Stuart J. Johnston

With the release of a new feature pack for Visual C++ 2008, developers can now write applications that feature the Office 2007 appearance, a Microsoft senior executive announced this week. At the same time, the company also discontinued support for its aging Visual Basic 6 integrated development environment , or IDE — to the dismay […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) on Tuesday began publicly beta testing its family of next-generation security tools. Codenamed “Stirling,” the package will include upcoming versions of the company’s Forefront-branded Client Security, Server Security, Edge Security, and Access products along with a unified management console. The company also said that Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA Server) […]

Microsoft has taken a beating in the courts lately. The European Commission continues to investigate what it views as anti-competitive behaviors in the European Union. The federal judge overseeing the company’s antitrust settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in January extended Microsoft’s consent decree for another two years. Finally, in late February, the judge […]

Microsoft may have won the gold for its Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats last week, but it appears that the company’s gung ho push for adoption as a standard has gotten it embroiled in yet another investigation by the European Commission (EC). Besides a probe begun in January regarding whether OOXML is sufficiently interoperable […]

When Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) began beta testing Version 2 of its Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform streaming media technology a month ago, company executives’ only comment on delivery is that it would be released in final form by year’s end. Earlier this week, however, a Microsoft developer in Bangalore, India, posted a slightly more detailed roadmap for […]

Windows Vista deployments at enterprise IT shops may be sluggish, but that’s not the case for Office 2007, according to a new study by analyst firm Forrester Research. Indeed, while most media attention has focused on Vista’s trials and tribulations, Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 2007 is doing just fine, thank you very much. “In a […]

Better late than never. That could be the ad slogan for Microsoft’s Surface computer. The table top, multi-touch, screen-based device that the company demonstrated last May has been wildly popular as “demo-ware” – garnering lots of attention in its public outings. However, so far there have been none of the deployments initially planned by Microsoft’s […]

Just weeks after Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), the company has decided it’s not quite time to put its aging Windows XP out to pasture. The reason? The advent of what are called “ultra low-cost PCs” or ULCPCs, a new category of mobile PCs that don’t typically have enough horsepower to run […]

As expected, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) officially announced on Wednesday that Office Open XML (OOXML) has received enough votes to become a ISO standard. Well, not quite. Technically, OOXML has met all the criteria to be awarded ISO certification as a co-document format standard with OpenDocument Format (ODF). But there’s a possible catch. […]

No one would joke about this – not even on April Fool’s Day. While it won’t be official until Wednesday when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) officially announces the final vote tally, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) issued a press release Tuesday morning stating that its Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats have “unofficially” made it […]

Little piques the frustration of IT professionals more than flawed interoperability among different security and identity systems — unless it’s no interoperability at all. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) joined the MIT Kerberos Consortium on Monday as a founding sponsor. It will now have a place on the executive board along with founders Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google […]

Despite a heated campaign to defeat International Organization for Standardization (ISO) status for Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML), over the weekend, even some staunch critics acknowledged that the company has likely garnered enough votes to win. However, that doesn’t mean that they’ve given up the fight. At least three Web pages set up to track […]