WinInsider

If you're an MFC developer for Windows, your applications won't have to look like they were made for Windows 95 anymore. The final edition of the latest VC++ Feature Pack enables you to replace your toolbars with the Office ribbon.Up until recently, the main evolutionary emphasis in Windows programming has been towards its Presentation Foundation, which emphasize distributed components and the .NET model. But the traditional Windows programming model, using Microsoft Foundation Classes, has lived on. And it hasn't exactly languished, either: MFC programming, where traditional DLL resources are packaged into a more monolithic distribution, is still a dominant discipline for many enterprises' in-house developers.

Apple has taken the place of Microsoft for disclosing more vulnerabilities than any other vendor, according to an IBM security report. The company rose from second place in 2007 to take the top spot away from Microsoft, which had fallen into third place behind open source content management system Joomla. Final results were close, according to the IBM X-Force 2008 mid-year report, with Apple achieving vulnerability disclosure score of 3.2 percent, followed by Joomla with 2.7 percent and Microsoft at 2.5 percent. IBM remained in fourth spot, followed by Sun, a newcomer to the top five, while Oracle and Cisco fell from their former positions to sixth and seventh respectively.

Microsoft's CodePlex celebrates its second year of helping .Net developers dabble in open source. The Microsoft open-source site enables developers to contribute to and share code for such projects as IronPython.The Microsoft community development site, CodePlex, celebrated its second anniversary in early August.

On Aug. 6, S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, blogged that CodePlex had reached its second year of operation as a Microsoft-run hosting site. The community site houses open-source software that can be used by developers to build applications that run on Microsoft technology and other systems.

Microsoft's security team will help third-party developers of Windows applications and add-ons find and fix bugs in their software, the company said Thursday.

The program, dubbed Microsoft Vulnerability Research, is a formalization of things the company currently does, not a brand-new initiative, said Andrew Cushman, the company's director of security response and outreach, from the Black Hat security conference.

"This is work we're already doing," he said. "We'll report vulnerabilities we find in third-party software and we'll work with them to identify, resolve and mitigate those vulnerabilities.

Microsoft's SharePoint Server will be powering a portal that more than tens of thousands of people will use to access information about the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the company said Thursday.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games is using SharePoint for its INFO 2008 Web portal, which will provide up-to-the-minute information to press, athletes and committee partners attending the games, Microsoft said.The company has published a case study about the deployment on its Web site and also posted details about INFO 2008 on an internal company blog, the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog.

Samsung isn't just pushing the envelope in storage capacity of SSDs (solid-state drives), it is also working with software makers to boost SSD performance on operating systems.

The company on Wednesday said it was in talks with Microsoft to improve the performance of SSDs on the Windows OS.

The speed and way in which SSDs fetch and cache data are different than hard drives, said Michael Wang, flash marketing manager at Sun. Samsung hopes to work with Microsoft to boost SSD performance on Windows by discovering optimal packet sizes for data transfers and the best ways to read and write files, for example.

Microsoft ratcheted up its PR and client communications efforts to demonstrate that it's serious about security. On Monday, in time for this week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft's Security Response Center launched a new ecosystem strategy team blog outlining its more collaborative approach to software security issues.

"The industry is reaching a point where delivering an acceptable level of security today is beyond what one company can do alone, wrote Microsoft's Andrew Cushman in the blog's inaugural post. "There's real merit in the clich?, 'It takes a village'."

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, whose failed bid for Yahoo Inc. helped drive the stock down 17 percent since February, is about to make it up to shareholders with a buyback of as much as $20 billion, according to a top-rated software analyst.

Investors should buy now, while Microsoft is trading at the lowest estimated price-earnings ratio since the world's largest software maker went public 22 years ago, said Heather Bellini of UBS AG, who was ranked the best software analyst by Institutional Investor magazine in 2007. She expects Microsoft to complete the repurchase -- at least five times larger than its average per quarter in the last fiscal year -- over the next three months.

Olympic athletes won't be the only ones sweating in Beijing this week. Microsoft is also in the spotlight -- and under pressure to prove itself -- as the games begin.

The company is working with NBC and providing the underlying technology for what they're describing as an unprecedented online presentation of the Olympics, to include more than 3,000 hours of on-demand video and more than 2,200 hours of live coverage from China.

For people watching the Olympics, NBC and Microsoft tout the ability to view events on their own schedules, and follow niche sports that they might not see on television. The site, NBCOlympics.com, will be free to use, supported by advertising.

Microsoft has told its shareholders and the SEC that it is developing products "with basic functionality that are sold at lower prices than the standard version." But today, the company indicated this may not be anything new.Whether Microsoft's plans for low-priced, general-purpose applications extend beyond its already acknowledged pilot of Works SE 9 is a question still hanging in the air this evening.

In its annual report, filed last week with the SEC, Microsoft said that "open source vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software that mimics the features and functionality of our products." Microsoft has been developing lower-priced products in response to this competition, according to the annual report.