A former Microsoft Corp. employee, accused of stealing and reselling software to finance a lavish lifestyle, has died at age 32. Daniel Feussner, of suburban Sammamish, died Friday in Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue. His family said he suffered multiple organ failure and had previous medical problems. The King County Medical Examiner's Office was awaiting toxicology results before issuing a cause of death. The results won't be known for six to eight weeks.
He was free on bond. No trial date had been set. "We are saddened by this news, and our hearts are with his family and friends," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said.
Microsoft on Tuesday will offer a glimpse at future versions of its Visual Studio.Net development tools and highlight a number of additions to the product line. At a developers conference in San Francisco this week, Microsoft will also seek to build developer loyalty by detailing case studies of companies using Visual Studio.Net. Released about a year ago, Visual Studio.Net is a bundle of tools that lets developers work with a variety of programming languages to build applications that adhere to Web services standards.
Microsoft is in an ongoing competition with Java-oriented companies to attract developers to their respective tools, particularly as the adoption of Web services grows. Applications built around Web services protocols can more easily share data and processing between disparate applications than did previous programming methods.
Microsoft is set to offer this summer a long-awaited upgrade to the Macintosh version of its Office suite. The update will give Mac customers access to corporate calendar and contact information stored on a server running the software giant's Exchange software.
Mac users have been clamoring for a way to access information from a Microsoft Exchange server under Mac OS X for some time. Office 2001, the Mac OS 9 program, allowed Exchange access, but the feature was not part of the Office v. X for Mac OS X, the version that debuted in November 2001.
The European Commission said on Tuesday it would look into a new complaint about alleged unfair practices by Microsoft, but that the new claims would not delay an existing probe into the software giant. Commission competition affairs spokeswoman Amelia Torres confirmed the European Union executive body had received the complaint from a group of computer firms. "We will look into it and analyze it on its merits," she told a news briefing. Torres added that the Commission intended to complete an on-going examination into Microsoft's practices in the first part of 2003 and deal with the new complaint separately.
Software giant Microsoft on Tuesday said it would cut the price on some best-selling titles for its Xbox video game console, a week after rival Nintendo cut some game and hardware prices in a bid to spur sales. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said the "Platinum Hits" program would start with more than a dozen titles at a price of about $19.99 each. Top titles for the Xbox, which holds the No. 2 position in the U.S. market, usually retail for $49 or in some cases $39.
Among the titles to be offered at the discounted price are Xbox hits like Microsoft's "Amped Freestyle Snowboarding" and "Project Gotham Racing" and third-party titles like Electronic Arts "Bond: Agent Under Fire" and Activision "Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions."
Microsoft partners will be showing their support for the software giant's development tools platform at the VSLive developer conference here this week. Infragistics Inc., of East Windsor, N.J., a Microsoft partner and maker of reusable presentation layer components for building Microsoft .Net, Common Object Model (COM) and Java applications, announced a new version of its NetAdvantage suite of components for Visual Studio .Net 2003. The new version will ship on March 1 and will be called NetAdvantage 2003 Volume 1. The new release features enhancements to the ASP.Net Grid and compatibility with Visual Studio .Net 2003, which will be released in April.
Microsoft has applied for a patent covering various application programming interfaces (APIs) related to its .NET technologies, leading to complaints from the open source community and various standards bodies that the company might use the patent to dictate how other companies work with .NET. Microsoft filed its application for the patent last year, but disclosed information about the application this week. The patent involves network access and XML, the markup language that forms the basis of .NET Web services.
At this week's VSLive! developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft will be doing more than showing off its next-generation tools suite. The company also will be beating the drum for its ASP .Net scripting language - Redmond's alternative to the open-source PHP.
To demonstrate momentum for ASP .Net, Microsoft is expected to highlight several projects the company has built using ASP. Net. And, plucking a page from the open-source book, Microsoft will likely tout the fact that it is making the full source code available to developers interested in these ASP .Net wares.
Microsoft already introduced one such project - its ASP. Net Web Matrix hobbyist development tool - less than a year ago. Microsoft has shown off Web Matrix at two LinuxWorld Expo shows, including last month's in New York.
A California woman is suing Microsoft, Symantec and some software retailers, claiming the companies "concocted a scheme" to mislead consumers by requiring them to consent to software licensing agreements they haven't read. The suit, filed Friday in Marin County Superior Court in San Rafael, Calif., seeks class-action status on behalf of all Californians who've bought software including Norton Antivirus 2002, Norton Systemworks and Windows XP Upgrade.
Specifically, the suit, which was brought by Cathy Baker, claims that Microsoft, Symantec, CompUSA, Best Buy and other unnamed retailers don't allow people to read "shrink wrap" licenses--agreements printed inside the box or incorporated into the software itself--before they buy a product.
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