Microsoft has released another community technology preview of Sandcastle, a tool for creating documentation for .NET projects.
New in the June rev is a presentation layer named "VSORCAS," an apparent play off the former codename of the upcoming Visual Studio 2008.
VSORCAS is aimed at improving the experience of navigating through and searching documentation, according to Microsoft.
"This new documentation presentation layer targets developer audience who need to find information quickly and easily in our documentation that grows significantly with every Visual Studio/.NET Framework release," read a statement on the Microsoft Sandcastle blog.
Microsoft wants to play a bigger role in China's living rooms, and the company is willing to spend millions of dollars to get there.
The company's latest home-entertainment moves in China include a planned $12.3 million investment in Sichuan Changhong Electric. The deal, announced earlier this week, gives Microsoft a small stake in one of China's largest TV makers, which in turn agreed to develop TVs and other products able to link with the Internet.
"Microsoft and Changhong have partnered in exploring the use of digital media technologies to benefit the consumers for a better in-home networked digital entertainment experience," Microsoft said Friday in an e-mail statement.
Microsoft has forced developers to close down a project aimed at reviving the original Windows client code-named "Longhorn." According to a blog posting on the site maintained by developers on the project -- called "Longhorn Reloaded" -- Microsoft sent a "cease and desist" letter to the project leaders asking them to shut it down shortly after the team posted the first release of the project online.
"It deeply saddens me that although Microsoft have known about this project for many months they only issued us with this notice a few days after we started to distribute" the first release, according to a post earlier this month on joejoe.org.Community.
Wooed by compelling application ecosystems, performance and cost, several large enterprise Linux customers have begun slowly migrating back to Windows Server, eWEEK reporting has found.
The migrations come after a quarter in which Windows Server revenue grew faster than Linux revenuethe first time that has happened since research company IDC started tracking Linux server spending in 1998.
Recent Linux-to-Windows converts include consumer products manufacturer Unilever, online retailer Overstock.com, French sports yacht Areva Challenge (the French entry for the 32nd America's Cup yacht race), and California candy maker Jelly Belly.
Windows Vista, in its first half-year of life, has proven to be an exceptionally secure operating system -- much more secure, in fact, than competing desktop OSes, according to Microsoft.
A "6 month vulnerability report" released Thursday by Microsoft shows that, compared to the first six months following the release of Windows XP, OSes from various Linux distributions, and even Mac OS X 10.4, that Vista is the hands-down winner for fewest security holes.
The report was written by Jeff Jones, a Security Strategy Director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group. He noted that for Vista's first six months (it was released to business Nov. 30, 2006), a total of 12 vulnerabilities affected Vista. Microsoft rated five of those vulnerabilities "Critical," six as "Important," and one did not have a severity rating.
Although it stops short of the coveted "exclusive" contract, Microsoft said Wednesday that it had paid $50 million for exclusive content for Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto IV.The next sequel in the wildly popular game series will launch in October on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, however downloadable add-ons will only be available for Microsoft's version.
Microsoft will pay $25 million for each of the two add-ons Take-Two is to produce. The company is likely hoping to recoup much of the cost through whatever content it decides to charge users for downloading.
Microsoft agreed Tuesday to make changes to the desktop search feature in Windows Vista in an effort to assuage Google and head off a further antitrust battle with U.S. regulators.
In a filing made jointly with the Justice Department on Tuesday night, Microsoft said it would change the search feature as part of the first service pack to Windows Vista. In the filing, Microsoft talked for the first time about when that service pack would arrive, saying a beta version will come by the end of the year.
Microsoft's Windows Vista team is eating crow after flip-flopping on its on-again, off-again decision to allow cheaper versions of Vista to be used in virtualized machines.
The company was all set to announce June 20 that the lower-cost Vista Home Basic ($199) and Vista Home Premium ($249) versions could be used in virtual machines, and that it had lifted its prohibition on the use of information rights management, digital rights management and its BitLocker data encryption service in a virtual machine.
When it comes to using Web 2.0 technologies in businesses, Microsoft is officially onboard. Microsoft's general manager of SharePoint tools and platforms, Derek Burney, gave a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here, where he announced a Web 2.0-style add-on called Community Kit for SharePoint.
Also, enterprise RSS vendor NewsGator announced that it has enhanced SharePoint's feed subscribing tools with tagging and an Ajax interface. The notion of integrating Web 2.0 technologies from the public Internet--blogs, wikis, and social networking features--in businesses has been gaining momentum for the past few years and is sometimes referred to as "enterprise 2.0."
Microsoft has teamed up with Intermap to give its 3-D maps in Great Britain a more realistic look through the use of the company's elevation data. Maps are also in the works for Western Europe and the continental US.Data for the remainder of Western Europe is scheduled for completion by the end of this year, with data for the US coming by the end of 2008. It will help Microsoft to better align and place objects "without distortion or undulation," it says.
Intermap said Microsoft's addition of its product into the Live Search Maps experience is a fundamental change for the industry, the Redmond company agrees.