Long-time stalwart of Microsoft's database business, Paul Flessner, will step down as senior vice president of the Data Storage and Platform Division as of Jan. 1, the company confirmed this week.
Microsoft and Zend Technologies are joining forces to improve the performance of PHP-based applications running on Windows Server 2003, the two companies disclosed on Tuesday. The Redmond software giant and the Cupertino, Calif. provider of products and services for the open-source PHP scripting language are embarking on this technical collaboration "to provide customers with richer functionality and better integration" of PHP on Windows.
On the verge of shipping Windows Vista, Microsoft is touting a new initiative aimed at using systems integrators to provide enterprise customers with application compatibility testing and remediation in advance of deploying the new system.
When Microsoft announced second fiscal 2007 quarterly earnings last week, officials also said they will defer reporting about $1.5 billion in revenues in the current quarter.
Microsoft this week quietly announced it is dropping the highly touted renaming of SQL Server Mobile Edition to SQL Server Everywhere Edition. Due to the complications of changing the name so late in the product’s release cycle, the company will delay the release of the latest version for an indefinite period of "several weeks."
The JRuby Guys — Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo — hired by Sun Microsystems to bring JRuby to 1.0 status, have apparently been hard at work: Sun has just released JRuby 0.9.1. It's an incremental release, but a milestone in the development of this Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.
Black-box testing is standard practice for analyzing the security of deployed Web applications. It's a practice that falls short in key areas, however, making it difficult for developers to find and repair code flaws.
Microsoft began shipping the beta test release of version 1 of ASP.NET AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), previously codenamed "Atlas."
Less than a week after Microsoft shipped the long awaited Internet Explorer 7, it's Mozilla's turn. Final code for Firefox 2 officially became available for download on Tuesday afternoon.
For IT shops that do not plan to immediately deploy Windows Vista or who have a lot of legacy XP machines, the wait for XP Service Pack 3 just got a bit longer.
Oracle this week released a free dev tool for its Fusion middleware. The new productivity tool called Oracle Developer Depot provides access to a library of reusable and sample code for rapid development of Java app prototypes.
Microsoft has just added its Virtual Hard Disk Image Format specification to the list of technologies available for free and without a license under its Open Specification Promise (OSP). Introduced last month, the OSP is Microsoft's "irrevocable promise not to assert" its patent claims on 35 Web services-related specifications.
Technologies for software localization—the process of translating a UI from one language to another and adapting it to foreign cultural references—have been around for about 15 years, but the modern global marketplace has spawned a new generation of specialized localization tools.
While the big news is that Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP on Wednesday, IE's main browser competitor hit a major milestone of its own just two days before.
Microsoft last week said it is cooperating with anti-virus and security providers so that they can provide the same protection level as its own products, including OneCare Live. At least one big Microsoft partner and competitor, however, disputes those statements.
In the countdown to Vista's release, there have been no reports of dumpster diving by enterprising reporters, but the largest circulation Seattle paper says it has seen a sign that points to the end of testing on Oct. 25th.
BEA Systems calls it the knowledge-worker gap: that rift between the ad hoc, spontaneous collaboration in which most of these kinds of workers regularly engage and the technologies that support those activities.
Microsoft's release of its Office Business Applications Reference Application Pack for Supply Chain Management is the first in a series of technical resources. OBAs are designed to help guide the development of what Redmond calls "a new breed of applications" that use Office 2007 as a platform.
Call them the M & Ms -- Microsoft and Mozilla, that is. Both are readying major new versions of their browsers --Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 -- for release in the next few weeks.
More than 13 months after Hurricane Katrina came ashore, Microsoft confirmed Monday that it is moving three of its annual conferences, including two of its largest shows, out of New Orleans -- at least temporarily.