WinInsider

Paul Vick, a principal architect on Visual Basic, is moving over to Microsoft?s broad software modeling initiative known as "Oslo." Vick, who helped Microsoft deliver its popular VB tool set, will now help produce Oslo, which is expected by some to be as big a deal for Microsoft as .NET.Perhaps as evidence of how important Microsoft's "Oslo" modeling strategy is to the future of the company's development strategy. Paul Vick, a principal architect of Microsoft's Visual Basic, is moving over to take a role in building out the Oslo declarative language.

Starting on Wednesday, enterprises can sign up for Microsoft's new Select Plus licensing program, a plan that one analyst said seems to be designed more to help the software giant than its customers. Select Plus is similar to Microsoft's Select volume licensing program in that it lets companies combine the purchasing power of different departments to qualify for bigger volume-based discounts. Select Plus has a couple of differences but not much that will be particularly attractive to most companies, according to Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. For example, unlike Select, Select Plus doesn't require customers to try to estimate their annual purchases in advance in order to calculate the volume discount they will receive.

With the next edition of Microsoft's development tools suite, every commercial edition will feature some type of architectural tool that competes directly with a slew of UML-based add-ons, including a major revenue center for IBM.

Though Visual Studio 2008 was only formally introduced last January, the betas of Microsoft's development environment were often found in full production use as early as late 2006. Now with Windows 7 looking to be a reality for around this time next year, Microsoft finds itself accelerating the pace of its rollouts and tightening the beta schedule.

Lead Microsoft and Xerox technologists tout the benefits of research in the quest to deliver the next big thing in IT and computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Emerging Technologies event. Signifying its commitment to invest in finding next-generation technology, Microsoft has opened a research lab near MIT called Microsoft Research New England. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Emerging Technologies event here Sept. 23 to 25, Microsoft and Xerox stood among several leading companies describing their view of the future of the computing world.

Microsoft plans to incorporate the jQuery JavaScript library into its Visual Studio platform, according to several blogs published on Sunday.

Microsoft product support will be extended to jQuery later this year, enabling developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases.

John Resig, of the jQuery development team, said Nokia also was taking steps to adopt jQuery as part of its official application platform.

Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld, specializing in news and features related to application development, Java, and .Net. He can be reached at paul_krill@infoworld.com.

Under the banner of "democratizing" application life-cycle management, Microsoft is unveiling today the next major release of its Visual Studio Team System platform. Visual Studio Team System 2010, which has been code-named "Rosario," focuses on collaboration between the different persons involved in the software development process. The company also is revealing "pillars" of Visual Studio 2010, which is the next version of the companys development environment, and the accompanying .Net Framework 4.0 programming model. Visual Studio 2010 recently had been referred to as Visual Studio 10.

Microsoft and Washington state are cracking down on scammers who bombard computer users with fake warning messages in hopes of selling them useless software.

On Monday the state's attorney general and lawyers from Microsoft's Internet Safety Enforcement team will announce several lawsuits against so-called "scareware" vendors, who are being charged under Washington state's Computer Spyware Act. The vendors targeted by the lawsuits are not being named until Monday, but the Washington attorney general referred to them in a media alert sent out Friday as "aggressive marketers of scareware -- useless computer programs that bilk consumers by using pop-up ads to warn about nonexistent, yet urgent-sounding, computer flaws.

Microsoft has given small- and mid-sized business customers more ways to earn cash to buy its software through partners by adding new products and product groups to its Big Easy program.

This week, Microsoft unveiled Big Easy 2.0, an update to a program originally launched in February. Through the program, small businesses purchasing certain products through authorized specialist partners get between 10 to 22 percent of money back that they can use to buy other services from those partners. Microsoft to date has invested about $13 million in the program.

Microsoft has informed its hardware and wireless carrier partners that it has delayed the release of Windows Mobile 7, the upcoming major update to its smart phone platform. The delay suggests that warring parties inside of Microsoft continue to disagree about the future of the system: Some believe that the company needs to start over from scratch with a more modern and modular platform, while others think the current platform can be melded to meet the needs of the market.

Whatever happens, this is a tough time to delay a next-generation smart phone platform, a situation that ailing Palm knows all too well. With Blackberry stealing away corporate customers, Apple opening up the consumer smart phone market with its innovative iPhone, and Google entering the market with its first Android phone, Microsoft is in a suddenly tenuous position.

Ballmer also noted that Microsoft was moving away from boxed, packaged software to a model where software and services are deployed and maintained via the Internet cloud. The company has a lot of work to do to catch up to Google in Web search, he admitted--a process that will take several years and "a lot of money," he said--but Microsoft "isn't afraid" of embracing a new business model. Ballmer says he's willing to spend 5 to 10 percent of Microsoft's annual income on research and development to get it there, too, and the company will spend $8.5 billion in this fiscal year alone on R&D. "If you are the Number Two guy you are going to have to at least ante up," Ballmer, ever the card player, added.