Microsoft has released a new version of a software tool that developers and administrators can use to harden older applications against common vulnerabilities.

Short for Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, EMET version 2.0 brings several new protections to operating systems and applications such as Windows XP or Internet Explorer 6, which remain widely used even though they are not as secure as more recent releases...

View Full Article: The Register

At Microsoft's Mix '10 conference in March, where Microsoft took the wraps off its HTML 5 vision for Internet Explorer 9, there were a lot of questions about the future for Silverlight.

Six months later — and one new version of Silverlight (version 4, released in April) later, those questions still persist. Should Web developers target Internet Explorer 9 or Silverlight when creating new Web and mobile applications?

View Full Article: Mary Jo Foley's Blog

Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions, bringing an even cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance.

As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology when it was first introduced just two years ago...

View Full Article: ReadWriteWeb

Intel will release on Thursday an upgrade to its parallel development toolset for Windows application developers, adding both a tool to walk developers through parallelism, as well as support for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 IDE.

Intel Parallel Studio 2011 is an update to Intel Parallel Studio. It aids developers in building parallel C++ or C applications for multicore or multiprocessing systems. "It's a suite of four products that work on the developer lifecycle, including designing, building, verifying and tuning," said Bill Savage, vice president and general manager of the Developer Products Division in Intel's Software and Services Group...

View Full Article: InfoWorld

In the future, there will only be artistically designed dust and massive smartphones.

Microsoft took groups of journalists around its “open house” set up at Sydney’s Luna Park yesterday after announcing further details of Foxtel on Xbox Live and the exact date of the Kinect launch in Australia. The open house was intended to showcase Microsoft products of all types against an introductory speech that talked about the products of the future. Microsoft’s future, to be precise...

View Full Article: Gizmodo Australia

Virtualization has not stripped Windows of its relevance, a Microsoft official said in response to VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s argument that operating systems are no longer the center of innovation in the IT world.

Maritz didn’t actually predict that operating systems are doomed, but he did argue in his VMworld keynote that the role of operating systems in managing hardware and providing services to applications is being usurped by virtualization software and new development frameworks like Spring and Ruby on Rails...

View Full Article: Network World

Terry Myerson: Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we’re very excited to say that we’ve reached the biggest milestone for our internal team – the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7! While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners’ hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete...

View Full Article: Windows Team Blog

Larry Larsen: I stopped by the hardware team to take a first look at the new Arc Touch Mouse, and shot this short video. The Touch folds flat, to about the same size as an HTC Touch phone. Where the old Arc Mouse fit well in a front pocket, the Arc Touch will do well in a back pocket. The folding portion of the mouse has 90 articulated pieces and snaps to a very solid feeling and natural arc...

View Full Article/Video: Channel 9

Stephen L Rose: Deploying Windows 7, but still running Web applications based on Internet Explorer 6? Join us live at 9:00 AM Pacific Time on Thursday, September 30, 2010 for a virtual, interactive roundtable discussion on migration strategies, standards, and support for organizations moving from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8...

View Full Article: Windows Team Blog

Let the mobile video-game wars begin. No, not Nintendo vs. Sony, but Apple vs. Microsoft.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs this morning announced the iOS Game Center, a new video-game app and software platform that will help developers of games for the iPhone and iPod touch introduce features including centralized achievements, leaderboards and, most notably, real-time multiplayer gaming between devices...

View Full Article: Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

Microsoft just received confirmation of a patent that hands the company the intellectual property of shutting an operating system down.

[...] In August 2005, Microsoft filed for a patent to more efficiently shut down its Windows operating system as well as other operating systems, including Apple’s Mac OS X, and override running programs that may prevent Windows from closing. That particular feature has been implemented for some time in Windows and is known as the notification screen just before the actual shutdown, if a user has requested Windows to close and other programs with open and unsaved documents are still running...

View Full Article: ConceivablyTech (via Slashdot)

Eric Ligman: The Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) will release new improvements in November, 2010. We have reached out to many partners and customers around the world through Live Meetings, interviews, hands-on usability studies, forums, and events to gather input and feedback on how to improve the VLSC. We take this feedback seriously and are continually incorporating suggestions into the VLSC.

Improvements coming in November include...

View Full Article: Microsoft Partner SMB Community Blog (via The Register)