It's looking more like the next-generation Windows Server, code-named Longhorn, will get key orchestration features derived from BizTalk Server. Microsoft is working on workflow and orchestration technology, called the Windows Orchestration Engine (WinOE), for the Longhorn/Orcas time frame, several sources familiar with the company's plans said. The technology manages how processes or software services interact in distributed systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft will 'componentize' both the client and server versions of Windows Longhorn, its next-generation platform.

Gnome 2.6.1 was made available, a bugfix version which was pending release for about a week. Update: Michael Hall replies to Petreley's review of Gnome 2.6.

Apple Computer seeded its developers this week with a new build of Mac OS X 10.3.4 Panther, labeled Mac OS X 10.3.4 build 7H56.

In a multi-user, multi-process operating system, files are continually being created, modified, and deleted, often by apparently unrelated processes. This means that any software that needs to keep aware of what is happening in a filesystem needs to employ a file monitoring technique. Monitoring, in this sense, means keeping a watch over a set of files, waiting for any of them to change. Read the article at DevChannel.

Join MSDN TV for a glimpse at the newest release from the patterns & practices team. In this episode they discuss memory management, COM Interop and the Dispose pattern.

.NET developer John Carroll wrote two articles on F/OSS claiming that the proprietary model is what drives the economy (article 1, article 2) while Rebecca Reid wrote her own piece "Open-source development models fall flat". What these articles don't discuss is the "fully open standards" model, which is a model Sun Microsystems is particularly fond of, and in a way it falls in between of "closed" and "open". Here's a reply from Sun engineer Glynn Foster to the second article.

In recent years "scripting languages" are becoming a path which is a must go for rapid application development. The open source community has seen many scripting language implementations. Some really popular and good ones available are perl and python.

WineHQ has an interview with Mike Hearn, the Wine and Autopackage developer (and also frequent OSNews reader). You can read 12 more interviews with Wine developers in their archives.

NetBSD's Linux emulation doesn't run a Linux kernel on a virtual machine; it runs Linux binaries on a NetBSD kernel. Linux emulation let you run plenty of useful programs that won't run natively under NetBSD, such as Sun's 1.4 Java Runtime Environment and JDK. Read the rest of the article here.

Here's a review of SuSE 9.1 Professional. The review includes several screenshots and covers the new software included with 9.1 and a performance comparison between the x86 and the AMD64 editions.

DesktopOS.com has interviewed Mike Hjorleiffsson, President of Element Computer, and Jason Spisak, Element’s Vice President Marketing (and former Lycoris employee). The interview is focused on ION, Element's new Xandros-based operating system.

"Mandrakesoft would like to alert all users and the software community at large about a recent clandestine attack by proprietary interests through covert adoption of EU Software Patent Legislation. In direct contravention of the recent vote by the European Parliament to curtail Software Patents, the Irish Presidency of the European Union has surreptitiously reinstated unlimited software patent language into the text of a statement to be adopted by the European Council of Ministers on Monday, May 17, without further debate!" Read the article here.

OrangeCrate's Chuck Talk talks to Russ Castronovo, in charge of Global Communications for Sun Microsystems about a lot of Sun-Linux issues.

I've been trying Linux on and off for a couple of years. My first experience with Linux was with a version of Slackware (can't remember) way back in 1996. At the time the installation was so daunting that I gave up all together. For a little background I consider myself a proficient computer user.