Microsoft has opened public betas for the upcoming Express edition of its Visual Studio product line as well as SQL Server. The products include "Visual Basic 2005 Express", "Visual C# 2005 Express", "Visual C++ 2005 Express", "Visual J# 2005 Express", "SQL Server 2005 Express" and an interesting "Visual Web Dev 2005 Express" for developing ASP.NET content in Visual Basic, C# or J#. The expected retail pricing for these products is $49-$99.

Here is a lenghty but in-depth look at what it takes to customize the Windows GUI.

As Futurama's Professor Hubert Farnsworth usually says: "Good news everyone...". Apple introduced today its upcoming 64-bit enhanced Tiger operating system due in the first quarter of 2005. Click in for our report from today's WWDC opening which includes 18 pictures of the event.

This article describes Performance Inspector, which contains a suite of performance tools for Linux. The author describes how to download and install the required software and tools, and how to collect performance data. She also provides details on how to use the five basic tools, which you can use to analyze performance of your C/C++ and Java apps, as well as performance of your system as a whole.

MadPenguin reviews the free version of Xandros, complete with screenshots.

The GNOME 2.6.2 Desktop and Developer Platform has been released: this point release from the stable branch of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform contains a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the previously released 2.6.1 version.

This ReactOS release features the new LiveCD image, improved and more stable kernel and win32k kernel graphics subsystem, lots of networking foundation work, improved setup and better bundled explorer, command shell and drivers. Also included is newly ported user DLL code from WINE.

New embedded device software fuels innovation with expanded feature set and additional source code access, Microsoft said. Elsewhere, you can see a Windows CE Feature-By-Feature comparison.

This morning at WWDC Steve Jobs introduced three new Apple Cinema displays. The new 20, 23 and 30-inch displays will use the standard DVI connection instead of Apple's proprietary ADC connection. The 30 inch display, which can run at a resolution up to 2560x1600, will require a special dual link Nvidia card. To read more about what's new at WWDC, head over to MacCentral.

Will magnets zap your data? Will turning off your PC without shutting down Windows hurt anything? Can hackers really hose your data? Do you really need one of those static wrist straps? PC World answers all of these questions and more. Are there any other myths that you've always wondered about? Post them in the comments!

The antitrust penalties that the EU laid down on Microsoft a few months ago will not be implemented until an appeals court has a chance to decide whether the penalties should be suspended for the entire length of the appeal, which is expected to be several years. Had this step not been taken, the penalties would have gone into effect today.

Speaking in Australia, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stressed that more widespread use of firewalls would solve some of the Internet's security problems. He also stressed that his company needs to reduce the frequency with which major security updates are released. He also noted that while most OSes can turn around a security fix in 60-90 days, "we have it down to less than 48 hours." He stressed the importance of using the Window auto-update feature and noted that SP2 defaults the auto-update and firewall to on.

Matt Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and more. A final is expected in two weeks.

Microsoft is eliminating many restrictions on the use of the "shared source" license for its Windows CE operating system. Significantly, ror the first time, any developer, anywhere in the world will be allowed to include modified Windows CE code within commercial products without having to sublicense the modifications back to Microsoft. The change, which accompanies the impending full release of Windows CE 5.0, will counter competition from Linux and is likely to expand Microsoft's slice of the roughly $1B embedded OS market pie.