In separate moves, Microsoft has released its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack but discontinued extended support for the Visual
Basic 6.0 IDE.
The feature pack had been available in a beta release since January, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog this week.
"The Feature Pack provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC (Microsoft Foundation
Class) and an implementation of TR1. Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications
with the 'look & feel' of Microsoft's most popular products -- Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and Internet Explorer," Somasegar
said.
Microsoft can't build the next generation of trusted computer systems on its own, the company's chief research and strategy
officer said Tuesday.
Speaking at the RSA Conference, Craig Mundie called for industry dialogue in building a new generation of secure systems,
an idea that the company is calling end-to-end trust.
"This end-to-end trust proposal that we've put together is not a product road map, its a way of framing the problem," Mundie
said. "All of these things that get to the questions of authentication, authorization, access, audit."
One year ago, Microsoft was defending the quality of its products, battling with the world's largest security vendors over
features in its next-generation platforms, and pitching the company's nascent promise as a provider of IT systems-defense
tools at the annual RSA conference.
With the release of its Stirling security management platform at the ongoing RSA Conference 2008 in San Francisco on Tuesday,
company officials and industry watchers contend that the software giant is rapidly proving itself a force to be reckoned with
in the sector.
Microsoft and Sun Microsystems both may claim to have pioneered the "datacenter in a box" concept, but Microsoft appears to be the first company that is rolling out container-based systems in a major way inside one of its datacenters.
At a conference in Las Vegas last week, Michael Manos , Microsoft's senior director of datacenter services, said in a keynote speech that the first floor of a datacenter being
built by the software vendor in the Chicago area will hold up to 220 shipping containers, each preconfigured to support between 1,000 and 2,000 servers, according to various news reports and blog posts.
Microsoft has released preliminary documentation for how several of its Office business products interact with each other,
part of the company's plan to appease regulators by releasing proprietary protocols that help developers make its products
more interoperable.
On its Microsoft Developer Network , the company Tuesday posted about 10,000 pages of technical documentation for products that are a part of the Microsoft
Office 2007 suite, including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The new documents outline the
connection points between the products in the suite and bring the total of protocol documentation pages Microsoft has released
to about 40,000, the company said.
The third update to Redmond's answer to Flash addresses several bugs within the platform.The technology is still not seeing widespread use outside of Microsoft's own sites, but that is not stopping Microsoft from pressing forward with Silverlight. The company is simultaneously working on the second major version as well.
Silverlight 2 will focus on enabling Rich Internet Application development, which includes built in-controls, and will include a built-in version of the .NET framework allowing for more scripting-intensive uses.However for the typical everyday user, there still is the first version of Silverlight.
Microsoft on Saturday gave Yahoo Inc. a three-week deadline to reach an agreement in response to its $44.6 billion acquisition offer, threatening to launch a hostile takeover attempt if the companies are unable to strike an amicable deal.
Read the full text of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo
In a letter to Yahoo's board, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer wrote that the Redmond company believes its original offer represents an even larger premium than it did originally, given trends in the market and Yahoo's business.
Microsoft is showing signs of running out of patience with Yahoo Inc., more than two months after making its acquisition bid for the Internet portal.
The Redmond company is "evaluating" its original $44.6 billion offer under the theory that Yahoo's value may have declined since the original bid, a person familiar with the matter said Friday, confirming a report by the Reuters news service.
The move was widely seen as an effort to increase the pressure on Yahoo to enter formal negotiations over Microsoft's bid. Whether or not it was a bluff, Wall Street took notice. Shares of Yahoo dropped in after-hours trading, as investors speculated about the possibility of Microsoft reducing the Jan. 31 acquisition offer, a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's share price at the time.
Microsoft said on Friday a U.S. jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent $367.4 million in damages after finding that the company had violated two patents related to the user interface in its software.
Microsoft said Alcatel-Lucent was seeking $1.5 billion in damages related to the four patents named in the case and the jury in U.S. District Court in San Diego found Microsoft did not infringe on Alcatel's video decoding technology patent.
The fourth patent in the lawsuit was asserted only against Dell Inc, which was found not to have infringed, according to Microsoft.
Adobe this week revealed that it will soon a native 64-bit version of its flagship Photoshop software. But in a controversial if logical move, that 64-bit version of Photoshop will ship only on Windows, and not on Mac OS X. The reason? Apparently, Adobe can't get the technical help it needs from Apple, which I'd imagine is far too busy working on future iPod and iPhone products to worry about little things like helping one of the top Mac developers. Adobe says the 64-bit version of Photoshop will have access to far more memory and offer much better performance. You know, on Windows. Because they aren't doing it on the Mac.