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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Extended Validation (EV) is a new standard in SSL certificates. This guide explains the needs which drove the development of this standard and how it addresses contemporary security challenges. It also delves into the integration of EV certificates into new high security browsers such as Microsoft's IE7.

I feel that Silverlight and Flash will continue to coexist for a long, long time because of the simple fact that they are really made for different types of developers. I can't imagine designers ever preferring Microsoft's toolset and I can't imaging programmers coming from other languages being satisfied with developing exclusively in ActionScript.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

IBM is starting to monetize Lotus Symphony, its freebie collection of Office-displacing ODF-based software for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations - but not for the money. It's offering unlimited subscription-based remote technical support to large organizations to get more of them on board. Companies tend to eschew unsupported product.

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.

Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's cross-platform prowess, important to Microsoft's place in the data center. Microsoft has released a public beta of so-called Cross-Platform Extensions to its System Center Operations Manager 2007, which for the first time can manage HP-UX, Red Hat, Solaris and SUSE out-of-the-box.

HP, which has previously given the space to Yahoo, is going to pre-install a Silverlight-based Live Search-enabled toolbar on all consumer PCs it ships in the US and Canada starting in January. That's when the HP-Yahoo deal expires.

Microsoft says it's going to ride the nettop wave and push XP, which is supposed to die this month, onto the ultra low-cost devices meant to put e-mail, web browsing and instant messages in your pocket. It says it's working with 20 OEMs. It's unclear what it's charging but the offer is supposed to be good for two years.

In the name of its unified communications interests and having failed to come to licensing terms, Microsoft a few months ago asked the Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine all 29 of Avistar Communications' patents, which cover stuff like instant messaging, desktop videoconferencing and online collaboration. Microsoft claimed prior art. The PTO Friday denied 14 of Microsoft's requests, said it'll look at nine of the Avistar patents and didn't said diddly about the other six.

At the eleventh hour Brazil, India and Venezuela joined South Africa in appealing ISO's highly politicized standardization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. Meanwhile, the Danish Open Source Business Association has protested the Danish Standard's 'yes' vote for standardization claiming a lack of consensus, rules violations, no final draft and little chance of interoperability. It wants ISO to reopen the issue. Denmark's is not a formal appeal and Danish Standard disagrees with the charges made. Microsoft declined to comment saying the flap is between ISO/IEC and the national bodies.

Call me a purist but I like to make my code as object-oriented and well structured as possible. I like to tweak the design and to work toward the overall quality of the code. My refactoring olfactory sense is quick to react to any offending odor in the code and it's becoming more sensitive and less tolerant with time.

Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo received stupid advice from their investment bank advisers and blew their chance to close the deal with Microsoft as of this Sunday morning. Neither Yang nor Filo are experts on how to sell a company in a multi-billion dollar deal. They have relied on their investment bankers and advisers since the negotiations started with Microsoft. The difference between the offered price of $33 and the asking price of $40 per share is roughly $1.4b per share, so it's not small potatoes.

Thanks to court disclosures stemming from a suit against Yahoo brought by two Michigan pension funds invested in the firm, Microsoft's offer of 40 bucks a share in January of 2007, when Yahoo's stock was in the mid-20s like now, has been confirmed. Obviously that puts still more pressure on the Yahoo board for Yang-toadying.

Infragistics announced the availability of two Community Technology Preview (CTP) User Interface (UI) components for Microsoft Silverlight beta 2. With the release of chart and gauge components for Silverlight beta 2, Infragistics demonstrates it can create innovative user experiences for new, emerging technology.

Nintex announced the release of Nintex Reporting 2008, the new product for the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Nintex Reporting 2008 collects and analyses SharePoint usage data to provide insight into workplace trends and behaviors. Nintex Reporting 2008 allows everyone from system administrators to business owners to access online reports and key information dashboards targeted to their role.