Microsoft on Tuesday released a photo-sharing program aimed at showing off the graphics abilities being built into the next version of Windows.
special coverage Rallying point for Redmond Developers gather in L.A. to hear the latest on Windows Vista, Office 12 and more.
Designed as a sample application to show off Microsoft's next-generation presentation and communications engine, Microsoft's "Max" allows users to create a display of their digital photos that can be e-mailed to friends and family.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates welcomed several thousand developers to the new world of XML, the data format at the heart of the company's next generation of products.
While Microsoft has used XML functionality in its products -- in Windows Vista and upcoming server products, formerly Longhorn -- he said, "XML is built into the core."
At the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, held this week here, the company will hand out over 30 gigabytes of code at the conference, including a new build of Windows Vista and previews of SQL Server and Office 12.
A former Microsoft executive can immediately begin recruiting staff for a Google development center in China, rather than waiting until after a January trial, a Washington state judge ruled Tuesday.
In his 13-page ruling, Judge Steven Gonzalez restricted Lee to recruiting for Google in China and to talking to government officials about getting a license to do business there but said Lee cannot work on technologies such as search or speech. Lee also cannot set budgets or salaries, or decide what research Google will do in China, according to the order.
Looking to drive demand for a wave of forthcoming products, Microsoft will fill the pockets of developers this week with early versions of several programs, including the latest "build" of Windows Vista.
At the software giant's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft is planning to provide programmers with the code for an early version of Vista, as well as Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, both of which will be released in November. Vista, the client version of the next release of Windows developed under the code name Longhorn, is expected to be released next year.
Parts of the city, including the location of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, plunged into darkness Monday afternoon as a result of a major power outage in the region.
The outage struck at about 12:30 p.m. and continued past 2 p.m. Microsoft group product manager Greg Sullivan was giving a briefing about Windows Vista when his Powerpoint presentation and most of the lights at the Los Angeles Convention Center went dark. "We haven't figured out a software solution to this one--yet," Sullivan joked.
Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system will deliver a series of enhancements that developers can tap to build more reliable systems, the company said.
At the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, the software giant will highlight some of the benefits for developers, the company said.
For instance, the WinFX SDK contains documentation, samples and tools designed to help developers create managed applications and libraries using WinFX, which is the set of next-generation managed APIs provided by Microsoft, said John Montgomery, director of product management in Microsoft's Developer Division.
Every couple of months, we get ... ah ... news out of Munich, Germany, regarding its ever-delayed migration from Windows desktops to Linux-based PCs. This month, we heard more of the same: The city is now delaying the migration to 2006, a year later than the last plan and a full 3 years after it announced, with some fanfare, that it was switching 14,000 desktops to Linux. But this eventual migration is even slower than it sounds. The first desktops to be switched will number only 250, and that migration won't happen until mid-2006 at the earliest. And the migration will move slowly, if it ever starts at all, with users first moving to OpenOffice.org on Windows desktops. It isn't too late to give it a rest, Munich. OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox run just fine on Windows, and you don't have to reinstall anything. Just a thought.
There will be two general categories of Windows Vista editions, which map closely to the two that exist today for XP ("Home," which comprises Starter, Home, and Media Center Editions, Pro, which includes Professional, Professional x64, and Tablet PC Editions). In Windows Vista, the two categories are Home and Business. In the Home category, Microsoft will create four product editions: Windows Vista Starter Edition, Windows Vista Home Basic Edition, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, and Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (previously known as "Uber" Edition). In the Business category, there will are three editions: Windows Vista Small Business Edition, Windows Vista Professional Edition, and Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. In all, there are 7 product editions planned for Windows Vista.
Computers running the Firefox browser could be open to remote attack as a result of a buffer overflow vulnerability reported Friday by security researcher Tom Ferris.
Vulnerable versions of Firefox include all those up to 1.06, and even version 1.5 Beta 1, released on Thursday, he wrote in a posting to his Web site, Security Protocols, and to the Full Disclosure security mailing list just after 6 a.m. GMT Friday.
Ferris said he reported the bug to staff of the Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox browsers, on Sept. 4, but had no idea whether they were working on a fix for the problem.
Microsoft is encouraging software developers to write programs that work with its MSN-branded services -- hoping to boost the appeal of its online products with much the same strategy that lifted the Windows operating system to dominance.
Escalating its competition with Google, Microsoft next week plans to release a series of tools that will let outside software developers write programs that build on and use the underlying technologies in the company's MSN Search, MSN Virtual Earth and MSN Messenger services.