Tabbed browsing has come to Microsoft.
Although version 7 of Internet Explorer has not been released yet, Microsoft has included tabbed browsing in an update to its MSN Search Toolbar for version 6 of Internet Explorer, which was made publicly available today.
The tabbed browsing feature in the new 2.5 version of the MSN toolbar will enable users "to quickly access, manage and save commonly visited sites into automatic 'routines' of Web pages that can all be opened simultaneously," according to an MSN Fact Sheet.
Even BJ Holtgrewe, a senior member of Microsoft's developer team, says he resisted upgrading from the Visual Basic programming language to the first VB.NET release when it was launched a few years back.
Eventually, he bit the bullet and upgraded his skills to the new programming features for building user interfaces.
His experience echoes the concerns of Microsoft officials as they look for ways to coax holdout developers to transition from Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET and its Visual Studio 2005 platform.
After more than a year of wrangling over how to comply with the European Commission's antitrust ruling against it, Microsoft is set to release versions of Windows XP that will satisfy the EC's demands to unbundle Windows Media Player.
Microsoft said the "N" editions of XP are set to be made available to manufacturers on June 15, with retail availability expected on July 1. The company provided the commission with copies of both N products last week.
Microsoft also said Windows XP Home Edition N and XP Professional N will comply with the March 24 EC antitrust ruling. The decision said Microsoft broke European antitrust law governing competition.
In an effort to get enterprises to use its solutions for branch offices, Microsoft has released the Branch Office Infrastructure Solution, a prescriptive architectural guidance based on the Windows Server System Reference Architecture.
"This is a set of guidance that walks organizations through how to best think about designing, building, deploying and managing Windows-based technologies within a remote office infrastructure," Ravi Gopal, product manager for Microsoft's Branch Office, told eWEEK in an interview at the Tech Ed conference here.
No one was more disappointed in the Longhorn content Microsoft provided at April's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, but the software giant appears ready to make up for it this September. That's when Microsoft will host its Professional Developers Conference 2005 in Los Angeles. And with a quick look at the conference tracks and sessions, you can see that it's going to be a much more exciting event than WinHEC.
"PDC 2005 will feature developer-focused presentations, discussions, and technology explorations into the future of the Microsoft platform, including the latest developer news on Windows 'Longhorn' and Microsoft Office [12]," a Microsoft representative told me Tuesday. "The PDC is the definitive Microsoft event for software developers."
Welcome to the world's largest beta program. Microsoft is the ultimate "dogfood" company, testing its products on its own network, a global information system encompassing approximately 300,000 devices, 104,000 e-mail accounts and 89,000 end users spread out over 83 countries.
Responsibility for the smooth running of this enterprise falls on the shoulders of Microsoft IT, which bills itself as "Microsoft's first and best customer." This has advantages and disadvantages; the advantage is that Microsoft products are tried out in a huge environment before they're released to the public. The disadvantage, at least from the point of view of Microsoft IT, is that many of the products it relies on for day-to-day operations are, by definition, unfinished and still buggy -- yes, even buggier than the 1.0 version products many companies instinctively avoid.
A jury in U.S. federal court found that Microsoft infringed on a Guatemalan inventor's 1994 patent on technology linking the company's Access and Excel programs, and ordered the world's largest software maker to pay $8.9 million in damages.
A jury in the U.S. District Court of Central California told Microsoft to pay the award to Carlos Armando Amado for software that uses a single spreadsheet to link Excel, a spreadsheet and calculation program, with the Access database application.
The jury award takes into account Microsoft software sold between March 1997 and July 2003. U.S. District Judge David Carter will review the case to determine how much, if any, additional damages should be awarded for programs sold to date, plaintiff's attorney Vincent Belusko said.
Tired of playing second fiddle in Web hosting, Microsoft is revamping its server software in an attempt to snatch market share away from the popular Apache-Linux combination.
When the software giant releases Longhorn Server in 2007, it will introduce a re-architected edition of its Internet Information Services Web server, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president in charge of Windows Server development.
The changes will make IIS more modular, which will speed up performance for Web applications, he said.
After numerous delays, the next editions of Microsoft's main software development products--SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005--will be available in November, the company said here Tuesday.
Microsoft also said that during the first half of next year it will introduce software to handle data generated from radio frequency ID devices. Such software will enable Windows Server software to collect and process data from RFID devices, Paul Flessner, Microsoft's senior vice president of server applications, said in a speech at the company's TechEd customer conference here.
Microsoft gave more details Tuesday on its plans to launch Windows-based "hypervisor" software for running multiple operating systems.
Bob Muglia, senior vice president in the Windows Server Division, said at Microsoft's Tech Ed conference here that the software will be "built directly in Windows and will allow companies to virtualize multiple operating systems."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first mentioned the hypervisor plans in April at the company's Management Summit conference. Such software lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer, a feature that's useful for consolidating servers in order to save money, and for extracting as much work as possible from a single system.