspace Announcements

Welcome to News Thursday, a blog we’ll be posting the 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month to highlight news across the Server and Tools Business. News Thursday will aggregate announcements of interest to you, which are typically found on Microsoft product and team blogs to make it easier for you to get the latest information on all announcements coming from the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.

New Expression Encoder Licensing Announced Today

Today, Microsoft announced a plan to license its Expression Encoder 4 Pro product for development and redistribution. Expression Encoder 4 users can quickly and easily encode both live and pre-recorded video in a wide variety of file formats. For more information about the direct volume licensing program check out Eric Ligman’s Microsoft Partner Channel Blog and the Encoder page for more information.

Rackspace Announces Cloud Plug-In for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Rackspace announced yesterday the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, a Visual Studio toolkit that enables the 6 million .NET developers worldwide to seamlessly extend development and deployment to Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows. This unique set of tools allows developers to deploy applications written with Visual Studio tools directly to Rackspace's cloud infrastructure, reducing deployment and provisioning time and providing users with a single cloud management portal. For more information about this announcement visit the Rackspace Newsroom.

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