Microsoft is working on a phased approach to enhancing its support for dynamic languages on the company's .Net platform.
Jim Hugunin, creator of the IronPython language and a development leader on Microsoft's CLR team, told eWEEK that Microsoft is working to help usher in support for dynamic languages on top of the CLR in a variety of levels or phases.
At the lowest level, Microsoft will be building additional support for dynamic languages into the overall .Net plumbing, Hugunin said. A level up from there, Microsoft will instantiate successful software patterns and practices into code that developers can call on from libraries to help them build applications using dynamic languages on the .NET Framework.
Microsoft announced this week at the SpeechTEK 2006 conference in New York that it will integrate the full capabilities of its Speech Server 2007 into Office Communications Server 2007.
The move is part of the company's unified communications plans, which it originally announced last winter.
At the show, Microsoft also showed off Windows Speech Recognition technology, which will be incorporated into Windows Vista and will support user interactions in eight languages: U.S. English, U.K. English, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.
Microsoft is working on a new reparations strategy, known internally as a customer incentive program, for those customers with volume licensing programs who will be negatively affected by the delay in the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007.
Most enterprises buy volume licensing agreements from Microsoft, along with Software Assurance, which guarantees them the rights to all upgrades for any product covered by the agreement while it is in force.
But even if Microsoft sticks to its current timetable for the delivery of Vista and Office 2007, the delays mean that some customers who bought Software Assurance and who would have qualified for those upgrades if they had shipped as originally expected will not get them before their contracts expire.
Microsoft said that it is dropping any plans to update its Virtual PC virtualization software to enable it work on Apple's new Intel-based Macs.
The news came on the heel of the announcement by VMware that it's releasing virtual machine software for the Mac.
At Microsoft, the company's Mac Business Unit is giving Virtual PC the pink slip, because, a spokesperson said in e-mail to TechWeb: "Developing a high-quality virtualization solution, such as Virtual PC, for the Intel-based Mac is similar to creating a version 1.0 release due to how closely the product integrates with Mac hardware."
Microsoft could have an early advantage over competitors IBM and Oracle as some software companies begin
shifting pricing to accommodate servers with multicore processors, analysts said.
IBM recently created a ripple of confusion in the industry when it announced it would one day charge for software based on
how fast it runs, not the number of processor cores on which it's running. The company created a new license pricing unit
called "processor value unit" and will set software prices this way beginning with the release of Intel's quad-core
Xeon processor, which is expected to be available later this year.
Microsoft wants PC buyers to recognize a machine running its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system from afar.
The software giant has already set out the minimum hardware requirements for a PC to run the operating system.
Now it's begun sharing ideas on how to design a Vista PC as part of what it calls the Vista Industrial Design Toolkit.
The kit, which has been distributed to about 70 different companies, offers PC and peripherals manufacturers as well as product design firms a number of ideas on ways to shape PCs and related hardware to complement the operating system's new features.
Search is about more than search-engine algorithms. It also must take into account user click-through and browsing behaviors, if search-result accuracy is to be improved.
That's according to Microsoft researchers, who are set to present details regarding some of the analysis techniques that Microsoft Research is developing to help improve search-result quality. The Microsoft researchers are set to present three papers on this topic at this week's ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval conference in Seattle.
Microsoft's attempt to differentiate the version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 that will ship with Windows Vista has been met with derision, disbelief, and displeasure. The software giant has listened to the complaints and has decided it won't use the IE 7+ moniker it had previously announced.
"We planned to call the version of IE 7 in Windows Vista 'Internet Explorer 7+'," Tony Chor, group program manager for IE, wrote in the IE blog late last week. "The feedback we got on the blog was overwhelming [and] many of you didn't like it. So, as we've said on our Web site, we heard you. I'm pleased to announce that we're switching the name back to 'Internet Explorer 7.' No plus. No dot x. Just 'Internet Explorer 7.'"
A Norwegian tech reporter fabricated an interview with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, according to the software maker. The interview was printed in the Norwegian magazine "Mann" and reportedly took place during a commercial plane flight in Europe earlier this year. There's just one problem. "It's totally fake," a Microsoft spokesperson said. In the interview, Gates supposedly talks about the European Union (EU) antitrust case, his cluelessness about cash, and competitors such as Google. Microsoft says it wants an apology. Meanwhile, I'm crafting my first-ever interview with Gates, in which the software titan bequeaths me $1 billion so I can retire. You read it here first.
When a group of Microsoft employees first attended the Black Hat hacker convention in the late 1990s, the company's security reputation was so bad that one of them says the experience was like constantly hearing people criticize his mother.
Apparently, things have changed.
Members of the Black Hat audience responded to Microsoft's briefings on Windows Vista security Thursday not with hostility but with polite interest. The real test won't come until after Windows Vista's retail release next year, but several people said Microsoft appears to have made the operating system more secure.