Microsoft Archive

Windows’ Market Share Slips Below 90%

  Submitted by shaneco Microsoft 83 Comments
The month of December has already been unkind to Microsoft. The software giant's Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser saw significant market share drops reported on back-to-back days. Not only was the November percentage drop for Windows the biggest in two years, but Windows market share dipped below a number where it has historically held tight: 90 percent. According to Web metrics company, Net Applications, Windows market share as of Dec. 1 is 89.6 percent. Meanwhile, Mac OS X posted its largest gain in two years, with 8.9 percent market share at the end of November.
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Singularity RDK 2.0 Initial Release

  Submitted by pablo_marx Microsoft 37 Comments
Microsoft has released an initial release of version 2.0 of the Singularity operating system (research development kit, as it likes to call it). Singularity is a microkernel research operating system, where the kernel, drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Singularity is released under a shared source academic license, and you can do whatever you want with it, except making money (simply put).
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Windows Live Gets Complete Overhaul, Adds Social Networking

  Submitted by mikemuch Microsoft No Comments
Among all the Windows 7 announcements, one of the more surprising ones was about things the new OS would not include – specifically, applications for e-mail, photos, and video editing. Instead, Microsoft decided that these programs would be updated and downloadable as part of the Windows Live Essentials. Not only did Microsoft announce Wave 3 of the Live applications on Thursday, but the company completely redesigned its online services, too.
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Microsoft Office Web Applications: Burning Questions Answered

  Submitted by poundsmack Microsoft 1 Comment
"Since the announcement of the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications at this year's PDC, there has been a lot of excitement about this new service which will allow for creating, editing, collaborating, and sharing documents using the web. However, as I've followed the blog posts about this topic, I've also come across quite a bit of misinformation about the web apps, too. In an attempt to dispel some of the rumors out there, I've created this special Q&A which will hopefully answer some of your burning questions about the new web applications."
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SDK Released for Microsoft Surface

  Submitted by Caffeine Deprived Microsoft 2 Comments
Microsoft offered a software development kit for Surface, the company's tabletop computer, to about 1,000 people at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. The article features a some details on apps already available for Surface. (For example, designers at Vectorform have built an application that lets people can "carve" a jack-o'-lantern on the Surface by using their fingers to trace a design in an image of a pumpkin.)
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Create Your Own Version of Microsoft BASIC for 6502

  Submitted by Michael Steil Microsoft 11 Comments
"If you disassemble a single binary, you can never tell why something was done in a certain way. If you have eight different versions, you can tell a lot. This episode of Computer Archeology is about reverse engineering eight different versions of Microsoft BASIC 6502 (Commodore, AppleSoft etc.), reconstructing the family tree, and understanding when bugs were fixed and when new bugs, features and easter eggs were introduced. This article also presents a set of assembly source files that can be made to compile into a byte exact copy of seven different versions of Microsoft BASIC, and lets you even create your own version."
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Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2

  Submitted by Remy Chi Jian Suen Microsoft 23 Comments
Microsoft announces new rich Internet applications development and streaming media features; company outlines plans for supporting Windows, Mac and Linux tools for developing Silverlight applications. Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.
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Bill Gates’ Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC

  Submitted by Michael Steil Microsoft 7 Comments
Pagetable.com has an interesting article on a Microsoft easter egg. "If you type 'WAIT6502,1' into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string 'MICROSOFT!' at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg 'after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel', 'just in case Commodore ever tried to claim that the code wasn't from Microsoft'. In this episode of Computer Archeology, we will not only examine this story, but also track down the history of Microsoft BASIC on various computers, and see see how Microsoft added a second easter egg to the TSR-80 Color Computer - because they had forgotten about the first one."
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Microsoft Begins to Reveal Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft 24 Comments
Yesterday Microsoft started introducing Visual Studio 2010 to Windows developers with a press release and a MSDN website. Introductions to the next Visual Studio also popped up on various technology news sites; InformationWeek, ChannelWeb, Microsoft Watch, BetaNews, and Ars Technica each have brief summary and explaination of the information Microsoft has released so far. Only NetworkWorld digs into the subject by asking various developers to give their impressions of the new Visual Studio.
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Windows Live Messenger 9.0 To Use WPF?

Microsoft 36 Comments
One of the common complaints regarding Microsoft is that the company has problems eating its own dog food. Even though it promoted Windows Presentation Foundation as the programming framework for building Windows and web applications, it so far failed to produce any significant WPF applications itself. None of Microsoft's major applications use WPF (Expression Design and Blend aren't major), which does not help in promoting it as the Next Big Thing. This may all change in the near future, as a small but extremely popular Microsoft application is about to make the switch to Windows Presentation Foundation: MSN Windows Live Messenger.
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Microsoft menaced by Open Source

  Submitted by JCooper Microsoft 58 Comments
Microsoft . . . complained in its annual report that it was facing increasing pressure from open source companies. It claims they are stealing its ideas and benefiting from its intellectual property. "A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products." Also see analysis at Microsoft Watch.
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Midori: Microsoft’s Endgame for Windows

  Submitted by snydeq Microsoft 24 Comments
Microsoft appears to be assembling its game plan for the day when the Windows client OS as it has been developed for the past 20 years becomes obsolete. The incubation project, also known as Midori, seeks to create a componentized, Net-centric OS, based on connected systems - one that largely eliminates dependencies between local apps and the hardware on which they run. SDTimes is also featuring an article that has some more details about Midori.
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Ext2 Ported to Microsoft’s Singularity

  Submitted by danmassa7 Microsoft 20 Comments
Scott Finley, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has ported the Linux files system Ext2 to Microsoft's new research operating system Singularity. One of the most striking observations was the author's comments on Singularity's robustness. "Perhaps the best testament to Singularity's dependability was the extremely good system stability during the development of ext2... If the ext2 process terminated as the result of a failure, it only resulted in open channels closing. Other processes could (and did) recover gracefully." Finley's report details all his findings quite extensively.
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Midori: A Non-Windows OS in the Works, Not Just Experimental

  Submitted by Thom Holwerda Microsoft 20 Comments
Codename Midori is a derivative of Singularity that is meant to supersede Windows, and it is more than just a research project. Singularity, is an experimental microkernel and operating system project started in 2003 for which Microsoft posted the source code back in March. Unfortunately Singularity was developed exclusively for research purposes and is not intended for practical use.
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