Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 still set to ship in 2007
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(InfoWorld) - Although Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is part of a February 2008 multiproduct launch, the company intends to ship it by the end of 2007, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. The company earlier this week announced that a launch event on February 27, 2008, would feature Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008. This revelation, made at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, came after Microsoft had said Visual Studio 2008 was targeted to ship later this year. But Microsoft is still anticipating a 2007 release, Somasegar said. "While we will be launching our products together in February, we are still aiming to release Visual Studio 2008 and .Net FX (.Net Framework) 3.5 by the end of this year based on your feedback so far," Somaseger said. A Microsoft representative elaborated on the plan. "It is Microsoft's desire to ship Visual Studio 2008 by the end of this calendar year (although, as always, customer feedback ultimately determines when a product is ready to ship)," the representative said in an e-mail. "The February launch event is more of an opportunity to show customers, partners, and the community the wave of innovation Microsoft is delivering with all three products represented (i.e. Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008)."Â  Formerly code-named Orcas, Visual Studio 2008 has been geared to development of Web applications, as well as for Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system. A second beta release of Visual Studio 2008 has been expected for later this summer. At the conference, Microsoft also announced that its Software Licensing and Protection Services products are due in the October time frame. The product suite features tools to help developers, including ISVs, protect intellectual property, build and license product versions, track product and feature usage, and integrate into back-end processes, Microsoft said. Featuring the Secured Dimensions technology that Microsoft acquired in January, the suite includes: * Code Protector SDK, a software development toolkit for protecting and transforming managed or .Net code; developers can mark features as licensable entities. * Software Licensing and Protection Server, enabling ISVs to host their own servers and create licenses for products. * SLP Online Server, for partners to conduct license management without hosting their own servers.Â
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has clarified how licensing for its current version of Windows Server works when paired with virtualization software. However, customers may face a whole new set of licensing rules once the next version, Windows Server 2008, is released later this year.
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Microsoft's chief operating officer says that Windows Server 2008--formerly code-named Longhorn Server--will be launched next February along with upgrades of SQL Server and Visual Studio.
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The last of the Office 2007 servers to ship, Microsoft to release PerformancePoint Server 2007 next week.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will ship the next version of Forecaster, its midmarket budgeting and planning application, in early April, the first major release of the software since 2003. The software giant intends to release Forecaster 7.0 to manufacturing on March 28, according to Gregg Gracheck, senior product manager for Microsoft Forecaster. The product will be generally available early next month. Microsoft also plans to talk up the forthcoming release at its Convergence 2007 business applications conference taking place next week in San Diego, he said. Microsoft acquired Forecaster when it purchased applications vendor Great Plains Software in April 2001. Great Plains had bought FRx Software in March 2000. Forecaster and the FRx financial reporting software are housed in a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary FRx Software, which has its base in Denver. Forecaster is aimed at financial professionals like CEOs and budgeting managers at companies employing between 25 and 2,500 staff, which are looking to move beyond budgeting using Excel or Lotus spreadsheets or general ledger systems. "The sweet spot for us is companies with 250 to 500 employees," said Andy Kamlet, director of marketing and sales at FRx Software. Forecaster can help automate many of the manual tasks involved in trying to budget using spreadsheets, he added. Kamlet sees Prophix Software's Prophix and Centage's Budget Maestro as Forecaster's prime competitors. Companies can use Forecaster to access the general ledgers of any vendor's ERP (enterprise resource planning) software such as SAP and Oracle. If they're already using Microsoft's FRx, users can leverage the reporting software's integration with Microsoft's Dynamics ERP applications to integrate general ledger and budget data from Forecaster into reports generated by FRx. With Forecaster 7.0, Microsoft has worked to improve usability and to speed up deployment of the tool. The software has more of the look-and-feel of Microsoft's Office suite of desktop applications in terms of its navigation capabilities, but it's Office 2003, not the latest version Office 2007, which shipped earlier this year. The last major release of Forecaster, version 6.7, appeared in October 2003. "It's not our intention to keep this amount of time between releases," said Gracheck. Like previous releases, although it supports multiple currencies, Forecaster 7.0 is only available in English. Microsoft has yet to see much demand for language localization, Kamlet said. The software costs from $8,500.
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Microsoft plans to ship the first release candidate of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003 by year's end and will release a developer's kit for the high-performance computing version of Windows Server next month.
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MICROSOFT will not broadly release its long-awaited update to the flagship Windows operating system, dubbed &quot;Longhorn,&quot; until 2006.
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Microsoft plans to issue a service pack for Visual Studio on Friday, as well as a version of the update specifically aimed at fixing issues with the software for those running Windows Vista.
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Microsoft will announce Thursday morning the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. According to Scott Guthrie, the general manager of Microsoft's Developer Division, the release will be nearly feature complete  and will likely be the last major release before the product is released to manufacturing in preparation for its launch on February 27, 2008.
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Here it comes: Microsoft today confirmed that the first service pack for Windows Vista is entering beta next month and is slated to ship during the first quarter of 2008. A third (and final) service pack for XP is on tap for the same timeframe.
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Microsoft.'s famously slippery ship dates are sliding once again when it comes to the company's long-delayed Microsoft CRM 2.0 update. Microsoft said Thursday it is expanding the software's feature set and delaying its release-to-manufacturing until the fourth quarter of 2005.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on Thursday that more than 200 million users will be using one of its new products -- including its highly-anticipated Windows Vista operating system, Office 2007 software suite and Exchange server -- by the end of 2007.
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TechWeb - The company insists the later date still keeps it on track to ship the database software within the original goal of 24 to 36 months after SQL Server 2005.
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Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 could now be released in March or April of next year.
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Microsoft has delayed the release of the next version of&#160;Dynamics NAV, one of its ERP applications for mid-size companies, company executives said Tuesday.It&#39;s the second delay this year for the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, which Microsoft acquired after buying Danish application developer Navision A/S in 2002. A 5.1 released was planned for the end of this year, but Microsoft has instead opted to release a version 6.0 mid-year next year.&quot;We decided we need a little more of what we call &#39;bake&#39; time,&quot; said Kirill Tatarinov, a vice president in Microsoft&#39;s division that deals with business applications, using a software developer term for when a product isn&#39;t done.Tatarinov said the company is working on &quot;architectural&quot; investments on NAV but did not detail those features. NAV 5.0 includes capabilities to manage the work flow of sales documents, the ability to link customer profiles with purchase orders and inventory tracking, among others.Tatarinov quickly added that Microsoft will announce a plan Wednesday to stick to more predictable release cycles. Microsoft has been stung with criticism for slow release cycles, particularly the five years it took to develop Windows Vista.Another senior Microsoft executive said that the company won&#39;t sacrifice quality for speed.&quot;I&#39;m very supportive of the decision,&quot; said Jeff Raikes, who is president of Microsoft&#39;s Business Division. &quot;We recognize that the investments we are making in Dynamics NAV are a very important step forward for the product.&quot;
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the Windows application platform is to be fitted with "Fluent UI" ribbon capabilities now offered in Office 2007.The ribbon UI presents a new interface in Office 2007. "We usability-tested it massively, and fortunatel, it has had a very strong positive reaction," Gates said during a keynote presentation the 2008 Office System Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif. "We in the next version of Windows will be using this Fluent UI quite a bit across a number of applications," he said. "It turns out it's a user interface that works very well for the pen and touch [interfaces] as well as being a better way of revealing application functionality."The Fluent UI represented "a major risk that Microsoft took," Gates said. But the older interface with its dropdown menus was hiding so much functionality that the company was being asked for features that were already there but were concealed, he said.At the conference, Microsoft is promoting Office as a development platform with users able to write extensions. During Gates's presentation, third party applications were shown that extended Office with custom development, such as the MindJet MindManager planning application and FedEx's QuickShip for processing FedEx shipments from within Microsoft Outlook.During a subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience, Gates was asked to compare and contrast opportunities for developers working with platforms like Microsoft's with platforms like open source. Gates responded, "Our platform is a commercial platform where customers expect a very high level of service, a very high level of integration, but the nice thing about it is they are willing to pay for software."Free software has always been around, he said. "We've always had free software out there, it's not really a new thing. In fact, I'd say in some ways it's less of a factor than it's ever been," Gates said.Everyone has the same business model, he said: Software developers have free versions of their software, inexpensive software, and robust commercial versions of their software. "The commercial environment, I think, will always be the pre-eminent thing in terms of providing business productivity," said Gates.He advised those who want to develop free software to be careful which licensing model they choose and to select an option that does not restrict commercial versions of their software.Asked about Yahoo, which has rejected Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition offer, Gates said the question was whether Yahoo should be a media company or focus on engineering. In an ad model, scale is needed, he said. Yahoo's engineering could be combined with what Microsoft has done, he said.Gates's overall presentation did not impress one attendee, who nonetheless was impressed with Gates himself."Bill is definitely a visionary, and he's one of the greatest men in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how much of that was just reading from a script," said Aaron Alanen, senior consultant at Sogeti."I did see in his questions later on that he really had some deeper knowledge," Alanen said.During Gates's presentation, he also played a tongue-in-cheek video about what he would do during his upcoming semi-retirement from Microsoft. Included were possibilities such as getting into politics, joining the rock band U2, and becoming a rapper or actor. Guests featured in the video included, among others, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Bono from U2, and George Clooney.
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Although Microsoft is at least 18 months away from releasing its Windows server virtualization tool, code-named Viridian, Redmond on Thursday released software that does what market-leader VMware&#39;s apps cannot.