With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft's Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company?s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Google is currently the pet of the American consumer. Although many in the industry don't find it particularly likeable, the company's reputation is tops among US consumers, based largely on how it treats employees and a perception of social responsibility, according to a Harris poll, in which Google dislodged Microsoft from the perch. Johnson & Johnson, the Band-Aid king, came in second and Intel third. Microsoft is now number 10. Google was previously number four. Companies with the worst reps include Halliburton, Comcast, Northwest Airlines and Exxon.

Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix has named former PeopleSoft chief marketing officer and HP veteran Nanci Caldwell to its board.

In ASP.NET 2.0, we introduced a very powerful set of application services in ASP.NET (Membership, Roles and profile). In 3.5 we created a client library for accessing them from Ajax and .NET Clients and exposed them via WCF web services. For more information on the base level ASP.NET appservices that this walk through is based on, please see Stefan Schackow's excellent book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management.

There ain't gonna be no highly diverting no-holds-barred fight-to-the-finish proxy fight over Yahoo come the company's stockholders meeting August 1. The two sides cut a deal Monday. Yahoo will be giving corporate raider Carl Icahn - who was threatening to replace the whole Yahoo board with cronies of his own and oust Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang - three seats on an expanded 11-man board still dominated by current Yahoo management that favors the anti-Microsoft status quo.

DevExpress is proud to announce the immediate availability of the XtraGauge Component Suite for Windows Forms. Built and optimized for Visual Studio .NET, this Gauge control radically simplifies the way in which developers create and deliver dashboard-style UIs to their customers.

DevExpress is proud to announce the immediate availability of the XtraWizard component suite for Windows Forms. Built and optimized for Visual Studio .NET, this Wizard control radically simplifies the way in which developers create and deliver step-by-step 'guides' and/or detailed data entry forms in their smart client solutions.

Gizmox announced the release of a fully functional beta version of its Visual WebGui (VWG) with support for Microsoft Silverlight. For the first time, VWG enables Silverlight for enterprise applications by providing a RAD like Windows Forms development experience with drag & drop design that cuts development cycles by as much as 90%.

Microsoft and its cross-platform, Flash-rivaling, RIA-building Silverlight plug-in are being sued in San Francisco for patent infringement by a no-profile Massachusetts outfit called Gotuit Media Corporation. The thin seven-page suit and its venue comes compliments of California lawyer Spencer Hosie who brought us the highly diverting Burst.com antitrust suit against Microsoft and its delicious tales of Candy and the Microsoft document shredder. Burst of course was settled on the courthouse steps for less than it might have gotten inside.

Microsoft earned $4.3 billion on revenues of $15.84 billion, up 18%, in its fourth fiscal quarter in June, making it a $60 billion company - compliments of emerging markets and demand for Windows Server 2008. It had better-than-expected Vista sales this time through, up to $4.37 billion, and solid results everywhere but in retail sales of the high-end Office kit - a function of all those freebies out there? - and in its online business which lost $488 million - impacted by the weak economy and explaining why Microsoft is desperate to buy Yahoo, AOL, somebody. Yahoo, meanwhile, has also been eying AOL.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Mithras Capital, which owns a relatively small block of 1.7 million shares of Yahoo and would vote for Icahn's replacement slate in a heartbeat, sent an open letter to Microsoft Thursday asking Steve Ballmer to take Microsoft's 'alternate transaction' directly to Yahoo's stockholders. That's the better-than-Google deal that Microsoft claimed - after talks with Yahoo fell apart a second time - was worth better than $33 a share.

Monday was theoretically the day that, over protests and despite its popularity, Windows XP was retired as a way of pushing people to adopt the widely reviled Vista operating system before the very Vista-like 'next-generation' Windows 7 arrives, supposedly at the end of next year or at least by January of 2010.

Recently I've been bumping into more and more people who've either left Google to come to Microsoft or got offers from both companies and picked Microsoft over Google. I believe this is part of a larger trend especially since I've seen lots of people who left the company for 'greener pastures' return in the past year (at least 8 people I know personally have rejoined). However in this blog post I'll stick to talking about people who've chosen Microsoft over Google.

Remember those Interoperability Principles Microsoft came up with back in, oh, February? Well, on Monday it posted polished-up 'Version 1.0' documentation on the protocols in Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 following a preliminary release in April as well as 5,000 pages worth of new documentation on the binary formats in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

After much soul-searching but finding no 'compelling reason,' Intel of all people is not going to upgrade its 80,000 PCs to Vista except in a few places; XP is just fine, thank you, according to a piece on a New York Times blog that actually started in the Inquirer. That started people to wondering whether Intel, when it finally does upgrade, will go to the Vista-beholden Windows 7 or to Linux or the Mac, its newest hero. It also got other people to remembering that Intel exhibited the same resistance to XP when it was new. It took four years for XP to get 50% of the market.

Tom Brokaw during his exit interview with Bill Gates last Friday asked, 'Do you think in a year from now, when you're down at the foundation offices, you'll look up at Microsoft and see Yahoo as a permanent wing of Microsoft, a part of it? Do you think the deal will get done?' To which Gates replied, 'No, I don't think so. But there are plenty of decisions ahead that Steve [Ballmer] will get to make about what he invests in, R&D, and what kind of deals he does. I don't think that one's likely but there are plenty of others that will get done and I'll look on with great respect.' That said it's still not over.

Microsoft has confirmed that it's buying the Powerset semantic or natural language search start-up and its staff of 50 to give Google and its keywords a run for their money, as rumored last week. How long it takes Microsoft to go algorithm-to-algorithm with Google, which doesn't have natural intuitive language skills and is committed to the keyword approach, remains to be seen.

Microsoft has finally explained what its subscription-based Albany gambit is and it's like what we said it would be. Microsoft officially calls it Microsoft Equipt and it's meant to push out Office Home and Office Student 2007 as kinda, sorta, almost, but not quite SaaS widgetry to get more retail buyers buying Office when they buy a PC - seems they don't usually - and to fight back incursions into its base by such as Google Apps.

On Tuesday TechCrunch and CNet, based on the usual 'sources,' reported that talks between Yahoo and Microsoft were back on, stories that prevented Yahoo's desperate, bewildered, shuttlecock stock from dropping below the 20-dollar barrier and landing in the high teens where it was when Microsoft entered the picture on February 1. It was certainly headed in that direction.

JetBrains announced the release of ReSharper version 4.0, the compan's productivity add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio. This release is spearheaded by across-the-board support for C# 3.0 language, including LINQ, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 in general. In addition, the upgraded add-in features multiple new usability and productivity-boosting tools, such as standard class library annotations, solution-wide analysis (for C#), versatile code cleanup, new automated refactorings, new and improved code-editing capabilities, and more.

AccuRev and Rally announced a technology partnership that will integrate AccuRev software change and configuration management (SCCM) with Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions. The combined solution will provide a platform to manage multiple Agile processes and ongoing customer feedback, while improving visibility and requirements traceability between defects, issues and tasks and the actual source code changes made to address them.

AccuRev announced a new AJAX-based Web Interface and a native integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer for its process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. These new capabilities make it easy to integrate every knowledge worker into the development process and offer new ways to share information.

Recursion Software released a private beta version of their Voyager mobile platform, with powerful interoperability for Android, Microsoft .NET and Compact Framework (CF), all Java editions (JME CDC, JSE and JEE), and more than 15 embedded operating systems. The Voyager platform is a powerful cross-platform development environment that allows developers to write one code-set natively in either Java or .NET and publish the code to mobile or desktop nodes that can execute transactions at runtime regardless of the virtual machine they employ. This beta version is an important step towards write once, run everywhere for application messaging and communications.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

So the Shanghai Securities News - sort of the Wall Street Journal of China but basically a government house organ often used for conveying official announcements - reports this week that Microsoft is being investigated for antitrust violations and might get sued when China's new antitrust law comes into effect in August.

Microsoft says it's going to open a Search Technology Center in Europe in the fiscal year that starts in July. The center is supposed to 'accelerate Microsoft's investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace to the benefit of both the consumer and the advertiser,' it said, 'in line with Microsoft's recent announcement in the US of Live Search cashback.'

Microsoft has bought Navic Networks, a move that puts it in the business of placing TV commercials in near real-time, one of the things that Steve Ballmer may have had in mind when he said there were a lot of things you could do with $50 billion besides buying Yahoo.

After failing to come to terms with Microsoft, and with antitrust regulators hovering in the background, Yahoo has gone and cut that death-defying deal on search advertising with arch-rival Google saying the agreement could clear $800 million in annual revenues. The deal is non-exclusive, applies only to paid search and text ads, and is supposed to run for four years with an option to renew for up to 10 years.

Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have failed for the second time. Yahoo said Thursday afternoon that Microsoft has refused to buy Yahoo for $33 a share, the price Microsoft offered May 3 and then pulled off the table when Yahoo's co-founders held out for $37. Microsoft refusal makes its 'strategic clarity' suspect.

John Gage, Sun employee number 5 and its chief researcher, head of its science office - the guy who coined the Sun tag line 'The Network is the Computer' - a seemingly nonsense slogan Sun used to wish it could shake - has finally left the building after 25 years. He's going to Kleiner Perkins to be a VC focused on green technology investments. Sun co-founder Bill Joy has a berth at Kleiner, one of Sun's original backers. A few days ago Sun, which is cutting maybe another 2,500 jobs, lost his chief salesman Don Grantham to HP.

Parallels virtualization and automation software is powering new virtual private server (VPS) offerings from Blacknight Internet Solutions. Blacknight, a Parallels Gold Partner, is offering four VPS service plans for the Linux and Windows platforms. Each level - Starter, Basic, Standard and Enterprise - is managed through Parallels System Automation and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers

In a Microsoft internal e-mail that just 'happened' to get out, Microsoft says it lost interest in acquiring all of Yahoo because of Yahoo's foot-dragging and offered instead $1 billion for just Yahoo's search operation and another $8 billion, the equivalent of $35 a share, for 16% of Yahoo, more per-share than Microsoft offered for all of Yahoo.

Pushing back against VMware, its chief rival, Tuesday, Citrix released its ballyhooed, on-demand XenDesktop, the widgetry that delivers custom, managed virtual Windows desktops from a data center server to a user over the network, and priced the stuff. Theres a free Express Edition for up to 10 users; an entry-level Standard Edition for $75 per concurrent user; an Advanced Edition for $195 per concurrent user; an Enterprise Edition for $295 per concurrent user; and a Platinum Edition for $395 per concurrent user.

Microsoft figures that in five years time half the Exchange mailboxes in the world - perhaps 160 million mailboxes - will be running on its servers in its cloud infrastructure on Exchange Online. At least that's Microsoft senior vice-president Chris Capossela told Reuters going into the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit the other day.

In Part 1 we started to develop a small racing game using XNA Game Studio Express 2.0. We learned about the game loop and how it's implemented by the XNA (by using the Update and Draw methods) framework. We also created our first track on the screen and four cars started moving on the screen, but, sadly enough, they left the track and weren't seen again. What does that mean?

So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware application, including Outlook on the PC and iCal, Mail, and Address Book on the Mac and iPhone. This also includes the old iDisk functionality which allows you to share files among all of your devices using file synchronization technologies. iDisk works, but don't ever try to code directly on an iDisk folder with Xcode unless you have a back-up. Hopefully this peculiarity has been fixed in MobileMe.

Many .NET applications fail to meet user requirements because they do not provide optimal access to underlying Oracle, Sybase, or DB2 databases. The root cause is often unmanaged ADO.NET data providers shipped by the database vendor or from Microsoft. In this paper, SQL Server MVP and SSWUG co-founder Stephen Wynkoop explores common misperceptions about data access technologies, describes the optimum architecture for ADO.NET data providers, and highlights key selection criteria for developers.