Microsoft offers second beta for Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft will offer the second beta of its upcoming Visual Studio 2010 software development platform and the accompanying .Net Framework 4 programming platform. The Visual Studio platform is being reduced from nine different packaging options to just three primary options.

“The feedback that we’ve heard from our customers was [nine options] was too complicated,” said Mendlen. “There were too many packages to choose from.” The three primary packages, featuring MSDN subscriptions, include:

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN, featuring the full suite of tools including ALM products. Testing and architecture tools also are featured. It carries a price tag of $11,924 for a new customer and $3,841 for a current customer renewing with Microsoft.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN, featuring the Visual Studio toolset but lacking some architecture capabilities of the Ultimate edition. Some of Microsoft’s ALM suite is included. Premium costs $5,469 for new users and $2,299 for customers seeking renewals.

Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN, for basic development tasks. It includes the core version of Visual Studio. It costs $1,199 for a new user and $799 for a renewal.”

Weekly Wrap-up. While there's a lot of noise about the UI challenge between Windows 7 vs Mac OS X some claim that Windows 7 needs a universal updater.

There is a lot of speculations around new OS's from Microsoft and Apple with the intentions to identify who invented what and what ideas has been stolen. The interest significantly grow after recent story "Apple versus Microsoft" published at InforWorld. The article marked the top 20 ideas that both houses have stolen from each other during years and provides slideshows on the stolen features.

Although, the emphasis has been given mostly on two new Windows 7's features - the task bar and Aero Peek it doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft leads in the list of stolen ideas. For example, the co-called Mac Finders's sidebar, according to the article has been taken from Navigation pane in Windows XP. The conclusion is that the borrowing process has been going for a long time and will continue to go on. A long list of major features eventually became a part of the computing landscape and it would be useless to try to find the roots.

Much more important for both Apple and Microsoft nowadays and in the future is to keep innovation on the place, as users become mature and selective, and it might be a problem even for such a popular OS as a Windows, especially when new the rival Google's Chrome comes to the market.

Although, Google many times has been blamed for stealing ideas from Apple yet it has its unique approach for user-friendliness, which might play as a main trigger for further innovation.

Apart from large-scale OS's wars let's turn to more realistic issues. Last month Apple was widely criticized for pushing the iPhone configuration utility to Windows users who have the Apple updater installed as the software was utterly useless to the majority of computer users, most of whom don't even own iPhones. That occasion proves that there is no need to have individual updater applications for Windows, Java, Apple and others as the universal updater is exactly the solution that can manage all updates for all software. As a result Mac's, Wins and other users can configure their updates, permit or restrict some particular updates and decide when the updates are allowed to occur.

An universal updater would obligate software developers dealing with it to comply with policies governing how applications is to be used. It would would remove the frustration of tediously removing updaters from each applications as well as return some control back to the user, and keep all relevant applications up to date.

According to Michael Scalisi an IT manager, an universal updater can provide a great benefits to users making Windows more flexible platform.

Microsoft creates tools for migration from LINQ to SQL to ADO.NET Entity Framework.

It is widely known that in the last release of the Microsoft.NET Framework there are two built-in object-relational mapping (ORM) solutions. One is LINQ to SQL and another ADO.NET Entity Framework. While the first one was introduced earlier in the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, an ADO.NET Entity Framework appeared later on in the .NET 3.5 SP1 with support in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

Although ADO.NET Entity Framework is younger and provides more simplistic functionality than LINQ to SQL it has gained recognition and being developed very dynamically by Microsoft. Its new version will be improved and enhanced with new features in the upcoming release of the .NET framework..

Moreover, Microsoft has already released the first version of Visual Studio 2010 templates for LINQ to SQL (.dbml) metadata migration to ADO.NET Entity Framework (.edmx) models which proves their strategical intentions to abandon LINQ to SQL in favour of ADO.NET Entity Framework.

That said, it does not necessarily mean that one day all software built using LINQ to SQL will stop working, but it could cause serious obstacles for the migration of existing applications to the following versions of the .NET Framework. From this perspective ADO.NET Entity Framework is undoubtedly more attractive for cost-effective and low-risk migration solutions.


The article has been prepared by Denis Nikolayenko. The original version of this article on Russian can be found here

The new attack code poses a threat on Vista users, while Windows 7 and XP crack-resistant.

The Microsoft is under the pressures after hackers have publicly released the new attack code that exploits a critical bug in the line of Microsoft oprating systems, including Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and 2, Windows 2008 SP1, SP2 server.

Although this vulnerabilty issue has been known since Spetember the publicly available programs that can use that bug haven't been able to do anything except crash the operating system. However, a new attack code developed by Harmony allows to run unathorized software on cracked PC making it much more serious problem for Microsoft. The attack code was added to the company's open-source Metasploit penetration testing kit making the code widely available.

From other side, a software company called Immunity recently developed its own attack code for the bug, but that code is available only to the company's paying subscribers. And although the atack code is claimed to potentially work on both Windows Vista and Windows 2008 (Service Pack 1 and 2) the code may not be completely reliable, according to Immunity Senior Researcher, who stressed that he could get the Metasoft Attack to work only on the Windows Vista operating system running within a VMware virtual machine session. He added "When he ran it on native Windows systems, it simply caused the machines to crash."

In turn a Metasploit developer said that the attack definitely worked on at least some physical machines, but looks like it could use more testing.

Either way, the public release of this code should put Windows users on alert. Security experts worry that this code could be adapting to create a self-copying worm attack, much like last year's Conficker outbreak. It might seems strange but unlike Conficker, this attack would not affect older Windows XP, Windows Server 2003,or Windows 2000 systems. That's because the underlying flaw that all of these programs exploit lies in the SMB (server message block) version 2 system, introduced firstly in Vista.

Microsoft has confirmed that Immunity's attack works on 32-bit versions of Vista and Windows Server 2008, but did not have any immediate comment on the Metasploit code.

According to Immunity Senior Researcher the flaw has been patched in Windows 7, yet Microsoft released a Fix tool that disables SMB 2, and the company said that it is working on a fix for the software.

Weekly Wrap-Up. Summary of some top stories in the past week.

In the search war Bing grabs 11% of search market, while Microsoft introduces new tools for secure application development.

According to recent results from analyst company Nielsen, Microsoft Corp's Bing continues to strengthentening its position on the search engine market and demonstrated steady growth by 9% in July and 10.7% in August. Such performance has made Bing the fastest growing search engine on the market, where still three major competitors, with Google long ahead are trying to take their stakes. Although, Bing still far behind Google, its verges towards Yahoo Inc.'s search engine position, that showed 4.2% decline from July. However, the emphasis might shift once Microsoft and Yahoo enter into a partnership after passing an antitrust muster. The agreement allows Bing to power Yahoo's Web sites, while Yahoo will drive sales of premium search advertising services for both companies. That movement
could unite two giants and give them a needed leverage in ongoing battle against the leader.

On other side, Microsoft continues to show its commitement to making Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) process real for developers and presented new testing tools to help Windows programmers build better security into their C and C++ applications. Symbolically the tools offered at no cost enablig implementation of Microsoft's SDL process, for injecting security and privacy provisons into the development lifecycle as opposed to testing during pre- and post deployment of application.

One of the tools, BinScope Binary Analyzer, analyzes binary code to validate adherence to SDL requirements for compilers and linkers. By checking a variety of SDL requirements like GS flag, which is used to prevent buffer overflows it also verifies use of strong-named assemblies and up-to-date build tools. The tool requires symbol files, providing security against hackers potentially using the tool to analyze software on the Web for weaknesses.

A Microsoft representative said many of the checks featured in BinScope Binary Analyzer are inherently built into .NET coding. Microsoft previously has released a threat management tool and process management template based on SDL.

The second tool, Microsoft MiniFuzz File Fuzzer implements the fuzz testing technique. Testers check application behavior by parsing files that have been deliberately corrupted. Security tests are applied to take code through different flow patterns and identify whether resulting crashes should be investigated as potential application security risks.

Microsoft has recently released a paper entitled "Manual Integration of the SDL Process Template," to guide Microsoft Visual Studio Team System users through a manual process to incorporate elements of the SDL process template into Team System projects.

Microsoft starts to work on Windows 8

With approaching of Windows 7 on the offer there are some questions arise whether Windows 7 will be the last Microsoft traditional operation system. And will the next version of Windows be completely cloud-based?

So what's the next? Windows 8, of course, and Microsoft has posted several job listings for developers to help with work on Windows 8, however in can have another naming by the time its launched. There is an example of those listings:

“For the upcoming version of Windows, new critical features are being worked on including cluster support and support for one way replication. The core engine is also being reworked to provide dramatic performance improvements. We will also soon be starting major improvements for Windows 8 where we will be including innovative features which will revolutionize file access in branch offices.”

It looks like Microsoft already works hard on the new storage technology "Distributed File System Replication", which is focused on keeping data synchronized across multiple servers. And another Windows 8 job posting focusing on Windows file system tells that Windows 8 Server will also show up.