Microsoft Archive

"Another interesting announcement here at PDC is that Microsoft is creating a subset of their cool, fancy pants UI layer (formerly code-named Avalon, now WPF) on other platforms, including the Mac! In fact, one of the demos involved showing vector graphics rendered in Safari using a Microsoft plug-in."

A surprising move by Microsoft: "MSDN Subscriber Downloads now supports Firefox! And Opera. Funnily enough, when we were doing the initial planning for our 3.0 platform I got some pushback from the dev team on this requirement because only .5% of our old site traffic was on a non-IE browser. After we realized that they were serious we got the requirement straightened out, only changing it from 'Mozilla' to 'Firefox' since that's the predominant browser."

From Channel 9: "Visit Bill in his office for a few minutes to talk about where he sees the future going. This is a fun interview (WMV), prepares you for the PDC that's coming next week." Also, here is an interview (WMV) with Microsoft's first employee.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer delivered keynote addresses from the Microsoft Redmond Conference Center that were broadcast via satellite to customer events being held simultaneously throughout the USA and at major Microsoft subsidiaries around the world. You can find links to the webcasts here.

Microsoft's program to ensure that developers build secure code is showing early signs of success, according to a senior executive from the company. The Security Development Lifecycle program is one of the results of Microsoft's announcement outlining concentration on security and secure development.

Some prominent figures in the Linux community believe that as enterprises increase their use of Linux on the desktop, Microsoft will be forced to consider offering a version of Office for Linux. "When the market share gets to a certain point, Microsoft will, just as it did with Apple in the past, make Office available on Linux," CEO Stuart Cohen of OSDL said in an interview. My take: Mr. Cohen is forgetting two important things: Excel was first released for the Mac (1985) and Word wasn't popular until MS ported it from DOS to Mac (1985).

At its upcoming Professional Developers Conference next month, Microsoft is set to shed more details on its developer-oriented graphics tool, code-named Sparkle. Sparkle will be one element of the upcoming Expression Studio suite of design and developer tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as Avalon. Expression Studio also is expected to be unveiled at the PDC, sources said.

Microsoft has once again stirred up a hornets nest in the open-source community, this time approaching the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) to work with it on a joint, independent research project to do some facts-based analysis of Linux and Windows.

This interview with Bill Hilf, Microsoft's Linux Lab Manager, answers questions from readers of Slashdot. It speaks about OSS inside Microsoft, attitudes towards open standards, and of course Linux. "Believe it or not, I use more different types of OSS here at Microsoft than I've ever used before. Our team uses over 40 different flavors of Linux and BSD, plus several commercial Unix variants."

The Indigo and Avalon Beta1 "RC" enables developers to continue experimenting with early builds of these technologies, get acquainted with the development experience, and provide Microsoft with feedback.

Microsoft is facing an uphill battle to push copies of Office 2003 on customers and its ISV partner ecosystem, ahead of next year's predicted launch of Office 12.

As part of its monthly patching cycle, Microsoft shipped three security bulletins, all rated critical, including patches for a bug in the JView Profiler (Javaprxy.dll) that was being exploited via the IE browser.

Microsoft surprised many of the attendees at its annual worldwide partner show here this weekend by allowing a third party to present a "hands-on lab" that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software. Is Microsoft toning down on its anti-Linux campaign?

Windows Server System brings together several existing products and comes with three copies of the Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, a copy of Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition and a copy of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition. Elsewhere, MS released a fix to a major IE hole confirmed last week, while some eyebrows are raised as MS downgrades its Claria detections.