WinInsider

Microsoft says MSN's new look is ready to share. Since last year, the company has been testing new designs for the venerable portal, including one that features a cleaner, more video-heavy look for the site. Over the coming days, Microsoft is rolling out the new look to all MSN visitors in the United States.

Although portals like MSN, AOL, and the Yahoo home page are sometimes scoffed at by the digerati, such sites remain an important generator of searches and display advertising dollars.

In response to antitrust concerns by European regulators, the company recently unveiled its browser ballot page to give European users a choice of browsers to install. But the company was criticized for using sloppy code that didn't adequately randomize the order in which each browser's icon and link displays.

The algorithm used is supposed to change the order of the browsers from left to right each time the page opens. That change occurred, but apparently not randomly enough. The code often put rival browsers at the start of the list and frequently kept Internet Explorer to the far right.

Microsoft is not the first company that comes to mind when you think open source, but the software giant has been supporting a foundation focused on open source.

Codeguru has the latest developments related to Microsoft's ambitious CodePlex Foundation.

When it comes to building a non-profit open source foundation, it takes time to get things together. That's certainly the case with the Microsoft-sponsored CodePlex Foundation, which today named four people to its permanent board of directors.

The CodePlex Foundation started in September of 2009 with an interim board of directors, but is now moving ahead to the next stage of its evolution as it aims to expand beyond its status as a Microsoft organ into an organization with broader open source participation.

Microsoft has a tradition of releasing service packs, a combination of all the cumulative bug fixes plus a few new bells and whistles, about a year after an operating system is released. Windows 7, however, has proven a pretty solid product and hasn't had a lot of fixes, and there has been talk of a very long delay before releasing the next update.

Or is there? A blog with a reputation for accuracy now says that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is coming a lot sooner than we thought. Datamation has the details.

Computing industry pioneer Chuck Thacker was honored Tuesday with the industry's highest prize--the A. M. Turing Award.

Thacker, who these days works in Microsoft's Silicon Valley research lab, helped create personal computing at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center and is one of the co-creators of both the Alto personal computer and Ethernet networking.

In an interview Tuesday, Thacker said he was surprised that he would even be considered for the Turing Award, which typically goes to folks on the software or theory side of things.

What do you get when you combine the best features of a search engine, media player and gaming system? Why, Microsoft's latest mobile operating system, according to Mindy Mount, the CFO of the company's Entertainment and Devices division.

Enterprise Mobile Today has the story on Mount's pitch to investors about Windows Phone 7, which she says "proclaimed that Microsoft is playing to win."

Microsoft is betting it will stand out among its mobile competitors with the newly-introduced Windows Phone 7 Series by combining the best of several strong offerings into a single package, a company executive said.

It's throw-Microsoft-a-bone Monday, not that I can promise much meat on it. Microsoft may have fallen behind in mobile, been talking about a three-screen strategy off of two screens, and clumsily competed as usual, but some early 2010 actions deserve at least a little praise. So here's where I give it.

First, some context. There's doing right -- and there's doing right. Some of the stuff here I'll assert Microsoft did right I previously dinged the company for getting wrong. That's because what's right for Microsoft might be wrong in a greater competitive landscape, like taking right action A too slowly or not soon enough. With that introduction, here are 10 things Microsoft has done right in 2010 (so far), presented in no order of importance.

Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that its new phone operating system is as different under the hood as it is to the eye. In a blog post and at an event with a handful of journalists, the software maker said that those developing software for Windows Phone 7 Series devices will do so using either Silverlight or XNA, the toolset used to create Xbox games.

The all-new look for Windows Phone 7 series isn't the only thing that's new. Developers will also use new tools--Silverlight and XNA--to write apps that work on the devices.

"Overnight those developers have become Windows Phone developers," said Charlie Kindel, the Microsoft executive in charge of the mobile developer strategy. "One of our principles is to build on the shoulders of giants."

As I noted last night, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Series is a clean break with the past, from the look and feel of the product down to the way software makers will write programs for the device.

Microsoft confirmed on Thursday that the primary tools for developers will be Silverlight and XNA, while the look of the device, as outlined at last month's Mobile World Congress, is closer to the Zune HD than to any prior version of Windows Mobile.

More details of Microsoft's rumored dual-screen "Courier" tablet emerged on Friday, including a rumored ship date of later this year, according to a post on Engadget.

According to the Web site, the product will ship later this year, is roughly 5 inches by 7 inches when closed, runs a version of the Windows CE operating system, and uses an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor.

In a January interview, Microsoft Entertainment and Devices unit President Robbie Bach confirmed that an earlier video was indeed from Microsoft, but refused to say where the product was in terms of development.