Corporate raider Carl Icahn started his proxy fight for control of Yahoo this morning, beginning with the classic Icahn opening, the letter of reproach to the Yahoo board telling them they have acted 'irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft.'

'RIA' is slowly fading in terms of its definition. When I first started the RIA Evangelism role in Microsoft, I had this nagging feeling that the term RIA was just all over the place. Depending on which technology you are backing and which stream of alliance you uphold, the truth is the term was destined to be abused before it really took off.

ASP.NET developers are bored with traditional books that outline concepts in a lengthy way. These books are good if you like to learn the features in a detailed manner. However, by the time the book is read, a new version will be released. Hence, many learners including myself prefer short and succinct books that not only explain the topics in a user-friendly way, but also enable the reader to learn the concepts of the current technology before a new version is released.

It seems as though whenever I bring up PNRP and its benefits, I am immediately inundated with a list of questions or comments indicating that Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel and that PNRP has already been implemented before in the form of ZeroConf and, more specifically, Apple's implementation of it called Bonjour (formerly known as Rendezvous).

db4objects has announced that its db4o object database is now optimized for Microsoft's LINQ. With the new support, developers can choose an object-oriented optimized engine without changing the API or compromising performance. db4object's db4o database offers a persistence solution to store objects of any complexity natively with a single line of code.

Microsoft, which spent $6 billion on aQuantive and was chasing Yahoo for its ads before it came to a dead stop, has been supporting - as in helping write - legislation in New York and Connecticut that would regulate the data that companies like Yahoo and Google collect for targeted advertising. The New York bill, which Google, Yahoo, AOL and Facebook oppose, would let consumers opt-out of tracking.

Xceed launched Xceed Upload for Silverlight, the commercial offering in support of Microsoft's promising new Silverlight technology. The product is available now for purchase or as a fully functional 45-day trial on Xceed's website. Xceed Upload for Silverlight lets developers add upload capabilities to any Silverlight 2 Beta 1 application. All upload operations are asynchronous; as a result, the Web page hosting the Silverlight application remains perfectly responsive and usable throughout the transfer.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's cross-platform prowess, important to Microsoft's place in the data center. Microsoft has released a public beta of so-called Cross-Platform Extensions to its System Center Operations Manager 2007, which for the first time can manage HP-UX, Red Hat, Solaris and SUSE out-of-the-box.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo received stupid advice from their investment bank advisers and blew their chance to close the deal with Microsoft as of this Sunday morning. Neither Yang nor Filo are experts on how to sell a company in a multi-billion dollar deal. They have relied on their investment bankers and advisers since the negotiations started with Microsoft. The difference between the offered price of $33 and the asking price of $40 per share is roughly $1.4b per share, so it's not small potatoes.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Mainsoft announced the release of its SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. This add-on to IBM Lotus Notes 8, an Eclipsed-based Rich Client Platform based on Java, provides point-and-click access to Microsoft SharePoint content, including Word documents, Excel worksheets, and PowerPoint presentations, from within Notes. Mainsoft professional services can also build composite applications across SharePoint data and Java or .NET line-of-business applications.

Monday morning before the markets open Bloomberg reported 'Yahoo, that spent three months fighting a takeover by Microsoft, tumbled $6.37 to $22.30. The software maker said this weekend it walked away when Yahoo demanded $37 a share. Microsoft had increased its $44.6 billion bid by about $5 billion to $33 a share. Microsoft shares added $1.27 to $30.51. '

By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the 'next IBM' and why Google is not the 'next Microsoft' - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors, like Zoho, to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled last week. As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moore s Law on these computing eras.

The Dot Net Factory introduced EmpowerID Role Enforcer for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the role-based entitlement management application for SharePoint permissions. EmpowerID Role Enforcer for SharePoint enables enterprise-wide access control, auditing, and enforcement of policy for all SharePoint Server 2007 environments. EmpowerID Role Enforcer for SharePoint is available and is offered as an optional module for the EmpowerID Version 4.0 Identity and Entitlement Management suite.

The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put an open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on its site complaining that Microsoft has 'betrayed MSN music customers' and urging him to fix the problems Microsoft will cause when it turns off its Music validation servers at the end of August. It says the move will make it impossible for users to transfer their DRM-protected music files if they buy a new computer or upgrade their operating system or if their disk crashes.

Microsoft claims to have sold 140 million copies of Vista. Ah, but, in an effort to scratch the widespread 'Save XP' itch, Dell, HP, Sony and Lenovo all say they are going to supply XP past June 30 when large OEMs are supposed to stop supplying it.

CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response to changes in the source set as well as changes to items in the source set, you can have aggregate scalar values that continuously update in the same fashion. The following is a list of the supported aggregation types that can now be done continuously:

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

The Wall Street Journal thinks that Microsoft is about to break the break the deafening silence that has hung in the air since Yahoo! ignored Microsoft's Saturday deadline to deal or be acquired by force at a lower price. The Journal thinks that Microsoft could nominate a proxy slate of directors to replace Yahoo!'s board but hold off on going directly to Yahoo!'s shareholders and say nothing about the price, a move that could let its shares recover from their 12% decline since Microsoft went public with its Yahoo! lust.

Neudesic announced the release of version 2.0 of Neuron-ESB. Neuron-ESB is an Enterprise Service Bus that extends the Microsoft Platform by providing real-time messaging, integration and web service management. Neuron-ESB accelerates SOA adoption by helping companies successfully implement real-time integration across their enterprise, allowing timely response to changing events within their business.

Telerik announced the landmark release of its Q1 2008 RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and WinForms, and Telerik Reporting. The new release represents a final touch in Telerik's goal to offer a comprehensive and mature toolset of next-generation web and desktop components.

ILOG announced that its latest graphics toolkits for the .NET platform are aimed at helping Microsoft developers create rich internet applications (RIA), specifically interactive and visually-rich diagrams and Gantt charts. ILOG Diagrammer for .NET 1.5 and ILOG Gantt for .NET 3.5, ILOG's graphics toolkits for creating diagrams and Gantt charts for the .NET platform, now support Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and ASP.NET AJAX for RIA development.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

Microsoft is going to experiment with subscription-based software that as near as we can figure out won't be on-demand or web-based - or even available as a download - so it's hardly a retort to Google Apps and its ilk like people thought. This is the stuff that's code named Albany that Microsoft started admitting to last Friday after being caught a month ago signing up closed beta testers under NDA.

After three strong quarters and against a backdrop of heady expectations, Microsoft came in with lighter-than-expected fiscal Q3 revenues of $14.45 billion Thursday, earnings of $4.38 billion, or 47 cents a share, and operating income of $4.41 billion. Earnings were off 11% against a hard compare. Last Q3 they ballooned because of Microsoft recognized $1.67 billion in revenues and profits deferred by delays in releasing Vista.

Word documents generated by the current version of Office 2007 don't conform to ISO/IEC 29500, the OOXML file format draft standard Microsoft moved heaven and earth to get ISO to accept. At least that's what Alex Brown, the guy in change of the ISO group that's supposed to maintain OOXML.

BluePhoenix announced that it has expanded its collaboration with Microsoft on legacy modernization projects. The collaboration provides customers moving their applications or databases to .NET-based environments the best in both modernization services and technical support. BluePhoenix enables organizations to modernize their legacy data stores such as ADABAS, IDMS, IMS and VSAM to SQL Server, and from application languages such as COBOL, Natural, RPG and PowerBuilder to .NET.

Time is running out on Microsoft's deal-or-else ultimatum to Yahoo! Basically Yahoo! has to move off the dime by Saturday or else Microsoft could try taking the place by force, lowering its rejected $31-a-share bid in the process or - scarier still for Yahoo! - Microsoft could walk away completely, a move that will send Yahoo! stock back to the teens and could be the undoing of Yahoo!'s desperate CEO Jerry Yang.

Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex. BUT, when you're looking for case studies, look for ones where the person or organization who adopted Silverlight did so of their own volition, without being approached by Microsoft. I'm interested in hardcore, unbiased opinions from people who have been in the trenches doing their own coding, not watching Microsoft consultants do the coding for them. There are plenty of case studies like that out there, you just have to look past the shiny bouncing balls that are the Olympics and the Oscars and all the other crap that probably cost Microsoft a hojillion dollars in marketing funds and incentives.

Xceed is poised to launch Xceed Upload for Silverlight, its offering in support of Microsoft's promising new Silverlight technology. Slated for release in May or June 2008, Xceed Upload for Silverlight provides programmers with HTTP upload capabilities for C# and VB.NET development using Silverlight. Whether client software needs to upload single files, groups of files, or strings to Web servers, Xceed Upload for Silverlight makes implementation fast and easy. In batch mode, file transfer is deferred, letting the application gather data from different sources, such as form controls, performing the actual transfer when it is ready. Uploads are asynchronous for optimum performance, so the client software remains responsive throughout the operation.

Sybase announced that AJAX development capabilities and further Microsoft .NET enhancements have been added to the latest version of Sybase PowerBuilder 11, the premier 4GL rapid application development (RAD) tool. PowerBuilder 11.2 represents another milestone in the PowerBuilder roadmap for delivering .NET interoperability and incorporates new features such as AJAX functionality for WebForms, which enables richer, more interactive data-driven application development.

DataDirect and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation announced Pervasive Software has embedded custom engineered DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET providers from DataDirect Technologies into the Pervasive PSQL Summit version 10 relational database. Microsoft .NET Framework users now have reliable, secure and high-performance access to application-critical data residing in the PSQL database.

Microsoft announced that the EBSnet Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack is included as a component of the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework 2.5. With TCP/IP, the .NET Micro Framework is delivering on the vision of helping to create new business opportunities for developers that build solutions for small network-enabled devices, by allowing them to communicate with the Internet.

Remember that swat of 15 infringement complaints that Lucent made in 2003 against Dell and Gateway? A couple of which, concerning MP3 audio technology in the Windows Media Player, resulted in a record $1.5 billion decision against Microsoft that subsequently got overturned? Well, the court has been working its way through the charges and on Friday a San Diego jury awarded the French company $367.4 million in damages, finding that Microsoft infringed two patents named in the latest case - one charge concerning the DVD video decoding technology in Windows was thrown out; a fourth was only asserted against Dell, which is now supposed to pay the French $51,000.

Microsoft posted 14,000 pages of what it called 'preliminary versions' of technical documentation covering the protocols in Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The move is Microsoft's latest step since some bright Microsoftee realized the company could move the control point off trade secrets and back to patents and perhaps save itself some aggravation with the European Commission, while impressing its US regulator with its newfound openness.

Monday evening, at a gathering called Campfire One, Google unveiled App Engine, a hosted web application platform that offers web developers free use of Google's mighty infrastructure and all the building blocks that Google uses for its own applications. Amusingly, it's as vendor lock-in and importable as anything Microsoft in its heyday ever dreamed up. That, however, didn't stop Google from immediately filling the 10,000 spaces it made available for App Engine's initial beta.

The programming language dictates how developers can describe data structures, interfaces, and algorithms. The libraries provide an extensive array of advanced services to the program such as data access, communications, and graphical user interface. The language and libraries are called the platform. The platform sets the rules and makes the system possible. However, over the course of a system's lifespan, the platform can and will change: languages and libraries inevitably evolve and are replaced by next-generation technologies. Usually, the changes are gradual with an appropriate measure of backward compatibility, so we can adapt through standard maintenance activities. Sometimes, however, the changes are more radical and disruptive, so a more focused effort, called a migration project, is called for.