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 of some die-hard users. “I am pleased to announce that...
Have you had problems receiving e-mail from Gmail users recently? If so, you’re one of thousands. Over the past month, major anti-spam vendors have had to apply scrutiny to Gmail in a way they haven’t had to before, and the result is reduced delivery performance and sometimes outright blocking of Gmail. Some messaging hosts are being instructed to reject SMTP connections from Google. Ars...
A European Commission advisory body has suggested that search companies delete data collected about their users after six months — a far cry from what most companies currently do. The recommendation arrived in a 29-page “opinion” (PDF) published Friday by a European Commission body known as the Article 29 Working Party. Backed by privacy groups, it has been pressuring Internet companies on the search...
Back in February, we posted about the release of a couple of prerequisites for Windows Vista Service Pack 1. While several million customers installed the updates successfully, you may have read that a few customers experienced an endless reboot cycle while installing one of the prerequisites: KB937287, the Servicing Stack Update (SSU), which contains the Service Pack 1 installation program. As posted last month...
Microsoft has announced that there will be a total of sixteen updates on the upcoming Patch Tuesday. Five of the updates are labeled as Critical and designed to address security vulnerabilities that could leave Windows or Explorer open to remote code execution. Three updates are labeled as “Important” and will resolve vulnerabilities that leave Windows open to spoofing and unauthorized user privilege elevation, and...
Today Microsoft announced the worldwide extension of the availability of Windows XP Home for an emerging, new class of mobile personal computers commonly known as ultra-low-cost PCs, or ULCPCs. Windows XP Home for ULCPCs will be available until the later of June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows. Microsoft has heard from partners and customers that they...
Be careful your product lives up to what you advertise it to be and be careful it does what you say it will do; that’s the lesson that many tech companies are learning the hard way. Microsoft recently found that out as its facing an uphill battle to fight against a class lawsuit alleging it intentionally deceived using “Vista Capable” stickers to sell chipsets....
Microsoft Corp has won a battle to have a key document format adopted as a global standard, improving its chances of winning government contracts and dealing a blow to supporters of a rival format. The OpenDoc Society, which had argued Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format was unripe for ratification by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), published the results showing Microsoft’s win on...
Balloting on whether Office Open XML (OOXML) should become an international document standard closed at midnight Saturday in Geneva, in an apparently tight vote. The results have not yet been officially announced. In order for the measure to pass, two-thirds of participating countries needed to vote in favor of the issue and less than one-quarter of observer countries in opposition to it. A total...
With the release of Firefox 3 imminent, the rest of the Firefox team is cooking up some crazy ideas for Firefox 4. While Firefox 3 pushes the boundaries of a browser, delivering a cleaner graphical interface, numerous security upgrades, and a variety of new features, it still is far from the “perfect browser”. Of course no browser on the market could earn such a...
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