News (42)

OpenOffice 3 enters beta stage

The first beta-test version of the OpenOffice.org 3.0 productivity suite was released on Wednesday, adding significant features such as improved Mac OS X support and support for the OpenDocument 1.2 standard. Read more »

Microsoft patches six 'critical' flaws

Microsoft has released 11 security patches, six of which are "critical" and five of which are "important", according to the software giant. Read more »

Microsoft Live Labs unveils Volta Web toolkit

Microsoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network. Read more »

Fighting Office with open source

Michael Meeks is a distinguished engineer at Novell. But his current project may be his toughest yet. He is in charge of tackling interoperability between Novell's OpenOffice.org productivity suite and Microsoft Office. And as with anything relating to Microsoft, this involves more than just technology. Read more »

Microsoft brings .Net to Silverlight

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, has introduced a video-streaming service and .Net development tool support for Silverlight, its cross-platform Web browser plug-in. Read more »

Microsoft shelves its Virtual PC for Mac

Microsoft is putting a halt to a version of its Virtual PC software for Intel-based Macs. Read more »

Xen leads Novell's turnaround effort in Linux

Novell will try to recover from earlier Linux fumbles by releasing major updates on Monday, adding Xen virtualisation software to its enterprise server product and glitzy graphics to the desktop counterpart. Read more »

'Mort, Elvis, Einstein' headed for the scrapheap?

Microsoft's internal classification system for developers is 'ethically bankrupt', critics say. Read more »

Microsoft frees Visual Studio 2005 Express

The stripped-down version of Microsoft's development tool will be available at no cost indefinitely. Read more »

Microsoft extends tool giveaway

Microsoft has decided to continue indefinitely a free development tool offer it launched last year to better attract hobbyists and students to Microsoft's software. Read more »

Features (134)

Microsoft details plans for Visual Studio and .NET

In the wake of the recent PDC and TechEd developer events, Microsoft has decided to put some of its key executives out on the road to explain the innovations that Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 have in store. Read more »

Get your Shoes on and go dance with code

Shoes is a Ruby-based toolkit which has the evangelical mission of letting non-programmers get their mice wet without having to go through all the tribal initiation rituals that today's computing environments demand. Read more »

Employ refactoring via Visual Studio to write better code

Refactoring is the practice of making your code cleaner and clearer without affecting the functionality. Find out what's included in Visual Studio's Refactor menu, and discover a couple of Visual Studio add-ins that bring refactoring to the Visual Basic community. Read more »

Seamlessly integrate applications with eBay using its Windows SDK

The eBay Windows SDK allows you to easily access eBay data within your application. Tony Patton gives you an overview of the functionality provided by the eBay Web services API. Read more »

Easily manipulate data with LINQ

The buzz around .NET Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is hard to ignore, especially since Microsoft is embracing it with the latest release of the .NET platform (beginning with C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0) and Visual Studio 2008. Read more »

Take advantage of code snippets in Visual Studio 2005

Visual Studio 2005 brings auto-complete for code snippets to C#, J#, and XML, as well as additional features for Visual Basic. Read more »

Don't sweat migrating legacy .NET projects to Visual Studio 2008

Migrating to Visual Studio 2008 is a breeze. It automates the conversion process and allows you to continue working with older versions of the .NET Framework. Read more »

Case Study: Switching places from Lotus to .NET

For almost a decade, Sydney-based software developer Just OnePlace (J1P) had been a loyal devotee of the IBM/Lotus platform. But following the strategic review that commenced two years ago the company made a strategic switch to the rival Microsoft .NET camp. Read more »

Working with LINQ in Visual Studio 2008

We cover how the O/R Designer feature in Visual Studio 2008 that allows you to use LINQ to access SQL Server. Read more »

Initial impressions of Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 was recently released to MSDN subscribers, and it's slated to be available to the general public soon. These recent developments spurred me to take a closer look at the latest version of Microsoft's flagship IDE. Read more »

Blog (2)

The good and truly awful celluloid depictions of computers

Chris Duckett [blogs:betaliving] -- Ever wonder why your lawyer uncle leaves the room whenever you turn over to Boston Legal? Or why your forensic science cousin can't stand crime drama? You know the answer: it’s the horrid trivialisation and dumbing down of an occupation to make it appear entertaining. Sometimes it is so unbelievable that it actually hurts and yelling at the screen is the only outlet. Read more »

NICTA: Aussies should focus on embedded programming not VB

Brendon Chase [blogs:codemonkeybusiness] -- The CEO of the national ICT research centre says the future of Aussie developers should focus on building better embedded and wireless applications and focus less on technologies such as Visual Basic. Read more »

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