The company is expected to distribute the latest "technology preview" of Visual Studio 2005, a major upgrade of the company's flagship development tool. The software giant last week said that it will delay the release of Visual Studio 2005 until the first half of next year and will begin a test program in the coming months.
In addition, Microsoft will provide more details on the .Net Compact Framework 2.0, according to a company representative. The .Net Compact Framework, which Gates launched a year ago, is the software plumbing needed to run Web services applications on handheld devices. The .Net software allows developers to write applications with Microsoft's widely used Visual Studio.Net 2003, rather than specialized tools.
Microsoft recognizes the benefits of open source but is not prepared to turn over its crown-jewel Windows operating system to the paradigm, according to a Microsoft official speaking at the Open Source Business Conference here on Wednesday.
Instead, Microsoft provides access to source code on a limited basis, said the official, Jason Matusow, manager of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.
Microsoft with its Shared Source program is doing things it has not done in the past, he said. "We're not open-sourcing all Microsoft technologies. We'll be strategic in how we share that," he said.
The Redmond software vendor continues in its quest to bring all of its integrators, ISVs, OEMs and other partners under one umbrella. In January, the company debuted its Next Generation Partner Program. The new program combined, for the first time under a single umbrella, all of Microsoft's various partner programs, including its Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains and Navision programs.
Next month, Redmond will roll out two promised pieces of its new partner plan, competencies and partner points, according to Kevin Wueste, general manager of partner strategies for the company.
The company is pulling out all the stops to continue to educate its users, reasoning that a more educated customer base will be a more secure customer base. Mike Nash, corporate VP in charge of Microsoft's security business and technology unit, reiterated in a Web cast on Tuesday Microsoft's plans to continue to deliver security-assessment and vulnerability-analysis tools as part of its educational outreach.
In a federal filing yesterday, RealNetworks Inc. blamed archrival Microsoft Corp. for its poor financial performance over the past three years, enlarging on claims made in its recently filed lawsuit against the software company.
In its annual report, or 10K statement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the 10-year- old Seattle media company blamed the decline of its own software business on Microsoft's, including Windows Media Player, along with free software for creating and streaming audio and video files over the Internet, as part of the Windows operating systems.
Sources close to the talks say that EU officials are using an unusual and potentially effective negotiation strategy: Rather than offering to drop requirements, the EU is asking Microsoft to make more concessions in its settlement than the company would be forced to accept in a court ruling. This strategy stands in sharp contrast to the negotiation techniques the US Department of Justice (DOJ) employed when it essentially handed Microsoft a huge victory during its antitrust settlement, even though the software giant was thoroughly defeated in court and found to be an abusive monopolist. In one example of the EU's strategy that "The Wall Street Journal" cited, the EU's draft ruling stipulates that potential changes to Windows apply only to European markets but, for the settlement to be approved, the EU is requiring that Microsoft make the changes worldwide.
Microsoft has released a technical case study of its internal security procedures, in which it spells out a three-pronged approach to thwarting malicious hacker attacks and urges enterprise admins to spend more time anticipating and preventing attacks.
The company chided enterprises for adopting a reactionary approach to malicious attacks instead of spending more time anticipating and preventing attacks. "With the vast number of tools available to attackers today, an active approach is needed to help secure networks from exploits. It is less expensive to reduce the risk beforehand than to mitigate the damage afterward."
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has released more information about its forthcoming Office 2004 for Mac productivity software. The company has made an online demo (in Flash format) of the product available, in which the curious get shown a few until now unrevealed features by lead program manager Kris Barton.
The company's watchwords for the upcoming release are "manage, create and share", the company says: "The entire Office for Mac suite has been enhanced to provide you with deeply integrated tools that can help you manage, create, and share information more effectively than ever."
Developers on the Microsoft platform may be getting an information overload at a group of conferences being held simultaneously in San Francisco next week. The VSLive conference, for Visual Studio .Net developers, will be held in conjunction with the Mobile Developers Conference mobile development show and the AVIOS SpeechTek Spring conference for development of speech-enabled applications. Three other shows also will be held under the sub-heading of VSLive: Visual Basic Insiders Technical Summit (VBITS), C# Live, for C# developers, and SQL Live, pertaining to the SQL Server database.
Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key applications, giving the software giant a hedge against a growing international threat from open-source software.
The Local Language Program will provide local and regional governments with "language interface packs" that government and academic developers can use to produce localized versions of the Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 productivity package, according to a Microsoft statement.