Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Developers are increasingly working on systems that abstract the underlying mechanisms they depend upon. SharePoint was the catalyst for this observation as I increasingly see development implementations that just don't seem to work out as hoped, with misunderstandings or in some cases bugs causing the issues.

Today, RIA technology is widely used, also referred to as Rich Internet Clients (RICs). RICs provide the usability, responsiveness, and reuse of client/server applications with the deployment, manageability, and availability of a traditional Web application. Many websites are using DHTML and AJAX technology in HTML pages. Another very popular technology is Flash. How about Silverlight, though? RIAs offer the flexibility and ease of use of an intelligent desktop application, and add the broad reach of traditional web applications with an entirely new kind of web experience that is engaging, interactive, lightweight, and flexible.

'When we first released Windows Vista last year, there were lots of customers who had great experiences, but some had issues finding applications that worked well on Windows Vista,' wrote Microsoft's Mike Nash yesterday candidly on the official Windows Vista Blog. 'The good news,' he continued, 'is that this last year has been a great year of progress for Windows Vista in terms of improving application and device compatibility.'

Nokia is buying Trolltech, the publicly traded Norwegian open source ISV, for roughly $153 million cash. Gee, and Trolltech just joined the LiMo Foundation, the anti-Nokia/anti-Microsoft mobile consortium that's building a middleware-focused Linux handset platform that can be shared by its members with third-party access to the APIs, and not Google's flashier Linux-based Android effort. The acquisition is practically in the bag.

The court charged with policing Microsoft's 2002 antitrust settlement with the US government has extended its oversight of the company until November of 2009, an additional two years. Most of the watchdogs were supposed to be called off this past November. However, late last year 10 states led by California and New York that were party to the original suit asked Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to extend the supervision of Microsoft until 2012.

Google doesn't like the idea of Microsoft buying Yahoo any more than Microsoft likes the idea of Google buying DoubleClick. Today in a blog Google general counsel David Drummond said Microsoft?'s $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo 'raises troubling questions.' 'This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another,' he wrote. 'It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet' openness and innovation,' throwing in Microsoft's face allegations of possible monopolization and antitrust leverage onto 'new, adjacent markets.'

I know I'm probably different than most folks, but I actually like using the command line. I also interact with a number of different operating systems, so I can end up with lots of command prompts and PuTTY sessions littering up my task bar on Windows XP laptop. Recently I discovered a project that has been around for quite a while, it's called Console.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

To satisfy growing customer demand for numerical application development technologies for .NET and Java, and for advanced charting and graph visualization, Visual Numerics announced the availability of the IMSL C# Numerical Library version 5.0 and JMSL Numerical Library for Java Applications version 5.0. These libraries now include enhanced algorithms for better performance, as well as new process control chart capabilities. The combination of these features is optimal for companies that are developing analytical applications in .NET and Java, and require highly accurate algorithms for quantitative analysis such as predictive modeling and quality control.

OpenLink announced the commercial availability of Release 6.1 of its high-performance and secure Universal Data Access Drivers. The updated components support new and older releases of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, IBM DB2, IBM Informix, Ingres, Progress Open Edge, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird, across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.

Microsoft this morning made a $44.6 billion hostile bid for the floundering Yahoo, striking at a point when it has become evident to all and sundry that Yahoo doesn't have a pray of turning things around on its own let alone getting competitive. Yahoo's first official reaction was basically to say it'll think about it. It said it would evaluate the offer 'carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans.' It did not give a timeframe for a response. Although it looks pretty boxed in, it could of course try for more money.

CodeGear announced the sale of a 1 million seat license deal to the Russian Federal Agency of Education for teaching programming and application development to Russian students. CodeGear's products -- Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++ Builder - will be available for use in all of Russia's primary and secondary schools to teach its new generation of computer programmers.

There's been quite a bit of hype recently about Volta, the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft. It's a bit like the Google Web Toolkit or RJS in Ruby on Rails, in that it allows you to write everything in C# and have it translated into JavaScript. You don't even have to use C# - you could just as easily use VB, since it works on the compiled MSIL, converting that into JavaScript.

Long about 2009, when - make note - Microsoft is really supposed to have Windows 7, the Vista rev, penciled in, its vaunted, if still unreleased, Hyper-V hypervisor is supposed to cease being an add-on and get sucked up into Windows Server. At that point Microsoft and market leading VMware are, for once, supposed to be at the same starting line at least as far as cross-chassis virtualization goes. Microsoft is rumored to be planning to support at least 20 blades in two chassis of 10 blades each - although those numbers are probably low-balling it - and that's something VMware can't do yet though by next year if should.

In response to the proliferation of other frameworks used to create rich Internet applications such as Flex from Adobe (formerly from Macromedia) and AJAX-based frameworks, Microsoft Silverlight was recently introduced. All three of these applications, as well as the others on the market, enable a web developer to create an interface on a web page that is much more robust than traditional HTML-based pages once were.

In this interview with the editor-in-chief of .NET Developer's Journal, Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg discusses the origins and the future of C#. The interview appeared in .NET Developer's Journal, Vol 1 issue 1 - in October 2002.

PreEmptive Solutions announced that it has launched a Professional Services organization and is shipping new releases of DashO, Dotfuscator Gold, Dotfuscator Professional, Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE) and Dotfuscator CE Enhanced.

Forget the fact that Microsoft came in Thursday with record-breaking fiscal Q2 earnings, up 92%, to $4.7 billion, or 50 cents a share, on revenues, up 30%, to $16.37 billion and an operating income of $6.48 billion, the giant leaps are skewed because of an easy compare due to deferred revenue and the company's technology guarantee programs last year. Analysts expected 46 cents on $15.95 billion.

AccuRev now offers significantly more software configuration management (SCM) functionality, productivity and performance enhancements for its AccuBridge for Visual Studio 2005 plug-in directly in the Visual Studio IDE. AccuBridge for Visual Studio 2005, which now implements the SCC provider interfaces that are part of the Visual Studio packages, also adds significantly improved usability over the previous integration, which was based on the Microsoft Common Source Code Control Interface.

Brussels-based VRcontext has announced the release of Walkinside Version 5 virtual reality software. Walkinside software has been redeveloped to deliver faster, more intuitive navigation of large complex production assets using .NET technology, which enables remote collaboration through the Internet with online virtualization tools that are accessible even from low-end workstations.

There are many controls and extenders provided by the AJAX Control Toolkit that can be used to enhance ASP.NET user interfaces. The ValidatorCallout is used with the existing validation controls to show a nice box with the validation message that points to the field in error. The CollapsiblePanel provides an area of the screen that can be collapsed to hide the content but leave a title bar with the header. The ModalPopup displays a popup window and disables the remainder of the page. There are many controls provided which provide a much richer experience for ASP.NET Web sites.

AJAX is not about Eye Candy. AJAX is about building functionality that is difficult or impossible with conventional web development technology. Done right your web applications ROCK, but it it's done wrong and your infrastructure pays the price. This session will expose a collection of design and usage patterns that will help you understand ASP.NET AJAX under the covers and design efficient, interactive AJAX Applications using Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Technologies.

In this session, Laurence Moroney, Microsoft, will introduce Silverlight 2.0 and how it can be used to easily and productively build next generation Rich Interactive Applications using C#, XAML, JavaScript, AJAX and more. He will demonstrate how to go from Zero-to-Hero as well as how to build more complex nTier applications with Silverlight at the front end, as well as using Silverlight with PHP, Java and other back-end technologies.

You think your ASP.NET AJAX application is secure, but how do you know? Are you SURE? Would you bet your career on it? Secure application design is 1/3 Architecture, 1/3 Code, and 1/3 Operations. You can't retro-fit a secure architecture. In this Digital Black Belt crash session you'll get a whirlwind tour of how to write secure web applications with ASP.NET AJAX. You can't learn it all in a day, but you can get started with secure development techniques and learn what questions you need to be asking each day in your development process.

Visual WebGui is the only framework that provides seamless integration to Visual Studio and the .NET framework which extends the paradigms of ASP.NET in both design-time and run-time to support WinForms development for web. Visual WebGui offering is unique and not more of the same (150 AJAX frameworks)! Visual WebGui replaces all of the ASP.NET methodologies which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications.

Intel's Q4 results, as good as they were, failed to impress a panicky 'the sky is falling' stock market and Intel's light Q1 forecast, which the company called 'a little bit cautious' on the US economy, sent the stock and the market down Wednesday, erasing billions in stockholder wealth in another utterly abominable day on Wall Street, a pattern that continued Thursday. The market wanted Intel to return 40 cents on revenues of $10.8 billion in Q4. It came in with 38 cents on $10.7 billion, an execution Intel figures was 'very strong' with nearly all products and geographies, particularly Europe, growing. The company's telltale margin that everyone has been watching was up 6.9 points year-over-year to 58.1%, approaching the 60% that investors say they want.

The clock is ticking and the time is near for the 2008 Server and Tools Launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 marking the largest ever IT Professional and Developer outreach in the history of Microsoft.

eZ Systems announced they will professionally support eZ Publish running on Mac OS X Server v10.5 Leopard. In addition, eZ demonstrated eZ Flow (running on Mac OSX), a new extension for eZ Publish designed for media companies who need to build complex page layouts and pre-plan publication schedules to ensure a constant flow of rich content.

In the past, I have downloaded the behemoth Virtual PC images that Microsoft provides for the Orcas CTPs. When I was confronted with the choice of whether I wanted to download the Orcas image (which is a 5.3GB dual-layer DVD image) or whether I wanted to download the Virtual PC image (which I think is 8 gargantuan files, and must also download the base image, also over 1GB) I decided to download the DVD image.

Microsoft disclosed late Thursday that Jeff Raikes, the head of its Office operation, second only to Windows in bringing in revenue, was retiring and will be replaced by Stephen Elop, 44, Jupiter Networks' short-term COO. Before Jupiter, Elop was president of worldwide field operations at Adobe by virtue of Adobe's 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, where he was president and CEO. Elop also has experience as a chief information officer. The plan is for Raikes, 49, to hang around until September as a backstop as a member of the senior leadership team for purposes of transition.

Intel turned up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week loaded down with 16 new 45nm Penryn chips, including its first 45nm Centrino mobile chips, and the idea that it can now cultivate a new category of tiny gadgets that'll put broadband Internet access 'in your pocket.' These devices are supposed to start appearing later this year thanks to the 45nm shrink. Intel said it would ship a first-generation low-power platform chipset known as Poulsbo this half that will help these ultra-mobile Internet devices (MIDs) or ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) materialize.

You have perhaps heard - given the amount of ink spilled on the story - that Intel quit the One Laptop Per Child board last week rather than get thrown off for badmouthing and competing against the altruistic non-profit and its cute little kid-friendly, customer-shy, AMD Geode-based green-and-white widget, the thing that was supposed to cost $100 and currently costs $188. Intel only took the board seat and promised millions of dollars in financial aid last July after the head of OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte, complained about Intel's interference with his brainchild and its potential third-world buyers on television's '60 Minutes.'

Microsoft's acquisitions guy, corporate VP of corporate development Bruce Jaffe, also responsible for strategic investments and joint ventures - stuff like Microsoft's $6 billion aQuantitive acquisition and its $240 million Facebook investment - will be leaving the company at the end of February. Valleywag thinks he might start his own company in Silicon Valley.

Microsoft's latest Google corrective has it buying Norway's troubled publicly traded enterprise data search firm, Fast Search & Transfer ASA, for a lavish $1.2 billion in cash. The buyout price represents a 42% premium over Fast's stock price last Friday and 48 times estimated 2010 earnings. It will be one of Microsoft's pricier acquisitions, demanding upwards of 5% of the loot in its treasury or three weeks worth of free cash flow to complete.

In this session, Laurence Moroney, Microsoft, will introduce Silverlight 2.0 and how it can be used to easily and productively build next generation Rich Interactive Applications using C#, XAML, JavaScript, AJAX and more. He will demonstrate how to go from Zero-to-Hero as well as how to build more complex nTier applications with Silverlight at the front end, as well as using Silverlight with PHP, Java and other back-end technologies.

Since I purchased my ADC subscription in January, it's coming up on renewal time and I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on the past year from the perspective of a newbie Cocoa programmer. When I showed up to the Leopard Tech Talk in 2007, I felt a little nervous... after all, I showed up and took notes on a Windows Vista machine ;) Everyone there, especially all of Apple's evangelists were very welcoming... they didn't even throw me out when I started asking them for comparisons between Cocoa and WCF and Core Animation and WPF. They even remained gracious when I started talking about Remoting and PNRP ;) Trust me, it takes a lot of patience to be in the same room with me when I'm in 'learning mode'.

On to part two in the series of Most Excellent Software Adventures. In this episode, we talk about scalability in the massive sense - à la Google style. Thousands of commodity machines, connected and waiting for your algorithm and data inputs, and the APIs that drive them.

As portals gain in popularity, both as consumer-focused information portals and corporate collaboration tools, developers are increasingly being told to integrate customized portal features. In this article, I'll take a look at the solutions Microsoft offers for creating Web portals and how you can extend these portals by building custom modules.

The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) is a new top-level project at eclipse.org. Originally proposed by Sybase in February 2005, DTP has attracted strong community support and is currently managed by a committee comprised of Sybase, IBM and Actuate. It is an open source initiative designed to provide solutions in the data framework and tooling domains.