On Tuesday
I wrote about my personal cynicism regarding Microsoft's prospects, as it transforms
from a shrink-wrap software outfit into a company committed to hybrid open and
close-source software and services.
It drew some interesting responses:
"Microsoft has a troubled future ahead of it. The only way it can compete
with cloud computing is to adopt the Google business model -- why do you think
it so desperately needs Yahoo?" wrote RedDevNews reader Mike. "It
knows that a large majority of the shrink-wrapped software's days are numbered.
And if it loses the Office cash cow, it's gonna hit the bottom line hard."
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/10/20083 comments
Like so many publications and Web sites in the IT industry,
Redmond Developer
News
has spent a lot of time pondering the future of Microsoft after Bill
Gates.
RDN
columnist Will Zachmann
just
wrote a feature story
that looks at Gates' developer legacy. And frequent
RDN
contributor and
Redmond
magazine columnist Mary Jo Foley has
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 07/08/20086 comments
Michael Desmond, editor in chief of Redmond Developer News and
Desmond File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen
Richards, RDN's senior editor.
Bill Gates is finishing up his final week at Microsoft on Friday to work full-time
for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates ends his stint in Redmond
as one of the richest men in the world and the face of the PC industry that
he envisioned with his childhood friend and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
in the mid-'70s.
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Posted on 06/24/20080 comments
Michael Desmond, editor in chief of Redmond Developer News and
Desmond File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen
Richards, RDN's senior editor.
Yesterday, Microsoft's Entity Framework program manager Tim Mallalieu announced
in his blog the beginnings of engineering work on ADO.NET Entity Framework
V2.0.
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Posted on 06/24/20080 comments
Michael Desmond, editor in chief of Redmond Developer News and
Desmond File blogger, is on vacation. Filling in for him today is Kathleen
Richards, RDN's senior editor.
Microsoft is running into some compatibility issues with Silverlight and the
latest release
of Firefox. Available as a free download earlier this week, Firefox 3 is
a major upgrade to the popular Mozilla browser.
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Posted on 06/19/20080 comments
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed that Microsoft
SharePoint is
on
a serious roll
. With Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) and Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, Microsoft has cooked up a one-two portal punch
that has surprised even longtime industry watchers.
SharePoint, it seems, is everywhere. And that's creating a huge opportunity
for development shops to begin rolling out some exciting new applications and
services against the platform.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/17/20086 comments
File this under: Things that make you say "Oops."
Microsoft has been hosting on its CodePlex shared source site a project called
Sandcastle, which is an XML documentation compiler for managed class libraries.
The project was published under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) and
promoted as an open source project. Ms-PL is one of two Microsoft license programs
to earn the approval of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/12/20088 comments
At the Tech-Ed Developers Conference last week in Orlando, Bill Gates and Co.
spent most of the
keynote
talking about Silverlight, Visual Studio and even its refreshed Microsoft Robotics
Developer Studio product.
However, one topic that looks like developers are very anxious to hear a lot
more about is SharePoint Server.
The Q&A session after Bill Gates' conference keynote offered a glimpse,
as one attendee, Bill King of BrightPlanet, specifically criticized the lack
of code support for SharePoint developers. Gates' response was telling.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/10/20081 comments
Good news on the Silverlight 2 front. The new beta, which is now expected to
drop on Friday, should provide a fairly smooth ride for developers currently
working with beta 1 or interim builds.
Anthony Lombardo, lead technical evangelist at Infragistics, said his teams
were ready to "stay up all night" to update their Silverlight 2-based
grid and gauge controls for the new beta. They needn't have bothered.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/05/20080 comments
Bill Gates' sometimes-inspired, sometimes-tired
keynote
may have been a harbinger of the first week of this year's Tech-Ed Conference,
which, for the first time, has been split into two parts: the developer conference
this week and the IT professional conference next week.
While the focus on dev tools and issues is a boon for developers and guys like
me who watch this industry for a living, it's a mixed bag for vendors.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/05/20081 comments
You know the old adage: "It ain't a conference until some poor schmuck
loses his job for mangling a demo."
Well, the Microsoft Tech-Ed 2008 developers confab reached conference status
right off the bat, when Microsoft's Webcast of Bill
Gates' anticipated keynote address failed to...well, cast.
Unlucky journos and developers stuck in the hinterlands (that is, outside of
the Orlando Convention Center) enjoyed an endless loop of peppy, spacey music
as they waited for the live Silverlight feed of Gates' speech to kick off. It
never did.
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 06/03/20082 comments
A few months back, conventional wisdom said that Microsoft had big plans afoot
for the next version of the Windows client after Vista, known currently as Windows
7.
Much of that expectation arose not from whisper releases or leaks out of the
Redmond campus, but rather from an innocuous
technical presentation given by Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Eric Traut
at the University of Illinois. (You can view the portion touching on Windows
7 at the I
Started Something blog.)
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Posted by Michael Desmond on 05/29/20080 comments