Earlier this week, a senior National Security Agency official told US Congress that the NSA had worked on Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7. This spurred a flurry of rumours about the NSA building backdoors into Windows 7, but Microsoft has today categorically denied these claims.

Jacob Moller*, founder and CEO of Kiloo, the maker of the Commodore 64 emulator in the Apple App Store has kindly answered a few of my questions regarding App Store controversies, and most importantly, porting to other platforms and future projects.

"Microsoft, which has been pursuing concurrent improvements for its Visual Basic and C# programming languages, plans to open up compilers for the languages and add capabilities for asynchronous programming and immutability. Discussed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the blueprint for the two languages will feature compilers as services and accommodations for multicore processors, said Luca Bolognese, program manager for the languages group at Microsoft."

"Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. The announcements also blow right past Amazon EC2 and targets Microsoft at Google, Force.com (Salesforce.com's cloud), OpSource and others offering hosting on demand, web services and bus interconnection services in the cloud. Microsoft peeled back last year's Azure onion, showing us how Microsoft wants to do much more than just offer computing platforms or hosted Microsoft products."

At PDC '09 Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details of the company's next browser, Internet Explorer 9. Even though the new browser is still in an early development stage, the first few builds are being tested internally. It is poised to come with some fancy improvements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support.

Okay, so it's not an actual release as Arrington predicted last week, but Google will indeed take the wraps off its Chrome OS tomorrow. The company will hold an event tomorrow at its company headquarters in Mountain View, California, where it will unveil its plans for the operating system. Update: An OSNews reader has uncovered possible evidence that Chrome OS uses X, Clutter, and Slim.

Fedora 12 has been released today. "I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 12, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat."

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is currently under way, and as usual, the technical fellows at Microsoft gave speeches about the deep architecture of Windows - in this case, Windows 7 of course. As it turns out, quite some seriously impressive changes have been made to the very core of Windows - all without breaking a single application. Thanks to BetaNews for summarising this technical talk so well.

"Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100000 iPhone apps, will continued migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?"

The beta for Atlas has been launched on November 15. Atlas is a visual development tool for creating web applications using the Cappuccino framework. "Atlas is a development tool for building Cappuccino applications. In addition to managing your project files and editing code, it includes a powerful visual layout tool for designing your interfaces without ever having to touch code. Designers are empowered to interact with their designs instantly, which means programmers get to finished applications faster."

This weekend, Palm launched its second webOS phone, the Palm Pixi. At the same time, the company also released webOS 1.3.1 for Pre owners in the US (other countries will follow later this month). At the same time, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein talked to The New York Times about his company.

OSnews Publisher David Adams and I discuss the mobile computing landscape, how the emergence of mobile computing is changing our lives and changing the design and market share of operating systems. Is there room in the market for 7 competing mobile phone platforms? Are we just repeating the 1980s PC market again?

Thom's down with flu, so to avoid moving a lot of interesting news to pg.2, I am creating a combined item here covering a number of Microsoft related news items submitted to us.

Google engineer (and my husband!) Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Queru just open sourced the latest Android version, codenamed "Eclair". This will open the doors for device manufacturers to get the latest version of Android. You can read all about it in his message here.