SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards program, widely considered to be the most prestigious award program in the software industry, is a community-driven process in which the products participating in the program are nominated by the industry's vendors, customers, and ...

Software development tools-maker Iron Speed Inc. has released Iron Speed Designer Version 5.0, the latest version of its application generator. Iron Speed Designer generates interactive data entry and reporting Web applications for .NET. New features such as PDF ...

Bluespring Software has released BPM Suite - SharePoint Edition, designed for businesses looking to deploy SharePoint in an environment with complex process or workflow needs. BPM Suite - SharePoint Edition comes pre-packaged with the right amount of SharePoint,...

Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes got ticked off over the criticism that the US Justice Department leveled at the antitrust verdict handed down Monday against Microsoft by Europe's second most powerful court, the Court of First Instance (CFI). In a written sta...

UBS thinks that Linux fever may have mitigated. After surveying a bunch of CIOs it found that the half (47%) who aren't using Linux already pretty much intend to stay Linux-free - at least this year - a deviation from the historical trend. Usually only 60% say the...

The so-called California Group, the hardcore collection of state attorneys general who fought Microsoft's 2002 antitrust settlement with the US government down to the wire, has, as expected, asked the court to extend its oversight of the company until 2012, five y...

In the first, possibly serious, quasi-defection to the online software-as-a-service Google Apps Premier Edition, Capgemini SA, the $10 billion French consultant, said Monday that it will recommend the stuff to its clients which include major outfits like Eli Lilly...

Infragistics has released a free reference application for Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Named Tangerine, the application employs best practices to help developers, enterprises, and e-commerce vendors experience and leverage the capabilities of ...

The goal of the Microsoft incubation project codenamed Astoria is to enable server applications to easily expose data as a service that can be consumed by AJAX clients across the internet. Standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE are used to perform o...

The so-called California Group, the hardcore collection of states attorneys general who fought Microsoft's antitrust settlement down to the wire, have filed a brief with the court overseeing the case questioning the effectiveness of the consent decree. They have ...

Microsoft has now managed to articulate the thought that the first Vista Service Pack will arrive sometime in the first quarter of 2008, which, if memory serves, was when the smart money thought it would be out anyway. Expectations of course are that it will give...

Microsoft was ever so prescient in calling the next Windows Server Longhorn because it's taking a formidable length of time to get here. On Wednesday, Microsoft confessed that it has been delayed still again. The company had previously promised to RTM the widgetry...

If you cast your mind back to July 5, you'll remember that was the day that Microsoft told the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that it could take its GPLv3, rewritten in an attempt to gut Microsoft's patent claims on open source, and put it where the sun doesn't sh...

The August 17 ruling has provoked DLA Piper partner and pro bono OSI general counsel Mark Radcliffe - OSI, or Open Source Initiative, being the arbiter of what exactly constitutes an open source license - to blog that 'this case was wrongly decided and if allowed ...

Much has been made recently of what will or will not be included in SP1 and when it will be released (some accurate, some otherwise). Now Microsoft says a Beta release of Windows Vista SP1 is slated for availability in 'the next few weeks.' A small group of tester...

The Linux Foundation (LF), very sensibly, is going to start keeping track of where exactly Linux development's at. It's going to be using the so-called Linux Weather Forecast assembled by LWN.net editor and kernel community member Jonathan Corbet to follow the s...

As part of an apparent joint aim to reassure consumers that, if they use Microsoft's software, it will continue to work with Cisco's networking products, and vice versa, the CEOs of both companies spoke at a press event in New York this week about how, while compe...

Linspire president and CEO Kevin Carmony, the guy who cut one of those patent protection deals with Microsoft, has - poof! - disappeared replaced by the company's sales chief Larry Kettler. Linspire has said nothing about the transition to its third CEO since it s...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Microsoft joined AJAXWorld Conference & Expo as 'Gold Sponsor.' Microsoft technologies enable designers and developers to create next generation web experiences. With frameworks like ASP.NET AJAX, developers can quickly create p...

General counsel Dian Peters is gone - reportedly to Mozilla - and her job has been essentially outsourced to former Black Duck counsel Karen Copenhaver, an ex-IBMer and licensing expert now a partner with Choate, Hall & Stewart, and Andy Updegrove, the consortium ...

Novell has whistled up a legal reinforcement, adding another Morrison & Foerster partner, Eric Acker, a practiced IP litigator and former federal prosecutor, to its defense team. One of Novell's team of 13 lawyers has been sidelined by illness so maybe he's a subs...

HP is picking up thin client house Neoware for its Linux charms and now Wyse, Neoware's major competitor, says it's working with Novell to bring a new generation of Linux thin clients to market and get customers off traditional desktops. Apparently Wyse already ha...

A San Diego judge Monday struck down the precedent-setting $1.538 billion award that Microsoft had been ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent for supposedly infringing on two of its MP3 patents. Unless Alcatel appeals the decision to the Federal Circuit and gets it reve...

Microsoft says it's got an early pre-beta Vista SP1, content unknown, out with trusted testers and released those two updates that leaked last week to its download center ahead of its Windows Update site. One, KB938979, tickles performance while the other, KB93819...

Novell owns the Unix and UnixWare copyrights, according to a 102-page summary judgment issued late yesterday by the federal judge hearing the SCO v Novell case for slander of title. And since Novell owns the copyrights, Judge Dale Kimball decided that Novell had t...

Version 3.0 features in-depth code analysis for C# and a host of new productivity-enhancing features such as a superior unit testing solution, efficient handling of to-do lists, plus new navigation and search commands. Another major boost is the addition of Visual...

JetBrains, creators of intelligent, productivity-enhancing applications, started shipping JetBrains dotTrace 3.0. The third major release of the company's intelligent profiling tool for Microsoft .NET applications features a quadruple increase in the number of p...

The Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) is going to vote on whether to standardized Microsoft's HD Photo file format, shipping with Vista and renamed for the occasion JPEG XR, XR for Extended Range. It would replace the current format standard, which is growing...

Eolas and Microsoft are off talking settlement. The retrial of the patent infringement case that resulted in a $521 million award to Eolas and the University of California was supposed to have started Monday, but it's been put off a month so the two sides can nego...

Microsoft is denying Forrester Research and Gartner findings of discontent and defection among some of its Software Assurance customers who pay a fee equal to 29% of their total license for automatic upgrades. According to a web site Q&A with Joe Matz, corporat...

Microsoft seems to be chewing on a 'Vista Performance and Reliability Pack' and 'Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack' that leaked out from outside Windows Server 2008 beta testers then - poof - disappeared that may or may be part of - or even the whole of - t...

In a decision that will distress OpenDocument Format (ODF) fans, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ODF's biggest booster, has gone ahead and as an acceptable format for state records alongside ODF. So now all those state office workers can go right on using Office.

Linspire, one of Microsoft's new patent covenant buddies, has joined Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance, which already includes Novell, of course, and the purer, untainted Red Hat. This is after Microsoft amended its patent protection/interop erability pact with ...

Xandros, one of Microsoft's new best friends, has acquired its own buddy Scalix, the Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging concern, a piece in Xandros' vision of having a complete Linux stack. No price was given but it's clear Scalix needed to team up to go any...

Well, we know one thing about the next, post-Vista, desktop Windows. It's code named Windows 7 now, not Vienna, and Microsoft is taking another round of blood oaths about it not taking five years to see market although it already looks like it's been pushed back. ...

The GVH, the competition police in Hungary, yes, Hungary, raided Microsoft's local offices from suspicions the company is abusing the dominance it gets from Office, Reuters reports. The GVH web site reportedly says that it 'sensed that [Microsoft] likely applied a...

Microsoft told its annual financial analysts meeting Thursday that 60 million copies of Vista had been sold as of the end of June. That's 20 million more than the last insight Microsoft shared with anybody. In mid-May it said 40 million copies had been sold to date.

SYS-CON Media's .NET Developer's Journal author and columnist Dennis Hayes celebrated the 5th anniversary of his 'Monkey Business' monthly column. Hayes is a programmer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta Georgia where he writes software for the Adult Cognition Lab in the ...

Ahh, it seems that Novell didn't know until two weeks before its infamous deal with Microsoft was announced that there was a sine qua non patent component to the thing. The poor little innocent thought Microsoft was negotiating interoperability for the sake of int...

Bloomberg reports being told by three knowledge albeit anonymous people that the European Commission has sent a second questionnaire to Microsoft's rivals asking for specific evidence of Microsoft abusing its monopoly in word processing and spreadsheets and with...