Microsoft News Tracker

Today was the kickoff of the 2007 Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) and as usual Steve Jobs were there to fire up the troops. Ryan Block at Engadget has the play-by-play complete with pictures, but here’s the net:

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Today after a bit of a delay earlier in the year, Microsoft today released Service Pack 1 for Virtual Server R2 for download. Patrick at the Windows Server Division Weblog tells us what’s new in SP1:

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Adobe’s Apollo environment for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) was released as a beta today and formally named the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR):

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system application runtime that allows developers to use HTML/CSS, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex to extend rich Internet applications to the desktop. Key elements of Adobe AIR are open source, including the WebKit HTML engine, the ActionScript Virtual Machine (Tamarin project) and SQLite local database functionality.

New features in the Adobe AIR beta include an embedded local database, PDF support, enhanced capabilities for JavaScript developers, and deeper integration with Adobe Flex. The new beta version of Adobe AIR allows developers to incorporate PDF by leveraging Adobe Reader 8.1 functionality. Users will be able to view and interact with PDF documents within Adobe AIR applications similarly to how they interact with a PDF in the browser today.

The beta downloads for both Windows and Macintosh are available on the Adobe website.

Sarah Ellison and Dennis K. Berman are reporting in the Wall Street Journal (a Dow Jones publication) that in recent weeks General Electric and Microsoft were in discussions about offering an alternative bid to News Corp’s proposed acquisition of Dow Jones from the controlling Bancroft family. Apparently GE and Microsoft couldn’t reach an agreement and GE may look for another partner to make a bid. It isn’t really clear what part Microsoft would have played in the deal other than providing a fat wallet and experience in partnering with GE in MSNBC.com and the MSNBC TV cable channel.