Microsoft Archive

Microsoft has solidified the time frame for the release of its Team Foundation Server and will be releasing a preview of another key piece of Visual Studio technology, a company executive said at the VSLive conference here. In a keynote address, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of developer tools at Microsoft, said that in the next week or so, Microsoft will "make the first CTP drop of Visual Studio Tools for Applications." Somasegar also said the TFS (Team Foundation Server) component of VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) will reach release candidate status by the end of this week and will reach RTM status in March.

Microsoft has begun e-mailing its corporate customers worldwide, letting them know that they may need to start using a different version of Office as a result of a recent legal setback. The software maker said Monday that it has been forced to issue new versions of Office 2003 and Office XP, which change the way Microsoft's Access database interacts with its Excel spreadsheet. "It was recently decided in a court of law that certain portions of code found in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, Microsoft Office Access 2003, Microsoft Office XP Professional and Microsoft Access 2002 infringe a third-party patent," Microsoft said in an e-mail to customers. "As a result, Microsoft must make available a revised version of these products with the allegedly infringing code replaced."

Microsoft's C++/CLI Language Specification is an ECMA Standard (ECMA-372) and they are trying to fast track this document to be an ISO standard. The problem is that the language specified is very different from C++ and so is likely to create a great deal of confusion. Details can be found in the UK objections , which suggest that a name distinct from C++ be used for the proposed language.

Microsoft Tuesday released new previews of its upcoming tools for designers. Microsoft Interactive Designer is a product for building Avalon ('Windows Presentation Foundation' or WPF) user interfaces. These tools have been dubbed a Flash killer by some industry watchers, as it is expected to compete head-to-head with the Macromedia Flash product that was acquired by Adobe Systems last year.

Following news that Google refused to comply with a subpoena requiring the company to turn over search records from its database, much speculation swirled about the response from rivals MSN and Yahoo. MSN has broken its silence and now acknowledges that it did share search data, but no personal information. The subpoena was handed down by the US Department of Justice last summer, and was reportedly issued to gather data to support a child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the Supreme Court. Under that law, the government could punish pornography sites that made content easily accessible to minors.

Taiwan's parliament has voted to end its dependence on Microsoft software, demanding that the government reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year. The resolution, passed on Friday, is an attempt by the island's law-making body to end the near monopoly Microsoft has with local government offices, a legislative aide said.

After 2 years of examination the U.S Patent and Trademark Office has reversed its two earlier unofficial decisions and decided that Microsoft's File Allocation Table file system constitutes a "novel and non-obvious" system enabling it to be patented. This coupled with Microsofts plans to charge licensing fees for use of the system could cause many problems for open-source operating systems that implement the file system, or even to mp3 players. Elsewhere, APCMag.com has an interview with Microsoft's "open source point man" Martin Gregory.

"CES wasn't only about crazy gadget news and booth tours - we also scored a second chance to sit down with our new best friend Bill Gates and ask him all about the big announcements he made during his keynote last Wednesday. Read on to find out what he had to say about online video download subscription services, whether or not he was happy with the launch of the Xbox 360, which Xbox 360 games he's been playing, how he still thinks there's time to avoid a format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD, why he doesn't think that Apple's switch to Intel chips makes a difference for Microsoft, and how he is now, finally, a Treo user."

Media coverage focuses on Microsoft's competition with Google, but Chairman Bill Gates sees IBM - not the Web search leader - as its biggest challenger. "People tend to get over-focused on one of our competitors. We've always seen that," Gates said, comparing the potential threat of Google's search capabilities to past competitors such as Internet browser Netscape and Sun Microsystems' Java programming language.

Microsoft is working hard to make sure the latest version of its e-mail, calendaring and messaging server, Exchange 12, appeals to both enterprise IT administrators and end users. The first beta of the product, released earlier this month, offers enhanced administrative controls as well as a unified messaging feature that will deliver fax, voice mail, e-mail and speech recognition.

"Though most people don’t know it, Microsoft has, not one, but two new operating systems that it is working on. The first, Vista, many people have heard of. Currently scheduled to ship just after the second coming of Christ, Vista has garnered most of the spotlight. However there is another OS lurking in the basement in Redmond and its name is Singularity (.pdf). So what does Singularity look like? A joke, at least at first glance. But taking a moment to analyze the situation I came up with some interesting observations which I will now share with you."

"Don Box is an architect assigned to the 'Indigo' project at Microsoft, where he is working on next-generation Web services protocols and plumbing. Box recently spoke with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft about upcoming technologies from the company such as the Language Integrated Query project, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo)." In addition, here's an interview with Ray Ozzie, who Bill Gates is counting on when it comes to Internet services.

Charles Torre again sits down with some of the people behind MSR's Singularity research OS. This time, they drill down into the architecture of Singularity and discuss design decisions, usage of safe code, Channels, SIPs, etc. They even manage to get Galen Hunt, the OS Guy, up to the white board to map out some of Singularity's architecture.

Burton Smith, a longtime supercomputer designer and chief scientist at Cray, has resigned to take a position at Microsoft. Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it planned to introduce a new version of its Windows software for scientific and engineering users, and that Smith would be involved.