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 o

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 ear

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 t

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 a

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 an

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.

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 desi

Basically Volta's tier splitting feature is designed to make it so that you can build your application early and then figure out where the services need to go when you're done. This allows you to profile your entire application on a per-method-call basis all in a tight integrated syste

SpringSource, formerly known as Interface21, has announced the final release of Spring.NET 1.1, an application framework for the development and deployment of enterprise .NET applications. With roots in the widely used Spring Framework programming model for Java, Spring.NET extends the

The annual Consumer Electronics Show keynote by Bill Gates has become an annual tradition, but his 11th CES opening keynote is likely to be his last. During the keynote, Gates talked about the ongoing transformation of the personal computer and he shared sales figures for Windows Vista

Since I'm in the middle of moving to a new city and need to get organized, I thought I'd roll a little application using SQL Anywhere, PowerBuilder, and Amazon Web Services to help organize my media collection. In doing so, I'm going to check out some cool features in SQL Anywhere, in

In the midst of Microsoft's initial assault wave on virtualization leader VMware this week, VMware announced the public beta of its Stage Manager management software, stuff that's supposed to accelerate the delivery of new or updated applications from staging to production. Microsoft c

It will take months for this week's fusillade, the results of Microsoft's Virtualization Deployment Summit in Redmond, to clear enough to see if any of the mortars scored a direct hit because Microsoft's repeatedly delayed retort to VMware, the free, catch-up, first-generation Widows S

In part because of MoMA, the Mono analyzer, there were 1,907 new methods implemented in this release, System.Data is 99% compatible with .NET 2.0, and about 150 bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms alone. This was the first version released after Novell hired a full-time QA person f

Telerik has released RadControls Q3 2007. The latest volume includes updates for all product lines for Web and desktop presentation layer development, as well as a new release of Telerik Reporting and a preview of Telerik's RIA controls for Silverlight 1.1/2.0. Q3 introduces new contro

Shipped as a part of Microsoft Visual Studio, SourceSafe sells more than $40 million (US) per year (Source: IDC) and is a very popular version control program for Windows developers. As the teams go distributed and cross-platform, the limitations of SourceSafe rise to the surface. In f

The evolution of Web sites to dynamic rich interactive applications is a true revolution for users. But for ASP.NET developers tasked with building high-performing scalable applications, it presents major challenges. The features that characterize blogs, wikis, personalized pages, and

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be re

In response to the commercial release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, the latest version of the most popular Integrated Development Environment for Microsoft .NET Developers, Software FX announced that it has updated and changed the name of its Chart FX for Visual Studio 2005 product

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich interactive experiences over the web. The Chart FX Silverlight Add-On extends Chart FX 7 and allows developers to add Chart FX functionality to their Silverlight-based web applications. Software FX will be providing

With the European Commission basically holding a gun to its head, Microsoft has signed a five-year accord with the Samba Team that will give the open source project access to the documentation for the Microsoft protocols that should make Samba fully interoperable with Windows workgroup

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-fidelity experiences in Windows Vista, blending together application UI, documents, and media content. WPF contains two data sources for XML and objects. To enhance productivi

SI International (www.si-intl.com) is a provider of information technology and network solutions, primarily to the United States government, But due to its continued success in defining, designing, building, deploying, and operating mission-critical solutions for the Department of Defe

Another version of Visual Studio is here and while there are many cool features, we can conclude a lot from the fact that it isn't a staggering release. The first Visual Studio that wore the .NET moniker was a paradigm shift and threw in many features such as Web services, which though

'Our adoption of MSN SideGuide expands the strategic relationship we have enjoyed with Microsoft and MSN since November 2006,' said MetroFi President and CEO, Chuck Haas, as MetroFi yesterday announced its planned introduction of MSN SideGuide as an advertising delivery platform for it

After suddenly canceling its earnings release last week because - come to find out - the SEC has been poring over last year's 10-K and this year's Q2 10-Q since this summer, whatever mysterious 'accounting matters' provoked the agency's review just as suddenly got resolved and Novell p

Microsoft is opening up its ad-supported 'software-plus-services' Office Live Workspace answer to Google Apps to public beta for feedback, it says, starting with those who pre-registered for the thing. The way it works Office users can post Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDFD files to an

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software ASA has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system and hindering interoperability by not following accepted Web standards. It wants I

As a part of a move to streamline patient records and deliver health solutions across incompatible software platforms, IBM and business partner Mainsoft Corporation announced that Healthways has crossed the .NET-Java EE software standards divide to deploy a multimillion patient health

'This acquisition will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business and presents a huge opportunity to expand our platform business beyond the U.K. and globally,' said Sharon Baylay, general manager of the Online Services Group at Microsoft, as it was anounced ye

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com

Microsoft put out its second Windows Server 2008 release candidate (RC1) Wednesday for anyone, it appears, to download and poke around ahead of the thing's long-awaited launch at the end of February at an event now dubbed 'Heroes happen here.' To take you back, Microsoft had to pull vi

My seven-year-old daughter thinks that there is a knowledge genie that her teacher 'Googles' for answers. While cute, the anecdote also exemplifies how much Google's obsession with simplicity has helped build brand awareness, making their name literally synonymous with search. I can fo

DNK Web Solutions, Inc announced the launch of .NET 3.5 hosting. DNK Web Solutions production web servers are installed side-by-side with .NET Framework 3.5 and earlier versions. Customers can choose which ASP.NET version they desire to develop against using a real-time ASP.NET Version

Microsoft, which is often cast as the evil stepsister, has advanced its rival-limiting designs on One Laptop Per Child's novel XO machine to the point that its so-called 'Unlimited Potential' people are openly talking about running 'limited field trials' on a XP/Office version of the t

'Please don't mistake silence for inaction,' requested IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch this week, as he revealed the none too astonishing news that the version after IE7 is to be called...IE8. His team looked at a host of alternative names, Hachamovitch said - including IE for Web

Xceed has announced that Microsoft is using Xceed Zip for .NET and Xceed Chart for .NET to implement client-side and server-side portions of its upcoming Windows Home Server product. Windows Home Server helps centralize and connect digital experiences, providing a familiar and reliable

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions

Software virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same computer. The basic premise is that for most of the day your server is basically idle and the CPU and memory are not tasked with processes all day long, the server has excess capacity

The .NET Framework 3.5 release last week was a big one for .NET, and delivered what Scott Guthrie summarized as 'a ton of new capabilities and improvements for web, client, office and mobile development.' Guthrie additionally shared with developers a road-map of some of the upcoming in