Microsoft is adding on Wednesday connectivity testing and publish-and-subscribe capabilities to its BizTalk Services platform for integrating
services within and outside a firewall.
Announced just last week as an early-release Community Technology Preview for developers, BizTalk Services features Internet-hosted
services for running composite applications. An Internet service bus capability that links applications across networks is
highlighted.
Connectivity testing, called Direct Connect, ensures that a message gets to where it is supposed to go. "The connectivity
service will allow now offer a Direct Connect feature, which will allow a developer to build an application to test the connectivity
between two endpoints," prior to sending a message, said Steve Martin, director of product management in the Microsoft Connected
Systems Division.
In an effort to drum up support for its Windows Live hosted services, Microsoft has changed the terms of use for APIs to key
services, including Windows Live Search, to allow companies to use information and leverage Microsoft's back-end infrastructure
for their Web-driven businesses.
Microsoft is releasing the APIs under new terms for the following services: Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Photo, Silverlight
Streaming, Windows Live Search, Windows Live Virtual Earth, and Windows Live ID. Microsoft has outlined the terms of use for
the APIs on the Windows Live Dev site.
The intermingling of media-rich consumer devices and socially oriented Web services is opening up new avenues in marketing, according to Robert Bach, head of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division.
Bach spoke here Tuesday at Mix '07, Microsoft's conference devoted to Web developers and designers, an audience that Bach's group does not typically address.
But Bach argued that the capabilities opened up by Web applications, such as social-networking sites, and the close integration of media in software is changing the face of consumer marketing.
Rumors circulated today that Microsoft is in talks to buy 24/7 Media, an online advertising and search-engine marketing company.
The New York Post has reported that Microsoft was considering making the purchase for $1 billion. Analysts place the company's value at about $600 million. The software giant joins WPP Group in the fight for the company, according to the report.
A Microsoft spokesperson would not "comment on rumors and speculation." And 24/7 Media did not return a request for comment.
Ozzie, best known as the creator of IBM's Lotus Notes, joined Microsoft in 2005 and assumed Bill Gates' role as chief software architect last year, when Gates announced plans to shift to full-time philanthropy in 2008. On stage Monday at the company's Mix 07 Web development conference, blogger Michael Arrington asked Ozzie if he is "living within the shadow" of his predecessor.
"Of course I'm living within the shadow of my predecessor," Ozzie replied. "Clearly, within Microsoft, there will never be another Bill Gates."
At the same time, Ozzie said, Microsoft is making progress in online services, his strategic specialty. In an interview afterward, Ozzie spoke with the Seattle P-I about that online strategy and his leadership role inside the company.
The software industry has a strong future regardless of whether its products are delivered as a service, as a component or in packaged form, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, said April 30.
Mundie, delivering the lunch-time address at the New Software Industry conference here, said that whatever the delivery mechanism, the bottom line was that there will be an ongoing demand for software in the future.
Acknowledging that services have a role in this future, Mundie noted that current communication capabilities had reached the point where services could now be offered in the cloud to complement them. "So, clearly, there will be services in the future," he said.
On April 28, Microsoft confirmed in a blog posting that the ADO.NET Entity Framework is now officially out of the next version of Visual Studio codenamed Orcas.
The Entity Framework is now expected in the first half of 2008 as an Orcas extension to the .NET Framework, according to Microsoft blogger Mike Pizzo, an architect with the Data Programmability team.
The news comes just nine days after Microsoft released Orcas Beta 1, which includes Entity Framework functionality.
The software giant announced its new Dynamic Language Runtime that enables dynamic languages to talk to each other and support for it on the Microsoft Silverlight platform. Microsoft is making the technology broadly available to the community via its permissive license and CodePlex community site.
"One of the things we're doing with Silverlight is, beyond having it based on .Net, we're going to be shipping support for dynamic languages inside the client-side runtime," said Brian Goldfarb, lead product manager of the Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft. "So, basically bringing dynamic languages to the browser and doing that in a very easy-to-use way."
Moreover, "At the show we're going to be shipping bits that let people use JavaScript and Python," Goldfarb said.
Microsoft is integrating the .Net framework into its new Silverlight browser technology for running multimedia applications
on the Web, the company revealed Monday. The move is part of an expanded effort to build a significant developer base so Microsoft
can catch up to Adobe in providing a revenue-generating business in the RIA market.
Chief Software Architect and CTO Ray Ozzie made the announcement in a keynote speech to kick off the MIX07 conference in Las Vegas. He said Microsoft is shipping a cross-platform version of the .Net framework for the browser in Silverlight, which went
into its first beta Monday.
More and more PCs are coming not just with Windows but with premium editions of the operating system, as Microsoft tries to further boost revenues from its biggest product.
Microsoft says 71 percent of the Windows copies licensed by computer makers in its most recent quarter were premium editions, such as Windows Vista Home Premium, which include additional features and command higher prices than basic versions of the operating system.
That was 18 percentage points higher than in the same quarter last year -- and analysts say it's no fluke. They point to the way Microsoft has crafted the various editions of Windows Vista, released for consumers in January.