Microsoft News Tracker

Besides announcing the acquisition of devBiz at VSLive!, Microsoft also laid out a roadmap for their upcoming development tool releases:

Visual Studio code name “Orcas”

• Beta 1 - 2nd Quarter, CY 2007
• Beta 2 - Mid-year CY 2007
• RTM - TBA

Visual Studio Team System code name “Rosario”

• To be released following “Orcas”

Follow the link for feature details and also the details on upcoming Team Foundation Server Power Tools, Team Edition for Database Professionals Power Tools, and the Team Edition for Database Professionals Service Pack 1 projected to be available in 2Q07.

Microsoft announced the acquisition of devBiz today at VSLive!

As part of the keynote address, Microsoft announced the acquisition of devBiz Business Solutions, a company well known for its software development tools and components for professional .NET developers.

The announcement has the biggest impact for users of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS), Microsoft’s integrated software development platform for building mission-critical applications.

And that’s because devBiz has been selling a product named TeamPlain Web Access which “is a web interface for Microsoft Team Foundation Server that allows managing work items, shared documents, reports and source control repositories.” It will be re-released as Team System Web Access as part of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. In the meantime it is now a free download at the devBiz website which also has a FAQ on the Microsoft acquisition.

A selection of Microsoft goodies from Santa’s sack:

Visions of sugarplums danced in their heads - Merrill Bets On Yahoo!-AOL Merger, but they don’t rule out Microsoft. Most interesting part:

Merrill also highlights this tidbit: “our understanding is that AOL’s current contract with Google has a change in control clause that would allow either [Microsoft] or Yahoo! to move its traffic onto their platforms.”

And Apple must have been not naughty, but nice this year - Planned Home PC Purchases Surge, Apple Closes On HP. Also IDC says that while 3Q2006 US sales were flat, global sales are rising and laptops now outsell desktops. More on IDC’s report here.

More gifts - Microsoft Teams With Macrovision to Populate Windows Marketplace with over 1,000 games. I’d nearly forgotten about Windows Marketplace, Microsoft’s digital delivery store for PC software and more.

Mom’s Genuine Holiday Surprise - Microsoft no longer thinks Joe Wilcox’s mother is a software pirate.

Finally, a lump of coal for Windows Live Drive which may be DOA.

Wait, there’s more!

First Exploit Of Windows Vista Spotted. It doesn’t seem to be much of an exploit, but it’s notable for being the first admitted exploit for Vista. Microsoft is very precise these days on which security holes are attributable to Vista and which to programs that run on Vista.

Here it comes - Microsoft builds Vista buzz in Tokyo’s Akihabara.

Google edged out Yahoo to become the number 2 Web venue in term of worldwide visitors during November according to comScore. Microsoft is still number 1. Google results did not include YouTube which was 10th.

Microsoft fights Gmail in the workplace - it’s all about mailbox size.

Microsoft made available version 1.2 of the Team Foundation Server MSSCCI (Microsoft Source Code Control Interface) Provider which allows a range of IDEs to access Team Foundation Server, the collaboration component of the Visual Studio 2005 Team System platform.

Microsoft in legal battle over ‘Halo’ game for mobile phones. Follow the link for Todd Bishop’s explanation of why French game maker In-Fusio is suing Microsoft. I’m still trying to figure what playing Halo on a mobile phone could possibly be like.

As promised (and preannounced yesterday) Microsoft has released Team Foundation Server.

If you aren’t familiar with it, Team Server is a key component of the Visual Studio Team System which enables and enhances collaboration for teams working on large programming projects. S. “Soma” Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Developer Tools provides a bit of the philosophy in a post on his weblog.

Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch has the story on Visual Studio service packs:

Microsoft is moving ahead on its promise from late last year to release service packs for both its Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 tool suites in calendar 2006.

Microsoft is planning to roll out Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Visual Studio 2003 (VS 2003) in the second quarter. Beta testing of that service pack is slated to begin in late March. The company is readying in parallel SP1 for Visual Studio 2005 (VS 2005), and planning to ship the final release of that code in the third calendar quarter of this year. Microsoft has not gone public with an expected beta date for SP1 for VS 2005.

More details by following the link where there is a pointer to the weblog of Microsoft’s Heath Stewart where he points to a new Visual Studio web page that describes the servicing plan.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporate VP, S. “Soma” Somasegar, reports on his weblog that, as promised, the Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) will be available in March. On Monday at the VSLive! conference in San Francisco, he also revealed:

A release candidate, considered a prelude to the final, general release of the product, will be available on the Microsoft Developer Network either this Friday or Saturday…

and other tools news:

Somasegar said Microsoft has had more than 10 million copies of its .Net Framework 2.0 runtime downloaded since the November release of Visual Studio 2005.

“This is by far the fastest adoption of the .Net Framework that we’ve ever seen,” he said.

There have been more than 1.8 million downloads of the Visual Studio Express products since then as well, he said. Visual Studio Express tools offer an abbreviated list of functionality from what the full Visual Studio 2005 platform has. Express tools are language-specific.

Somasegar also cited an IDC survey that he said shows more companies betting on .Net for mission-critical applications than Java, with 35 percent of respondents opting for .Net and 25 percent for Java.

Microsoft in the next week plans to offer a CTP of its planned Visual Studio for Applications offering. Geared mostly toward ISVs, this product is intended to enable .Net-style application customization.