Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input.

The Kodu Language and Grammar Specification white paper is now available for download from Microsoft Research...

View Full Article: MSDN Blogs

Search giant Google has revealed that it has been approached by the Texas attorney general as part of an antitrust review. This investigation seems to be essentially along the lines of the European one, revealed back in February, looking into whether Google manipulates its search results in order to suppress competition, mainly in the area of price comparison.

Just as in the earlier case, Google has responded to this new investigation by pointing out that the hidden hand of Microsoft can be seen in the complaints received by the Texas AG. Foundem was part of the European complaint too, and is a member of ICOMP, which is sponsored by Microsoft...

View Full Article: HEXUS.net

Microsoft is investigating reports of a new bug in Internet Explorer.

Redmond's Security Response Team (MSRT) said on Friday that it was aware of a "publicly disclosed issue involving Internet Explorer", and promised an investigation, without going into details...

View Full Article: The Register

The personal computer is vanishing.

Computers once filled entire rooms, then sat in the closet, moved to our desks, and now nestle in our pockets. Soon, the computer may become invisible to us, hiding away in everyday objects...

View Full Article: The New York Times

Microsoft's hosted suite of enterprise applications — the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) went down for 90 minutes on September 3 for a number of customers in North America.

This is the second BPOS outage reported in the past month. The previous one hit on August 23, and like today’s, was attributed to an unspecified networking issue...

View Full Article: Mary Jo Foley's Blog

Apple's iOS mobile operating system rocketed past the open source Linux this summer to become the third most popular Web browsing platform on the Internet.

A new release from Web traffic firm Net Applications has revealed that iOS share overtook Linux in July, when it represented 1.06 percent of all Web traffic, verus the 0.93 share of Linux. Apple's mobile platform grew even more in August, when it represented 1.13 percent, compared to a shrinking share for Linux, down to 0.85 percent...

View Full Article: AppleInsider

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