Think robotics is only good for General Motors' assembly line and vacuuming your floor? Think again. Microsoft's Robotics Developer Studio has a number of components that businesses are using, or thinking about using, for such far-flung things as carded door access and Web messaging services.
Take Tyco, which is using Microsoft's Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, a part of the Robotics Developer Studio, to prevent the company's card-based physical access system from being overloaded.
"The robotics studio has many elements: a graphics suite, models, controls. I don't use any of that," says Stephen Tarmey, a Tyco software architect.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has started the clock ticking on his retirement from his position as head of the world's largest software maker.
Speaking at an event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Ballmer said he would preside over Microsoft "for another nine or 10 years ... until my last kid goes away to college." Ballmer, 52, is married with three children.
Microsoft is now selling its wares directly to consumers.
This week, the company launched the Microsoft Store -- a Web site where consumers can purchase Vista, Office, Microsoft Works and the new Web design product Expression directly from Microsoft -- in the U.K. and Germany.
Currently, the software purchased through the sites are delivered via electronic download, although the company said it expects to offer "full packaged products" by the end of 2008.
Previously, all direct sales have gone through Microsoft's retail channel and other partners.
Microsoft received a mixed ruling in the latest round of lawsuits between it and Alcatel-Lucent. This time, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California found that Microsoft did not infringe on an Alcatel-Lucent patent covering video encoding technology. "We are gratified that the jury found Microsoft did not infringe Alcatel-Lucent's video encoding patent and rejected Alcatel-Lucent's exorbitant US$419 million damages claim," said Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, in an e-mailed statement. The jury also upheld four Microsoft patents, but found that Alcatel-Lucent didn't infringe them, and found one Microsoft patent invalid.
With multi-core processors becoming a preferred method for building more powerful computers, Microsoft anticipates that a
key trend for the future of application development will be accommodating parallel systems.
Microsoft officials at a press event Tuesday evening in Orlando, Fla. emphasized parallel development as a focus for the future.
The event was held in conjunction with the TechEd 2008 conference. Attendees at the conference offered their own perspectives
not only on parallel programming but on other issues and technologies, such as the Silverlight rich Internet application platform, the Oslo modeling project, and migrating Visual Basic 6 code to .Net.
Microsoft plans to add to the next version of its developer suite for teams the ability to visually model the architecture of an application and validate it against application code, the company said at TechEd this week. A new feature Microsoft plans to add to the next version of Visual Studio Team System, code-named Rosario, will allow developers to create a visual map of an application's architecture, and then compare that to the back-end code to ensure "the code is correct given the constraints of the architecture," said Norman Guadagno, a Microsoft director of product marketing.
Winning friends and influence in Washington isn't cheap. Big Tech took a lesson from Big Pharm and spent a fortune on lobbyists.Led by Microsoft's $2.9 million in lobbying spending in the first quarter alone, the IT industry is on pace to set a tech lobbying spending record of $119 million this year, eclipsing last year's $110 million.
According to numbers compiled by eWEEK from OpenSecrets.org, a database of political contributions and lobbying spending by the Center for Responsive Politics, Microsoft projects to spend more than $10 million in 2008 on lobbying. In 2007, Microsoft spent $9 million in lobbying.
No, it's not WinFS, the file system that was supposed to revolutionize the way files and documents are stored in Windows. But if it gives users tools that accomplish the same things WinFS was supposed to provide, does Search 4.0 come close? Download Windows Search 4.0 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 from FileForum now.
After making a preview release available last March, Microsoft this morning lifted the curtains on its completed Windows Search 4.0 desktop tool.In a post on the Windows Experience blog this morning, developer evangelist Brandon LeBlanc touted today's release as a milestone, saying, "First and foremost: We've introduced some performance and reliability improvements.
Microsoft on Wednesday debuted a new version of its customizable operating system for embedded applications -- but perhaps a little surprisingly, it's not based on Windows Vista.
Instead, Windows Embedded Standard 2009, as it's called, is based on Windows XP Service Pack 3, which was released earlier this spring.
The announcement came at the company's annual North American Tech-Ed developers conference in Orlando, Fla., during a keynote speech by Kevin Dallas, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business Unit.
Microsoft has made an unspecified agreement with a payment processing company, in what could be another step toward establishing
its own online payment system.
The agreement is with Symmetric Systems, which runs VitalPay , a payment processing platform.
Microsoft didn't detail in its announcement how technology from Symmetric Systems will be linked with its software. But Microsoft
has a variety of point-of-sale software, CRM and Web-based offerings that could potentially
integrate with Symmetric's offerings.