Microsoft

Microsoft made two enterprise moves on Monday, one expected and the other a bit of a surprise.

As promised, the company used its TechEd event in Berlin to release Exchange 2010, the latest version of its e-mail and calendar server software. Microsoft finalized the code for the product last month and had said it would launch at TechEd.

Microsoft VP Tami Reller talks about enterprise adoption of Windows 7 as part of a Webcast held after the first day of TechEd Europe.

(Credit: CNET News)

Meanwhile, the company also announced it is buying the Teamprise technology from SourceGear. Teamprise allows developers using Eclipse and those working on non-Windows operating systems to build applications using Microsoft's Visual Studio product.

"We know our customers face daily challenges with management, collaboration and development in heterogeneous environments. The industry must take steps to make interoperability a stronger business asset for our customers," senior vice president and developer unit head S. Somasegar said in a statement. "With the acquisition of the Teamprise assets, we're taking a step forward on this journey, providing customers with a viable cross-platform development solution that will help produce business results more quickly."

Microsoft didn't announce financial terms of the deal, but did say the Teamprise technology will be integrated into Visual Studio 2010.

At TechEd Europe, Microsoft also talked about enterprise adoption of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, highlighting some early customers of the two products.

"We remain just pleased and humbled by the very warm reception we're seeing," Microsoft vice president Tami Reller said in a Webcast on Monday.

As part of the same Webcast, senior vice president Chris Capossela sounded off on Cisco's announcement of updated collaboration tools that could take on Exchange.

"Rather than stitching together acquired products and calling that a solution, we've built Exchange form the ground up," he said.

Microsoft on Monday is announcing that it will release in November a public test version of Office 2010.

The software maker released a limited technology preview of the software in July and plans to release the final version next year. It also started testing of the browser-based "Office Web Apps" in September.

Microsoft, which is making the announcement at its SharePoint conference, is also detailing some of the features of the next version of its portal software, which will also enter beta next month.

The new version, SharePoint 2010, includes Office's Ribbon user interface as well as enhanced support for video, audio and Silverlight. Programmers will also be able develop Sharepointl sites using the next version of the company's Visual Studio, which is going into a second beta this week.

SharePoint is an important product for Microsoft as it is one of the company's fastest growing large businesses. Last year it brought in more than $1.3 billion in revenue, up 20 percent from the prior year.

"SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date," CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. "When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business."

Microsoft is set to announce on Monday that it is ready with a second beta version of its Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0 developer tools. Both products are set for a final release on March 22, Microsoft said.

"Microsoft has reached the home stretch for Visual Studio 2010," said Dave Mendlen, a senior director in Microsoft's developer division. "This is probably the biggest release we've had in many years."

Among the product's features is a Tivo-like recording feature that Microsoft has now dubbed "IntelliTrace."

"That's our time machine," Mendlen said. "We're very proud of that."

Other features new to the 2010 release include support for Windows 7 and Windows Azure as well as tools for building on top of Microsoft's Sharepoint product.

With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is also taking the opportunity to scale back the number of different versions it sells, cutting the number of subscription options from seven to three. In a telephone interview, Microsoft Vice President S. "Soma" Somasegar said that move came from customer requests.

They told us "one place you can do better is making it simpler how you package your products," Somasegar said.

Under the new plan, myriad Visual Studio options will be consolidated into Professional, Premium, and Ultimate. Microsoft is planning an "ultimate offer" promotion that will give many current subscribers access to the next-higher version of Visual Studio as well as 750 Windows Azure compute hours per month. Next year, the company plans to change that to offer varying amounts of Azure compute time based on the level of the Visual Studio subscription.

In a rare move, Microsoft on Friday said it would be releasing security updates on Tuesday--outside of its monthly patch cycle--for a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer and a moderate vulnerability in Visual Studio.

The two security bulletins will address one overall issue and are being released separately "to provide the broadest protections possible to customers," Microsoft said in a statement.

The vulnerabilities affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and Visual C++ 2005 and 2008, according to the security bulletin advance notification.

"While we can't go into specifics about the issue prior to release, we can say that the Visual Studio bulletin will address an issue that can affect certain types of applications," the statement said. "The Internet Explorer bulletin will provide defense-in-depth changes to Internet Explorer to help provide additional protections for the issues addressed by the Visual Studio bulletin."

"The Internet Explorer update will also address vulnerabilities rated as critical that are unrelated to the Visual Studio bulletin that were privately and responsibly reported," Microsoft said.

Customers who are current with their security updates are protected from known attacks related to the updates, the company said. The updates will be released through the Microsoft Update, Windows Update, and Windows Server Update services.

A Webcast to address customer questions is scheduled for Tuesday from 1 p.m. PDT to 2 p.m. at this site.

Microsoft typically releases security patches on a monthly basis, the second Tuesday of every month, and did not say why it is making this rare, out-of-cycle release.

Matt Carter (left) and Jason Zander (right)

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

In the wake of the recent 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.

Microsoft is promoting the next version of its Visual Studio tool set, code-named Rosario, as offering new levels of analysis of the application development process.

On the back of a well-rehearsed pledge to democratize the application life cycle management process, the company is hedging its bets with a set of product enhancements it says will meet the software development needs arising from trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, and parallelism.

Attempting to shed light on the forthcoming tools with a visit to the U.K. were Redmond-based Jason Zander, general manager for Visual Studio, and Matt Carter, group product manager in the same division. ZDNet UK caught up with them both at Microsoft's London headquarters in Victoria.

Q: What's the core technology proposition for the new tools and how will the new releases simplify everyday development tasks?
Carter: with VS2010 (Visual Studio 2010) there will be a strong focus on providing insight into the development process in terms of the structure and function of the code. We're also concerned with making it easier to build web applications. We want to encourage the development of departmental business applications that utilize the Office UI and we want to make SharePoint development feel like Visual Studio development so that usability is improved.

We also want to reach out to C++ developers if they have a large investment in terms of lines of C++ code, so they can now carry those forward into a Visual Studio environment. There will also be evidence of our investments in Visual C++ to simplify development of native Windows 7-based applications, and this will mean support for innovations compliant with Windows 7, such as multitouch user interfaces.

Specifically, how will developers be able to work competently with increasingly complex applications if they adopt the forthcoming tools within the .Net 4.0 framework?
Zander: If you learn a language like C# or Visual Basic and you learn a framework like .Net and how to program against it and combine that with Visual Studio, then those three things together provide a very consistent environment for working towards numerous platforms that you may want to target--complex or otherwise.

This is already the case now, but it will be more so when .Net 4.0 arrives.

If we need the integration elements of Rosario so pressingly, why have the so-called development silos you often talk about developed to such a degree? Surely this segmentation has developed through the use of much of your existing technology.
Zander: In a big enterprise there will always be multiple tiers of development with externally facing elements sitting alongside internal business management needs, so silos will always exist to some degree. What we need to look at now is a situation where, let's say, a procurement department needs to build in a new external web service as well as form tighter links to the rest of the business. What we're trying to do with our tools is make sure the programming for those different segments--and, crucially, being able to stitch them together--becomes a simple task.

Your marketing people are fond of saying VS2010 will "democratize application lifecycle management from architects to developers, to project managers to testers." Where's the substance for that kind of statement?
Carter: The substance, for us, comes from the information share and insight improvements we've made. We've looked very hard at the problem of non-reproducible bugs--when a tester tries unsuccessfully to replicate reported defects. We have a new test tool that allows a developer to view a screen-captured video of the defect as recorded by the tester. At the same time, the developer can also view the historical debugging information and machine state at the time of the problem. By lowering barriers and making sure everyone works from the same repository of information, you get a far greater sense of a team and that, for us, represents democratization.

Visual Studio Team System [VSTS] 2010 architecture is claimed to bring non-technical users into the modelling process to define business and system functionality. How do we keep business managers reigned in to keep their requirement specifications under control?
Carter: It's all about transparency. Through VSTS we will aim to try and make available all the reporting and business intelligence necessary for business users to be able to view the status of a project. So if that reporting exists and is delivered to business users via tools they're used to, such as Excel and Outlook, it must represent a positive addition to the project at hand.

Your next Windows Azure tools are aligned to development for the cloud. How will they look and feel in practice?
Zander: We want to make it possible for developers to use all their .Net programming skills for the cloud. There will be a sandbox security model similar to that which we have provided with the ASP.Net web application framework. The best practices you can find with that technology will also extend to Azure on the cloud.

Carter: With Azure, the key thing is everything will look very familiar to you as a Visual Studio developer, because the programming model is the same. With the same components at hand, we hope developers will see a movement to the cloud as a natural and evolutionary extension.

What tools do you have to help developers with the techniques chip developers say are necessary for multicore?
Zander: In terms of VS2010 and parallel computing, there is a new set of libraries specifically built to enable to developers to write parallel code. At the base level we have a new runtime called the concurrency runtime, which allows me as a developer to take advantage of all the cores present on the machine. Secondly, the tooling inside VS2010 will be enhanced so both the debugger and the profiler are able to track all the extra work you're scheduling for the machine and see how well it is executing.

You're making a big play for Web developers with the new products. Other than full support for Silverlight, which we would have expected, what else is new?
Zander: Of course, it's more than just Silverlight support, but as we head towards version 3.0 that will be important. With the new products we have incorporated new model-view-controller (MVC) patterns and we're also shipping the JQuery JavaScript library with VS2010 including full IntelliSense support for auto-completion functions.

VSTS 2010's testing and debugging features have been described as a black-box recorder to help eliminate non-reproducible bugs. Do you think you'll "eat your own dog food" and improve your own beta releases with this technology?
Zander: Absolutely. One of the sessions people will have seen at PDC and TechEd delivered by Stephanie Saad was designed specifically so she could document all the instances where Microsoft is "dog-fooding" on the development of VS2010 and VSTS. It is used internally right across teams like the Microsoft Office division where thousand of developers will be contributing code at any one time. In fact using "dog-fooding" as a verb in this way has been the norm at Microsoft for some time now. We're pretty comfortable with it.

Adrian Bridgwater of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Updated 9:56 a.m. PDT: Added screen shot and a link to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 page.

Airplanes are equipped with recorders that capture both cockpit audio and flight data, so in the event that something goes wrong, investigators can try to determine the source of the problem.

Microsoft is aiming to give software developers the same kind of access. In the next version of its developer tool suite, to be known as Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft plans to include the ability to record the full screens of what testers are seeing, as well as data about their machine. When a test application crashes, the technology will enable developers to see the bug as it occurred.

In an interview last week, Microsoft Developer Division Director Dave Mendlen said the feature is designed to avoid the all-too-frequent conflict that occurs when a software tester finds a bug that the developer says it can't reproduce. Internally, the feature has been called "TiVo for debuggers."

Visual Studio Team System 2010 will offer tools for managing test cases and execution, and will boost support for filing actionable bugs.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Sample JavaScript using JQuery.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft said Sunday that it plans to ship the JQuery JavaScript library with its Visual Studio developer tool suite.

The software powerhouse said that jQuery would be one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.net Ajax Control Toolkit, and would also have a role in new Ajax server-side helper methods. The 15KB JQuery JavaScript library will be distributed as is, with no forking, and files will continue to adhere to the JQuery MIT license.

In addition, Microsoft said that it would contribute tests, bug fixes, and patches to the JQuery open-source project and that later this year it would extend product support to JQuery.

The announcement came in a blog post by Scott Guthrie, a vice president in Microsoft's developer division, who described the library's attraction:

A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.

Guthrie also pointed to a newly posted tutorial on Scott Hanselman's Computerzen blog about integrating JQuery with ASP.net Ajax.

Writing on the JQuery blog, John Resig said that mobile phone heavyweight Nokia also is adopting JQuery as part of its application development platform. As is the case with Microsoft, he said, Nokia isn't looking to make any changes to the library, and its developers will contribute to the JQuery project.

Resig, a lead developer of JQuery, wrote:

Nokia is looking to use jQuery to develop applications for their WebKit-based Web Run-Time. The run-time is a stripped-down browser rendering engine that allows for easy, but powerful, application development. This means that jQuery will be distributed on all Nokia phones that include the web run-time...

...The jQuery test suite is already integrated into the test suites of Mozilla and Opera and this move will see a significant level of extra testing being done on Internet Explorer and WebKit - above-and-beyond what is already done by the jQuery team.