USA.NET announced that it is using the advanced features and capabilities of Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1, SharePoint Services 3.0 and other software applications and utilities to provide its clients with a more fully integrated eMessaging experience. 'Our latest expanded integration is part of our commitment to provide our clients with the best solutions and service available on an ongoing basis,' said USA.NET President Doug Howard.

AccuRev and Electric Cloud announced a technology partnership designed to improve software development productivity and efficiency. The combined solution, which integrates the automated build, test and deployment functionality of Electric Cloud's ElectricCommander software with process-enabled software configuration management (SCM) using AccuRev, advances multistage continuous integration and scalable agile best practices.

'As computing continues to become more powerful, more affordable and more connected it will give billions more people around the world a chance to take advantage of incredible new social and economic opportunities so they can lead better lives. And that will truly be revolutionary.' With those words, Steve Ballmer has been telling attendees at CeBIT in Germany about what he calls the 'Fifth Revolution' in computer technology. But what were the first four?

AccuRev announced the availability of AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase, the latest add-on to its software configuration management (SCM) solution. AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase provides coexistence for optimal support of parallel, geographically distributed and Agile development with AccuRev in existing ClearCase environments. This enables a coexistence strategy, where teams are able to use the most appropriate SCM solution for each group, project or user.

Xceed unveiled an upgraded Xceed DataGrid for WPF. Version 2.0 of Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition features the addition of hierarchical master/detail. Xceed's support for WPF will help facilitate adoption of Microsoft's next-generation platform, which lets developers create desktop and rich client applications.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 to an audience of 4,000 customers and partners at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, CA, yesterday. The top four benefits of Server 2008, Ballmer stated, are virtualization, more server roles like Server Core, embedded high availability, and new energy-efficient features.

Infragistics announced that NetAdvantage for .Net 2008 volume 1 and NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 volume 2 are compatible with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. The NetAdvantage user interface components take advantage of many of the new features in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to enable developers and development teams to create immersive user experiences and compelling applications.

The European Commission this morning slapped Microsoft with a massive $1.33 billion fine (899 million euros) for charging too much for the communications protocols it was ordered to share with competitors in March of 2004. It is the largest single fine ever levied by the EC and the second time that it has dunned Microsoft for not complying with its original antitrust order.

The European Commission this morning slapped Microsoft with a massive $1.33 billion fine (899 million euros) for charging too much for the communications protocols it was ordered to share with competitors in March of 2004. It is the largest single fine ever levied by the EC and the second time that it has dunned Microsoft for not complying with its original antitrust order.

Many .NET applications fail to meet user requirements because they do not provide optimal access to underlying Oracle, Sybase, or DB2 databases. The root cause is often unmanaged ADO.NET data providers shipped by the database vendor or from Microsoft. In this paper, SQL Server MVP and SSWUG co-founder Stephen Wynkoop explores common misperceptions about data access technologies, describes the optimum architecture for ADO.NET data providers, and highlights key selection criteria for developers.

Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Extended Validation (EV) is a new standard in SSL certificates. This guide explains the needs which drove the development of this standard and how it addresses contemporary security challenges. It also delves into the integration of EV certificates into new high security browsers such as Microsoft's IE7.

I was reading news feeds when I read a blog post that included some quotes from Bill Gates. Bill was quoted as saying that Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past. We've all heard that crap before, it's typically what Bill used to say before attempting to pimp yet another failed Tablet PC project. I admit, I fell for the Tablet thing once... I had one, and I hated it. It was never powerful enough to be a real laptop and it was never portable enough to be a good enough tablet. In short, it was useless.

McObject has added support for the KD-Tree, a database index with uses in spatial and pattern-matching applications, to its Perst open source, object-oriented embedded database system. For developers working with Perst, the KD-Tree expands coding efficiency and helps make Java and .NET data objects easier to use in certain types of application.

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platform and services division, sent round an email on Friday to provide Microsoft employees of the Platforms & Services Division with an update on the company's Feb. 1 proposal to combine with Yahoo! We bring you here the text in full.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

The DreamSpark program is one of the newest initiatives to come out of Redmond that are very, very un-Microsoft-like. I'll talk about another later in this post. It appears as though University and high school students will, at some point (I don't know the hardcore details) be able to receive free copies of Visual Studio, SQL server, and other development servers and enterprise servers. They can use these for non-commercial uses free of charge.

Red Hat listened to Microsoft's interoperability statement Thursday and then issued a statement of its own saying it wasn't enough. It thinks Microsoft should throw in the towel on getting its Office Open XML file format standardized by ISO and 'embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization's meeting next week in Geneva.' It also wants Microsoft to abandon patent licenses for its protocols that 'it knows are incompatible with the GPL.'

Microsoft is doing something sensible in the face of the mounting FOSS movement. It's going to give away its software development and designer tools, its OS and database free to college and high school kids and get ?em while they're young. The offer includes Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio 2.0, Expression Studio, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server Standard Edition, widgetry enough to write everything from a program for a cell phone to an RIA web site.

and Service Division that will include the four-year-old start-up EMC just agreed to buy off of him. EMC is paying cash for the Seattle-based Pi Corporation and its 100 engineers. EMC didn?t say how much but Pi was founded using Warburg-Pincus ($$$) money and EMC says the acquisition will likely dilute its EPS this year by a penny.

Microsoft and Yahoo are not negotiating a deal behind the scenes, according to what Bill Gates told the AP yesterday morning, 18 days after Microsoft made its rejected $31-a-share offer for the company. And it appears that Microsoft, whose stock has been down 12.8% since publicizing the offer, isn't prepared to up the ante - at least not yet - not at the cost of $1.4 billion for every dollar of sweetener.

In this excerpt, author N. Satheesh Kumar shows us how to query different objects using LINQ operators and avoid having to use the looping method to filter the values in a collection. Without LINQ, we'd have to go through the values one-by-one and then find the required details. However, using LINQ we can directly query collections and filter the required values without using any looping.

Whistling past the graveyard, Yahoo! went ahead Tuesday with its thin, pre-Microsoft plans of canning a thousand non-core people worldwide in an attempt to get the firm growing in the right direction. The number actually turned out to be more like 1,100 but far from what it would take to puncture its 14,300-man bloat.

SCO's back from the grave with a doozy of a reorganization plan and $100 million to spend pursuing its legal case against Linux. This is top-drawer coin-of-the-realm kind of money put together from the deep-pockets of the Middle East by Stephen Norris, the co-founder and former president of the ultra-posh Carlyle Group, the guy who had Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud salvage Citibank on a cold call and turn a $15 billion profit on mere $590 million equity investment. After leaving Carlyle, whose chairman is now ironically ex-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner and whose resources, shall we say, include from time to time politicos like the Bushes, père et fils, and former prime ministers like John Major, Norris started Stephen Norris Capital Partners LLC, another chi-chi private equity firm that's done things like, oh, recapitalize Suez. It's Norris Capital Partners that'll be buying at least 51% of SCO and taking it private.

Novell has acquired SiteScape, an open source, Web 2.0-style team collaboration operation that started the ICEcore open source collaboration project and whose 12-year-old taproot goes back to that Google- that-might-have-been, AltaVista. Terms were not disclosed. SAIC has funded SiteScape over the last few years and supplied its CEO. Hoover's says the 35-man company did $3.4 million last year, an indication of why another open source concern has gone to the old guard. Novell, who's been distributing Sitescape's software for the last year, says it's getting team workspace and real-time collaboration capabilities, the makings of a unified communications and collaboration strategy.

db4o, an open source object database system with broad industry applicability, belongs to a popular database management systems that has close to 2 million downloads to date. Here we'll illustrate the features and application areas of such a database and compare db4o against relational DBMS/object relational (OR) mappers.

Have you ever needed to integrate an external system with SharePoint, showing content from each system within the other? What if you needed to integrate search between SharePoint and an external system? How do you keep the user experience seamless if the systems use different authentication mechanisms? Have you wondered if this can be done if the external system is written in Java?

This book is an update of an earlier version that was written for SQL Server 2000. It employs the Murach approach of dual pages that repeat and enhance the concepts being presented on each page. If you're new to SQL Server 2005 you'll gain a lot from this book. It has three goals: to teach T-SQL (Transact SQL), introduce you to the new .NET CLR integration, and introduce you to the new graphical user interface called SQL Server Management Studio that replaces the enterprise manager and query analyzer that were part of the SQL Server 2000 package of software tools.

Mono has released version 1.2.6 and it includes a lot of good stuff. One big addition in 1.2.6 for Mac fans includes a native Winforms driver for OS X that lets Winforms-based applications to run without X Server. This is good news because it means better performance, and will allow future themes, and deeper integration, including the use of other Carbon APIs, better drag-and-drop support, docking icons, and other interface improvements.

'It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies,' wrote Microsoft yesterday in a response to the rejection by the Yahoo! board of directors of its $44.6BN acquisition proposal. 'Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.'

Taking a page from its friend Linspire's hymnal, Canonical, the brains behind Ubuntu, has started offering its flock proprietary Parallels widgetry so it can run Linux and Windows on the same desktop without rebooting. It is Canonical's first dalliance with a proprietary package, but evidently not its last. The Parallels stuff can be found in Canonical's Ubuntu Partner Repository, where Canonical intends to push both proprietary and open source third-party software, and will be available to Ubuntu users as a drop-down menu on the operating system.

Ingres, the open source database, and Pentaho, the open source business intelligence alternative, have partnered up. They say they're going to integrate key product lines and together chase the BI market, saying it's hot. LogicWorks has become MySQL's first authorized hosting partner in the US. It intends to offer customers a managed MySQL Enterprise database for delivering mission-critical apps, making sure at its end that service levels are met. SAP has certified its Business Suite application and NetWeaver platform on Red Hat on IBM's mainframes, part of the Linux-on-Mainframe program Red Hat and IBM put together last spring.

Misys says it's going to make good on its promise to open source components of its proprietary Connect Healthcare solution at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles today. It expects new products and cheaper prices out of the exercise and maybe even improved healthcare delivery. Linspire is going into the custom desktop Linux Build Service business as a way to give its 7,000 partners a leg up into the market, cutting time and costs.

Both Windows Server 2008 and the Vista Service Pack 1 were released to manufacturing Monday with a perspective availability date of sometime in March. Called a bug-fixer almost universally, APCMag says that, based on version and build number, the Service Pack swaps out the original Vista kernel for the new unreleased Longhorn kernel on Windows Server 2008.

Now it's being sued by the University of Wisconsin at Madison for patent infringement. The school's patent management organization, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the world's first university-based technology transfer office, established in 1925, filed suit the other day in Wisconsin's district court saying the Core 2 Duo and the so-called Core micro architecture tread on one of its patents. Naturally it wants damages.

Time Warner's new CEO Jeff Bewkes said Wednesday that AOL is being split in two. Its web portal and advertising business will be separated from its nose-diving Internet access business, the operation that made AOL into a household word and led Time Warner into one of the worst mergers in American corporate history. The move, which should take a few more months, TW said, obviously puts AOL in play, raising speculation of a possible spin-off or sale.

Some of the most scared people inside Yahoo right now have got to be the open source Zimbra crowd that Yahoo acquired last September for $350 million for its Microsoft-opposing enterprise-directed e-mail and calendaring, folks who just released their webby AJAX-based Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 this week - and intend to give it a browser-based document-creating and -sharing Zimbra Desktop, called the 'world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaborative experience.' Somehow we suspect Microsoft may not think e-mail is 'broken' like Zimbra, a partner of Red Hat, does, but if Microsoft does acquires Yahoo and you hear a crunch, you can imagine Zimbra's back breaking.

Buy this book! I don't often give such a blanket endorsement but this book works on many levels. It's one of the few books that really addresses the needs of more experienced ASP.NET developers as well as providing a well thought out text that can be used by instructors. There's a plethora of things in this book that make it worthwhile. There are walkthroughs, code listings, in depth examples, and code snippets. There are 16 chapters and an appendix. At the end of each chapter there's a summary, exercises, key concepts, and references for further investigation.

It's unlikely, however, that Google, the target of the proposed merger, can do much of anything other than raise dust - like its move over the weekend to raise the specter of Microsoft's possible monopolization of the Internet and its illegal leverage into 'new, adjacent markets.' As the Journal observes, Google would have a tough time making a bid for Yahoo itself because its owns too much of search and Internet advertising to clear the regulators, and even the alternatives - underwriting another white knight or helping Yahoo stay independent by guaranteeing 'revenue in return for a Yahoo advertising outsourcing pact' - would probably meet with regulatory headwinds.

Tuesday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang sent out his second company-wide e-mail since Microsoft made its unsolicited $44.5 billion bid for Yahoo, a message that made it into an SEC filing Wednesday. He said the same thing he said before: 'No decisions have been made about Microsoft's proposal.' 'The board, he said, 'is focused on maximizing the value of Yahoo!'s tremendous assets for our shareholders. And it is going to take the time it needs to do it right.' Clinging to the pre-tsunami past of a few days ago, he said, 'We won't let it distract us from pursuing our transformation strategy.' Right.

Like many world-changing technologies before it, SharePoint has caught IS organizations off-guard. Early adopters within the business established SharePoint environments on their own. These users assumed they could manage these environments independently without IS's knowledge or perhaps with tacit consent. SharePoint environments began proliferating throughout many organizations. Quickly, these environments needed maintenance at a level these business users couldn't handle, and that's when things got interesting.