Latest Software News

In case you were one of the many Windows Live Messenger users affected by the recent outages of Microsoft’s consumer IM service earlier this week, here’s an update on what happened.

On Thursday September 11, I — like many of my IM contacts around the world — couldn’t sign into Live Messenger for a number of hours. Courtesy of a Microsoft spokeswoman, this is Microsoft’s statement on the disruption:

And furthermore, he says, that's a good thing.

A great post over at Scott Hanselman's blog goes into some detail of the Microsoft code

Google has included in Chrome. It's all street-legal: the code was made available under a very permissive open source licence back in 2004, and may be the first of Microsoft's steps in that direction.

Hanselman is a senior program manager at MS, and clearly enthusiastic about the whole business. He also writes a mean blog--if you've got any curiosity about some of the gnarly bits inside Chrome, including how it works securely with multiple versions of Windows, then give this the once-over

Even more interesting than Chrome's internals is this statement:

Apple’s support forum received numerous complaints about a crash that occurs on their Windows Vista computer when running iTunes 8 with an iPod or iPhone that is connected to the computer.

iTunes 8.0 was released on Tuesday according to Computerworld and users will see the “blue screen of death” when either of those two devices are plugged on the computer.

The software generated this type of error before. A support document for version 7.7 notes, “Attempting to connect an iPhone or iPod touch, which has been updated with the latest iPhone 2.0 software, to iTunes 7.7 on a 64-bit Microsoft Vista platform may cause the system to unexpectedly quit and display a blue error message screen.”

Microsoft is on tap to talk publicly about and show off Windows 7 at two of its upcoming tech conferences this fall. But that does not mean the Windows team necessarily will be distributing bits at those shows.

Along with many other Microsoft watchers, developers and customers, I have been assuming Microsoft was going to provide attendees of its late October Professional Developers Conference (PDC) – or at least its early November Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) — with early Windows 7 bits.

But according to new information I’ve received from sources that have asked not to be named, Microsoft is not planning to make Beta 1 of Windows 7 available until mid-December.