Microsoft to Release Third Open-Source Project
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MicrosoftWatch: The Redmond software firm is set to make available more of its code under an open-source license on Tuesday. Microsoft is preparing to release a third piece of code under an open-source license
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InfoWorld - Castle, which is an open source project to ease development on Microsoft's .Net platform, is nearing its general release.
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Microsoft adds another product to the list of those vulnerable to a critical bug patched nearly three weeks ago.
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As part of a European antitrust settlement, Microsoft will supply protocol documentation to developers of the open-source software.
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Microsoft's defeat in a European appeals courtÂ Monday has left open-source developers hopeful about the future although still dissatisfied with the company's compliance with a 3-year-old antitrust ruling.
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Microsoft has agreed to make certain parts of its Windows source code available for distribution to developers under revised terms that European Commissioner for Competitiveness Neelie Kroes called "compatible with the open source business model."
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Microsoft plans on Tuesday to unveil what could be an industry-changing effort in application modeling and SOA with its "Oslo" project, which could significantly change the equation in the Windows application deployment space.Part of Oslo involves delivering a unified platform integrating services and modeling, Microsoft said. But instead of models describing the application, models are the applications themselves.Oslo is a codename for a set of technical investments that will be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft's platform products, said Steven Martin, director of product management in the company's Connected Systems division. These products include Visual Studio, System Center, BizTalk Server, BizTalk Services, and the .Net Framework. Beta releases of Oslo technology are due in 2008."Oslo is a set of technologies that we think will help take model-driven design mainstream," Martin said.With Oslo, Microsoft is making investments aligned with a vision to simplify the effort needed to build, deploy, and manage composite applications within and across organizations. The effort builds on model-driven and service-enabled principles and extends SOA beyond the firewall.Release dates of Oslo-driven products have not been set. "This will make existing products we have better. Oslo doesn't have any new products. It's being injected into existing projects," Martin said.The products include:* Microsoft .Net Framework "4," which will further enable model-driven development within the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services platform and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).* Visual Studio "10," to follow the upcoming Visual 2008 package. Version 10 focuses on application lifecycle management with tools for model-driven design of distributed applications.* BizTalk Server "6," which will continue to offer technology for distributed SOA and BPM and include capabilities for composite applications.* BizTalk Services "1," which provides BizTalk capabilities within the cloud, will feature Web-based services for hosting composite applications that cross organizational boundaries. Advanced messaging, identity, and workflow will be featured.* Metadata repositories will be aligned across server and tools products, including System Center "5," Visual Studio "10," and BizTalk Server "6." Each will utilize repository technology for managing, versioning, and deployment models."System Center will be able to grab an application from the repository and deploy it easily without any intermediate steps," said Martin. Also, Microsoft anticipates that WCF and WWF will collapse into a single technology, he said.Analysts at Gartner called Oslo "ambitious.""It's pretty ambitious, and as a matter of fact, I believe we're not going to see anything concrete until well into 2008 and possibly 2009," said analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president of the application platform strategies group at Gartner.Featured in Oslo are three fundamental components: a modeling environment, a business process server, including a significant evolution of BizTalk Server, and a new deployment model, Pezzini said.Oslo makes sense on paper, he said. "So far, there are only ideas and plans and prototypes, etc., so we have to see," said Pezzini.He added that he senses Oslo is mostly focused on enabling Microsoft Dynamics applications as work as enterprise applications via a SaaS (software as a service) model.Microsoft will need industry backing for Oslo to succeed, said analyst Nick Gall, vice president at Gartner."It's doubtful that it could really have the kind of major impact that I'm sure Microsoft and all of us would like to see unless they get the industry behind the approach," Gall said. Microsoft said it is evaluating whether to submit Oslo to an industry standards body and whether to seek industry-wide use of Oslo.SOA is related to Oslo because a services piece is offered, in which tooling and integration are improved with the .Net Framework. Also, there will be better connectivity to BizTalk Services, which provides Web-based services for messaging, identity, and workflow.Modeling, meanwhile, is important to application development, said Martin. Microsoft sees stumbling blocks with modeling as it is now: that modeling represents the application or business logic at a specific time, thus providing only a snapshot, and that models exist in isolation."Anytime you're looking at a model, you're only looking at a piece of the application because each of those models is separate," Martin said.Solving these problems involves taking modeling mainstream, he said. "Today, modeling is really only something that a select group of users and a select group of companies can do," said Martin.Whether a user is designing, developing, or deploying applications, Oslo "will simplify your job," Martin stressed.Microsoft's approach is not about Unified Modeling Language (UML), a technology of which Microsoft has not been a big supporter. But UML is a great example of a modeling language and Microsoft wants to unify its approach to modeling in general, Martin said.A modeling language is part of Oslo, but Microsoft is building a modeling language, a set of tools, and a unified repository. Microsoft's modeling language provides a way to unify existing modeling languages, similar to Microsoft's Common Language Runtime for application development.Oslo expands beyond UML to cover deployment and management, which UML does not address, Pezzini said.Key to Microsoft's effort is a unified metadata repository. Users get a view of a model being pulled out of this repository, Martin said. Deployment and policy information, workflow, and rules are maintained in one location, to prevent loss of data useful when deploying and managing an application or writing business rules against it."We think this will allow a much broader set of users to collaborate on applications," Martin said. "We think the process of building applications will be more efficient when anybody can see the application holistically."If Microsoft is successful with its plan to have application components automatically deployed based on models in the repository, it will be "a very huge benefit for the IT operations," said Pezzini.Microsoft is making available tools and guidance to take advantage of "real-world SOA." Featured are SOA resources from Microsoft and industry partners. Meanwhile, the new Microsoft SOA and Business Process Solution Center offers resources such as patterns and practices based on customer implementations.Microsoft's approach to SOA is to start out with a business problem and build services. The company will continue to work with partners such as AmberPoint and SOA Software to help round out SOA offerings, said Martin.Also at the conference, Microsoft plans to demonstrate an upcoming technology preview of BizTalk Services, with additional support for interoperability, Web 2.0 services, identity standards, and workflow in the cloud.The Oslo vision will be the subject of a keynote by Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash., on Tuesday morning. Microsoft's SOA strategy will be covered in the presentation.
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This is release 0.3.0 of ReactOS, an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003).   This release holds a few records - it is the most long-awaited release of ReactOS, it is the release which was preceded by 3 Release Candidates instead of usual 2, and at last ReactOS release never had so much changes since the last one.  This release's main feature is the networking ability - it's the first release where it is possible to download and install FireFox and browse the web, get mIRC (or some other irc client) and get to #reactos to chat a bit with developers. Or install command-line Samba-TNG client via the built-in package manager and use it to share files with Windows, Linux and MacOS X (all of them support SMB protocol)  But there are a bunch of changes beneath the "networking" feature: The kernel, drivers, applications, control panel applets, Win32 subsystem, boot loader, etc, etc was changed, improved, bugfixed and hackremoved. For the detailed overview it's advised to read the Changelog.  The compatibility with applications and drivers is also improved. In order to keep track of progress, the reactos.org website now features a ReactOS Compatibility Database. It allows to quickly look up the driver's version or some software which has been tested on various ReactOS releases and see how good it performs.  Thanks a lot to our core developers who are doing a fantastic job and to those people who submit patches for various small and big things - it really helps a lot, even if it is a formatting change!  Aleksey Bragin, ReactOS Project Coordinator http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/
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Microsoft has announced a new framework and tool for Visual Studio Team System to support the creation of service-oriented applications for various vertical industries.
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Under the Free Software Foundation's previous roadmap, a so-called "last call" draft of the third GPL revision was due by now, with final release set for March. However, recent comments in the tech press indicate that is no longer the case.
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Ziff Davis - Microsoft is reaching out further to the open-source community with offers of joint development and testing, but some wonder about the company's sincerity.
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Microsoft-sponsored open-source group expected to release ODF translator for Word.
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The KDE Project has released version 3.3 of its Linux desktop interface software.
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Microsoft announced Tuesday that it would post the release candidate of Windows XP Service Pack 3 to its download site this evening at approximately 6 p.m. Eastern time.The move marks the first opportunity for all users of the six-year-old operating system to try out its final upgrade. Previously, several thousand users were given access to test builds of SP3 only by Microsoft's invitation.According to a company spokeswoman, the version that debuts Tuesday, dubbed a "release candidate" to note progress from earlier betas, will be available from the Microsoft Download Center. She was unable to say when the service pack would post to Windows Update so users can download and install it with the company's update service, however.The final version of Windows XP SP3 remains slated for delivery sometime in the first half of 2008, the spokeswoman said. She also warned off casual users from trying the preview. "As this is a release candidate, we strongly encourage only those who are comfortable installing prerelease code to download Windows XP SP3," she said.Recently, Microsoft has been downplaying the significance of Windows XP SP3. In a white paper posted to its Web site last week and also Tuesday, the company praised Windows Vista at XP's expense, reminding users that "Vista provides the most advanced security and management capabilities of any Windows operating system.""Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP," the spokeswoman said.According to the white paper, the Download Center version of XP SP3 will weigh in at about 580MB; the version downloaded and installed via Windows Update, however, will be much smaller, typically around 70MB.Windows XP debuted in October 2001 and was last updated as SP2 in August 2004; SP3 will be the final major upgrade of the operating system.
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BURLINGTON, Mass.--Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday.
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Redmond software company Microsoft Corp. said it will add the source code of its Office 2003 flagship software suite to its program for sharing the details of its products with government entities.
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Microsoft to users: Ignore that press release from earlier this week. Service Pack 3 for Windows XP won't be out until next year.