Andy Patrizio

Microsoft took a stab at an open source community for Windows developers this week with the launch of CodePlex at the Open Source Business Conference in London. The community development site went into public beta last month, providing a dozen Microsoft open source projects and another 18 Shared Source-related projects with a single place to […]

After years of talk about the importance of WinFS (Windows File Storage), including a number of sessions at the recent TechEd conference in Boston, Microsoft has decided to splinter WinFS into several pieces and ship the technologies in different Microsoft products. Quentin Clark, the lead program manager for WinFS, announced in a blog posting late […]

Digg, the power-to-the-people Web site that allows Web trolls to decide which stories get top billing, is moving beyond its technology news roots to provide wider coverage, and adding some new features to make it easier to keep up with the incoming news. The public beta of the new look and new features goes live […]

MessageLabs today launched version 2.0 of its Web Security Services, an e-mail/instant messaging/Web browsing security system that lives in the cloud of the Internet rather than requiring a software installation on a user’s computer. MessageLabs primarily serves businesses, leaving consumer antivirus and anti-spyware to market leaders, such as McAfee and Symantec. Its Skeptic technology catches […]

Reporter’s Notebook: It was ironic timing. Microsoft released a report on how splendid a job its Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool had done at removing malware from computers. This was just days after news broke that the Windows Genuine Advantage program, something it forced on every single Windows user, was sending data back to Microsoft […]

Note to hardware vendors: If your Windows Vista drivers stink, you’re liable to get voted off the island. Well, sorta. Microsoft  is putting its Windows Crash Analysis reports to use in a way that is sure to give new meaning to the term making the grade. The company is launching a Driver Quality Rating (DQR) […]

For the third time this month, a security flaw has been found relating to Excel, an application not normally associated with viruses and bugs. However, in this case, it’s not directly an Excel problem. At the same time, Microsoft had to issue a patch for a patch released on June 12, which was supposed to […]

The old saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ seems to be a very familiar one to Adobe Systems and Google, Microsoft’s two biggest rivals these days. The two firms have linked arms in a multi-year agreement that will see Google’s Toolbar included with various Adobe products. The first product to be bundled […]

Normally, a product is feature-complete by its second beta, but Sun Microsystems is still adding features to Java Standard Edition 6 (Java SE 6), due this fall. Sun is adding Java DB, the Sun-supported distribution of Apache’s Derby Project and the group layout SWING component from the NetBeans GUI Builder. In addition to the growing […]

UPDATED: Perhaps it’s convenient timing, or maybe he felt a bit braver now that Bill Gates is heading off to be a 21st century John D. Rockefeller. Whatever the reason, a Microsoft employee really unloaded on his employer, and not in an anonymous blog, but on the company’s own public developers site. The posting, entitled […]

McAfee has formally launched the beta test for Falcon, its all-in-one security platform designed to compete with Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare, launched last month, and Symantec’s Norton 360, which has yet to launch. Falcon is the code name for McAfee Total Protection. It combines many current McAfee products into a new platform with a friendlier […]

Things aren’t going well for Microsoft on the litigation front. On Friday, a United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a patent infringement verdict against Microsoft from last year, and as Microsoft protests, the bill piles up. The patent, owned by inventor and businessman Armando Amado, covers linking a spreadsheet to a […]