And according to what Gutierrez told Fortune senior editor Roger Parloff 'This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement. There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed,' making it sound treble-damages expensive. Well, not filing suit is a pretty notion but given the level of Penguinista intransigence it's hard to see how Microsoft can stay out of court and not be called a girlie man, accused of being all bluster and bluff signifying nothing. The copyleftists are already calling it out and daring it to sue.

With the Microsoft MIX conference just ending last week and product announcements happening with greater and greater regularity, it's sometimes discouraging when you think of how much work it will be to just keep up with it all.

As both a .NET programmer and ColdFusion developer, I always wondered how I could leverage the world of .NET in ColdFusion. Both platforms come with powerful features and using them together might be a wonderful friendship, if one could only make them cooperate. There are two worlds out there and none of them is an island.

When I first started learning Cocoa I ran across a design pattern that I had seen implemented a few times before but I had yet to see it labelled with a name. This pattern is called the Delegate design pattern. Coming from C#, I found this initially confusing because in C# the concept of a delegate is slightly different than the concept of a delegate in the Cocoa world. In C#, a delegate is essentially a function pointer, and when someone in Cocoa refers to a delegate, they are referring to an entire instance of a class to which work is delegated.

Lately there's been a lot of buzz about Orcas. You keep hearing about Silverlight and the Entity Framework and Jasper and Astoria and who knows how many other code names. One of the things that you don't hear about is PNRP. Why? I haven't the faintest idea because this is some of the coolest stuff to surface as a .NET API since .NET 1.0 reshaped our opinion of streams.

Wednesday morning Microsoft and Novell waved around the names and testimonials of 12 new customers that they said have come into the controversial Microsoft-Novell interoperability-IP assurance fold, giving Novell the chance to brag that its Linux market share is growing. Microsoft is supposed to deliver SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription certificates to each of the companies under separate customer agreements.

The wake's over and now they're burying the corpse. Progeny Linux Systems ceased operations on Monday. Its founder, Debian creator Ian Murdock, now at Sun as chief operating systems officer, got a day job with the Free Standards Group months ago. Progeny's various domain names are up for sale.

When the first draft of the C# 2.0 spec was released, the Mono team started working on it immediately. The first draft of the C# 3.0 spec has now been out for almost a year, but the Mono team has just started to work on it. There are two reasons for this: one is that the whole team was working on the major 1.2 release, including Winforms. The second reason is that the first draft of the C# 3.0 spec was released shortly after the official release of C# 2.0, and the Mono team was still busy fixing bugs, cleaning up code, and integrating last-minute changes to the C# 2.0 spec. Because a lot of C# 3.0 relies heavily on the new C# 2.0 features, the mono team also wanted to get C# 2.0 refactored and on a solid footing before beginning work on C# 3.0.

This article continues the series devoted to principles of teaching .NET and other modern technologies. The first article described my SPBU.NET educational project and the ERATO (Experience - Retrospective - Analysis - Theory - Oncoming perspectives) teaching paradigm that I use in my courses and seminars on .NET, compilers, software engineering, and operating systems, parts of my SPBU.NET project supported by Microsoft Research in 2004.

To state the obvious: with mission-critical applications, your mission will fail around the same time your applications do. This truism is of immediate concern to .NET developers involved with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), the loosely coupled software services that now support all kinds of business processes, including supply chains and customer-facing online applications. Failures or even brief slowdowns can take immense tolls because, well, the company's mission itself is affected.

The short of the story is that Silverlight 1.0 applications don't support code-behind, they don't support making plain XML calls back to a web service (despite some other people's claims to the contrary, 1.0 will not let you do this!), and there is no real two-way binding (though you can set values of controls in response to events, which is what I call 'old school' binding).

While Java community is discussing which language features to include in the heavy tank of the future called Java 7, their main competitor provides support to multiple languages. JVM is a very powerful but underutilized machine, and it's about time to run more than just tried and true Java there. Now Adobe has to respond to Microsoft with some secret weapon besides Apollo. If I were running Adobe's RIA division, I'd pick up the phone and dialed the number of Jonathan Schwartz. 'Jonathan, what do you think of this crazy idea - let's see if we can run some trimmed down version of Java in Flash Player 10!'

Well, Google hasn't put Microsoft out of business yet. Redmond is still a money machine. It posted record profits up 65% to $4.93 billion, or 50 cents a share, Thursday on revenues up 32% to $14 billion for the March quarter, its might-as-well-call-it Vista quarter when the software finally came out. Microsoft's operating profits came to a staggering $6.59 billion. The numbers beat the Street.

Microsoft has been getting a lot of press lately. From the announcement of their decision to Open Source some of the Dynamic Language Runtime (the tool that powers the IronPython thing in Silverlight) to the announcement that the ADO.NET Entity Framework will not ship as part of Orcas (don't even get me started on my opinion of that announcement!) - MS has been getting a lot of write-ups and a lot of blog treatment - some good, some bad.

When Microsoft announced the technology that is now known as WCF, there was a lot of expectation and some skepticism. Expectation because it sounded great and would help us solve so many problems and realize so many things that were then very hard to make happen. Skepticism because it sounded great and would help us solve so many problems and realize so many things that were then very hard to make happen...

When building WCF services you'll eventually need to integrate common logic that may be applied across a number of services, contracts, endpoints, or operations. Examples include logging, security, error handling, and message or parameter manipulation. Since this kind of logic cuts across all of these concerns and must often be executed somewhere between the submission of a message from a client to the service, we are presented with an interesting design and programming challenge. Fortunately, WCF provides a feature called Custom Behaviors that lets us inject common and 'cross-cutting' logic into the WCF runtime either at the proxy (i.e., the client) or dispatcher (i.e., the service) to achieve such ends.

I'm sure this is old news to pretty much everybody, but I just wanted to take a minute to post my feelings on this subject. According to multiple sources, including one blog post (and associated comments), the designer for the Entity Data Model will not ship with the RTM version of Orcas. It's still kind of nebulous as to whether we'll get an out-of-band release (Expression Data maybe?) or whether we'll have to wait for VS 10.0.

Former OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen and his new partner, former Credit Suisse CTO Evan Bauer, wheeled out their new start-up Monday. The for-profit venture, called the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI), is supposed to oversee the development or acquisition of business software at half the cost of traditionally outsourced or internally developed software by employing open source methods. HP, IBM and Novell are reportedly helping them identify vertical industries and scope out projects where 'collaboration among industry peers can meet requirements quicker and with less expense.'

Infragistics, a provider of presentation layer development tools, has announced the immediate availability of the NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 Volume 1, a toolset that extends the capabilities of the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) platform by providing flexible, editable DataGrid style controls for developers.

One of my favorite bloggers, Paul Graham, has published an essay called 'Microsoft is dead '. He starts, 'A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead', and then explains why he thinks so. I do not think Microsoft is dead, but...

Microsoft, which has been on a cross-licensing kick, has cut a broad patent cross-license with Samsung Electronics, one of the largest US patent portfolio holders. The boilerplate announcing the deal says 'Samsung and its distributors and customer may utilize Microsoft's patents in Samsung's products with proprietary software, and Samsung will also obtain coverage from Microsoft for its customers' use of certain Linux-based products.' Microsoft says the Samsung deals 'employs a similar licensing model to that between Novell and Microsoft and the patent protection it offers to Linux customers. Samsung will now be able to employ Linux in their future products with the assurance that intellectual property is valued and respected.'

I have a rather unique perspective on persistence tools because I have probably tested and developed in just about every conceivable environment for rapidly creating data-bound desktop applications, including some that called themselves '4GL' and were basically code generators that would inhale a data model and exhale an application. The general feeling I have come away with from tools that make it so that you can write a data-bound desktop application 'with no code at all for the low-low price of $19.95!!' is that such tools are crap. They spend so much time insulating you from what is really going on that as soon as you want to do something other than build the 'hello world' samples - you're knee deep in crap without a shovel.

Sourcefire, which just went public a month ago, had its teeth kicked in Monday after it pre-announced its Q1 results and said it was going to lose $2.2 million-$2.6 million on revenues $10.1 million-$10.5 million, up around 20% year-over-year. Its stock was still nose-diving Thursday going from $17.35 to $11.08 and falling.

Mono has released version 1.2.3, and there are a lot of improvements and additions. In my opinion, the biggest addition is the new Visual Basic compiler. It's not ready for prime time and is still officially unsupported, but this is the first version of VB to be included as a standard part of a release. Note that it only targets VB8 and .NET 2.0; there are no plans to make it backward-compatible with .NET 1.1 (The runtime supports .NET 1.1 so programs compiled with Microsoft Visual Basic 1.1 will run under Mono.)

Dell has gotten another one of those delisting warnings from the Nasdaq, this one telling it that it hasn't filed its 10-K for the year ending February 2 and so it's out of compliance with the rules. Dell has matching notices covering Q2, Q3 and Q4. There's still no indication when it might have its numbers ready.

OpenOffice, the Sun-sponsored open source project, has hit rev 2.2, claiming it's 'a real alternative to Microsoft's recently released Office 2007.' Apparently they've enhanced the word processor, spreadsheet, presentations and database and figure it's now an 'easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users.' It's supposed to protect users from newly discovered vulnerabilities that leave them open to attack if they open malware-laden documents or access infected web sites. The community has also gussied it with some of the new cosmetic changes in Vista.

'To me, Java is like the cheap, but affordable property and .NET is like the - ahem - 'Gated' community,' writes consultant Dan Mabbutt at the About website. 'Java has been around a bit longer - long enough to be tied into the architecture that was current when it was invented. .NET is much newer and the architecture was guided by the best software geniuses that money could buy including Anders Hejlsberg, creator of Delphi at Borland.'

The European Commission wants Microsoft to license its server protocols to rivals for nothing according to the Financial Times, which says it saw a 'confidential document' saying so. According to the paper Microsoft wants a maximum of 5.95% of a licensee's server revenues as a royalty but the EC's technical expert Professor Neil Barrett calculates that even a royalty rate of 1% would be unacceptable to potential licensees and that zero percent would be 'better.' Barrett apparently ran the numbers and concluded that Microsoft's terms would mean a licensee wouldn't recoup its development costs for seven years. The potential licensees that are believed to have reviewed and objected to Microsoft royalty structure include IBM, Sun and Oracle. The EC's stance means the open source Samba Project has gotten what it wanted from the agency, which last month in its opening gambit hit Microsoft with an apparently surprise Statement of Objections (SO) - which was what was evidently leaked to the FT - accusing it of setting unreasonable royalties for the protocols that it was ordered to make available to its competitors in the EC's 2004 antitrust order. The EC claims, as Samba has, that there's 'no significant innovation' in the protocols to justify Microsoft's royalties structure although the protocols are protected by 36 patents with another 37 patents pending. The gun that the EC is holding to Microsoft's head to force it to submit is another round of draconian billion-dollar fines. Microsoft is saving its formal response for its April 23 rebuttal to this SO but in the meanwhile its spokesmen have been charged to say that the company believes 'the terms on which we have made the protocols available are reasonable and non-discriminatory' - which is all that was demanded of it by the EC's 2004 order - and it seems logical to conclude that any move by the EC to expropriate the protocols is likely to touch off something of an international incident. Former House majority leader and economics professor Dick Armey took the first shot at the 'invasive economic management practiced by old Europe.' In a piece run Monday on Cnet, Armey laid out Microsoft's position: its entry into the server market increased competition, introduced innovation - as memorialized in the patents - drove down the cost of server operating systems, served the consumer and the reason it's being punished is because its competitors failed to succeed. Armey says, 'It sounds a whole lot like the EC is bent on redistributing technological wealth instead of fostering the creation of new innovative products and services,' and he anticipates a 'stern diplomatic shot across the bow?to let the old fogies of Europe know that we take innovation seriously.' BusinessWeek then weighed in Tuesday with Pat Cox, the former president of the European Parliament, conjuring up visions of the old Soviet Union's property confiscation and saying, 'The European Commission has declared war on accepted international and European conventions regarding intellectual property rights, applying instead its own test (determined by the Directorate General for Competition) of what constitutes innovation and novelty as a measure of both value and worth.' Cox says, 'For the EU to threaten the value and fate of assets - located anywhere in the world, not just inside the EU?is a unilateral application of administrative law unaccountable to and unapproved by the European Parliament and European Council.'

Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets are a great way to add value by addressing targeted and focused user scenarios. Think souped-up system tray - always-on applications typically used for monitoring something that often drives, based on notification, to a broader range of related scenarios. The nice thing about Sidebar is that it gives you more space and freedom to work with in designing your notification-based applications; rather than being limited to an icon and toast pop-ups, you can take advantage of resident UI space.

Usually in this space I like to summarize the contents of the issue and point out anything bearing in particular on our theme, but if you will indulge me, I would like to talk more long term and big picture this month. I am thinking specifically about security. Not a big surprise for those who know me and, if you were paying attention, you might have noticed that I used to be the security editor before taking over as editor-in-chief. Security is one of those pervasive things like error handling. You don't typically notice it until it fails you when you need it most.

To solve problems DHTML, JavaScript and XML can't handle, you sometimes need so-called 'rich' client components for your Web applications. Traditionally, this is the realm of Java (applets) or ActiveX controls.

Intel confirmed that it is going to build a $2.5 billion politically sensitive plant in China. Plans have been in the works for over 18 months. The only way Intel was able to get the US government to countenance the deal was to ensure it wasn't a joint venture. It's 100% Intel owned, It's going to produce 300mm wafers, making it Intel's first Asia wafer fab. It will be know as Fab 68. Production won't start until the first half of 2010. Intel says initial production will be chipsets for its core microprocessors for export as well as local use.

'Today Microsoft issued a rare out-of-cycle patch to fix vulnerabilities in GDI,' said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager, McAfee Avert Labs. 'McAfee Avert Labs is always concerned when Microsoft releases an out-of-cycle patch. We urge our customers and the computing public to take this release seriously, as there has already been active exploitation of at least one of these vulnerabilities in the wild. Consumers and enterprise users should immediately evaluate this patch as well as ensure that they have up-to-date proactive security technologies in place to mitigate and manage all risk.'

Attune Systems, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class file virtualization solutions, today announced the company is supporting the recent Aberdeen Group end-user survey on storage and server virtualization. The highly educational report reveals that more customers are turning to virtualization to ease data center headaches such as the need to improve utilization rates, reduce data center complexity and manage costs. Tiered storage implementation, controlling rapid capacity growth and non-disruptive data migration also made the list of top business drivers.

As much as it may pain Red Hat, Oracle, - and maybe now IBM - it seems that Novell is actually in resurgence. According to a new survey by the Yankee Group due out next week, 14% of the nearly 1,000 IT managers and C-level executives polled said they will deploy SUSE Linux. Yankee thinks, 'This is one of the first indicators that Novell's technically elegant and highly reliable Linux distribution may mount a serious threat to Red Hat's heretofore unassailable dominance of the Linux market.'

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) finally delivered itself of the third draft of the GPL rewrite known as GPLv3 on Wednesday. This is the draft that got held up for months because of the surprise Microsoft-Novell rapprochement in November that the FSF found so offensive it decided it had to make changes in the prospective GPL 3 'to prevent such deals from making a mockery of free software.' FSF's biggest problem with the Microsoft-Novell arrangement is that it appears that Novell is paying Microsoft not to sue its SUSE Linux users for patent infringement, at least the ones that pay Novell money, leaving users of other brands of Linux to twist in the wind with worry. FSF claims that such an arrangement makes free software 'effectively proprietary' and splits the Linux community into haves and have-nots.

Microsoft has combined its search and AdCenter online advertising operations, units that are supposed to compete against Google, and named the head of its Dynamics CRM line Satya Nadella to run it, reporting to Kevin Johnson. This after Microsoft reduced its guidance for revenue growth in online services and after the head of Microsoft's search Chris Payne was reported leaving to start his own company and online ad chief Blake Irving said he would retire. Nadella takes over April 19.

Microsoft says consumers bought 20 million copies of Vista in February, the first month it was out. The number includes copies exchanged for the upgrade coupons Microsoft started handing out last year ahead of the software's availability, OEM installations, retail sales and web downloads. Microsoft compared the number to XP, which in 2001 sold only 17 million copies in its first two months. Of course the PC market has doubled since then. Some 96 million PCs should be sold this year to consumers. Some 12 million-15 million PC were sold over the holidays.

FSF's biggest problem with the Microsoft-Novell arrangement is that it appears that Novell is paying Microsoft not to sue its SUSE Linux users for patent infringement, at least the ones that pay Novell money, leaving users of other brands of Linux to twist in the wind with worry. FSF claims that such an arrangement makes free software 'effectively proprietary' and splits the Linux community into haves and have-nots. So what it's done is come up with two new paragraphs - one directed at Microsoft, the other at Novell and neither of them, frankly, very easy to read - to address the issues they pose.

Mono 1.2.2 was released last month, and with the help of the Mono Migration Tool, Moma, which was discussed last month, 496 new methods were added, 212 'bogus' to-dos were removed, and 65 NotImplementedExceptions were removed.