Microsoft News Tracker

“The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine” or for the modern world: EU Microsoft Judge: Ruling by September:

The judge due to rule on Microsoft Corp.’s appeal against the European Commission’s antitrust order said Monday he hoped to publish his decision before he leaves office in September.

Bo Vesterdorf, the president of the Court of First Instance, refused to give a precise deadline for his ruling.

“Obviously we would do our very best to get the case out as soon as at all possible,” he told reporters at an Informa legal conference in Brussels. “It’s a very big case.”

Microsoft is challenging the European Union’s 2004 antitrust order, which found the software maker broke competition law and fined it a record 497 million euros ($613 million).

This decision had been anticipated in the the first part of 2007 and in case all the EU antitrust actions are running together in one vast blur, the appellate trial before the European Court of First Instance was held last April. There has also been some speculation that the European Commission will take no action on Vista or Office 2007 until the decision on the appeal is rendered.

Catching up on an item from last week - Expression Design Beta 1 and Blend Beta 2 Available:

Yey - I know several of our ISVs have been waiting patiently for these downloads. I just need to find a day to try them both out! You can beat me to it by downloading them from http://microsoft.com/expression.

eWEEK’s Darryl K. Taft interviews Forest Key, director of product management for Microsoft’s design tools, and InfoWorld’s Paul Krill interviews Eric Zocher, general manager of the Microsoft Expression product line, to provide the big picture, but the nut is that the Expression family is Microsoft’s new foray into tools for designers as opposed to all the existing tools for developers. The Expression products utilize Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, codenamed Avalon), Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E, aka “Flash Killer” which also has a new CTP) and XAML to create the design elements for rich content Web and desktop applications.

Of course, a persistent side issue of the invidious distinction between designer and developer tools is the fact that the Expression tools are not being made available to developers through the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN). As long as Microsoft is going to erect barriers between the two, they might as well also create a “Microsoft Designers Network” although they better use a little of that artistic creativity to avoid conflicting acronyms.