Microsoft on Tuesday issued updates to plug a half-dozen security holes, four of which were rated critical.

Developers building applications for Microsoft's much-ballyhooed Silverlight media player won't be able to use Visual Studio 2008 running the company's latest software update.

Microsoft today announced that it will launch a “public preview” program for two of its first Windows Server 2008-based bundles.

The software giant is targeting one package at the small business market, where Microsoft has been heavily foraging, while the other will be aimed at mid-sized firms.

Jeff Raikes is to captain Bill and Melinda Gates' massive global philanthropic operation, just months after announcing his phased resignation from Microsoft.

Microsoft is appealing a record European Commission fine for not complying with a milestone European Commission anti-trust ruling.

Microsoft has pulled an apparently rogue internal marketing project that sat quietly, but not unnoticed, on the same servers as its main UK website for at least a fortnight.

Microhoo Microsoft and Yahoo! have pulled their chairs back up to the proverbial negotiating table.

Project Watch: Microsoft 2008 OK, so choosing and installing the hardware - that was easy. I wish I could say the same for the software.

On the face of it all I had to do was install the beta version of Windows Server 2008, the production version of Visual Studio 2008 and the beta SQL Server 2008. Sorry, by beta of course I mean community technology preview. It appears that Microsoft has learned that renaming can be used to shed bad associations.

Interop 2008 A decidedly downbeat Bob Muglia took centre stage at Interop this afternoon to preach the gospel of interoperability according to Microsoft.

Microsoft has poached a 17-year Adobe Systems veteran in a sign of where the company is placing its technology bets.

Microsoft has recruited database guru David DeWitt to head up a new database research lab. Based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where DeWitt was until recently professor of computing sciences, the new lab will focus on advanced data-management techniques.

Microsoft has released to manufacturing Windows XP Service Pack 3. The fresh software disgorgement will be made available for download through the Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center services on April 29.

IT infrastructure veteran Mark Wilson asks:

It seems that, wherever you look, Windows Server 2008 is almost universally acclaimed. And rightly so - I believe that it is a fantastic operating system release (let's face it, Windows Server 2003 and R2 were very good, too) and is packed full of features that have the potential to add significant value to solutions.

So, tell me, why are the same journalists who think Windows Server 2008 is great, still berating Windows Vista - the client version of the same operating system codebase?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted that Windows Vista is an incomplete product, even though the operating system has been on the market for more than a year.

Microsoft has bought Farecast - a travel search site which finds flights for you and, if you're flying from some US cities, can also tell you if the price is likely to go up or down in future.

RSA Internet Explorer is the next battleground for Microsoft in its goal of securing the Windows stack against an anticipated avalanche of script-based attacks.

And the company appears to be putting out the feelers to the community in order to get there.

Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007.

Microsoft's plans for security and cross-domain communications in Internet Explorer 8 have received qualified support from the cross industry OpenAjax Alliance.

Let's be perfectly clear. Everything is up for negotiation and nothing is off the table when it comes to Microsoft's dealings with open source. Except for one thing: patents.

The anger and frustration normally associated with Internet Explorer tends to focus on specific areas: security, stability, and standards. But those feelings have now spilled over into efforts dedicated to "saving" developers from the aging IE version 6.

OSBC Excel is the focus of a technology interoperability initiative between Microsoft and open-source BI specialist JasperSoft.

EclipseCon Microsoft has gone on a second date with Eclipse, this time around Windows Vista, but there's still no commitment to go steady.

Courtship, though, is part of a bigger strategy to improve the company's standing in the open source community by 2015, Microsoft said.

Microsoft today spat out a release candidate build of its delayed virtualisation software Hyper-V.

Project Watch: Microsoft 2008 Here's a question for you: what hardware does it take to run an entirely new, pre-release Windows operating system and 1TB-worth of SQL Server 2008 community technology preview?

Microsoft has released the long-awaited first Windows Vista Service Pack, a wrap-up of incremental updates that apparently cripples certain vendors' software.

Microsoft hopes to deliver the .NET-tuned implementation of the phenomenally popular Ruby, IronRuby 1.0, by the end of this year.

There's a ton of work left between then and now, though, and project manager John Lam isn't falling for that old Redmond trick of committing to a date and then watching the software slide out of view. Some stuff is getting cut, though.

Hands on, part 1 While Ruby and Groovy seem to get all of the attention, there's one scripting language that has been around for a lot longer and that has quietly been picking up in popularity over the long run. That language is Python, and, according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index Python was the language of the year for 2007.

The announcement of Microsoft's SQL Server Data Services was almost buried near the end of chief software architect Ray Ozzie's Mix 08 keynote last week.

It was a curious move for an offering that, as Microsoft's database service for the internet, marks the company's foray into database-based utility computing and promises an architecture that extends Microsoft's popular SQL Server database.

Open sourcing Windows is more hassle than it's worth and Microsoft sees little gain in releasing code, according to the man leading Microsoft's server marketing and platform strategy.

Mix 08 Royalties charged by Microsoft on Windows APIs and protocols are the next hurdle the company must clear in its wooing of open source developers.

Leading open source figures have questioned charges Microsoft makes on its protocols and APIs, with a call to clarify whether Windows server, client and application APIs and protocols that Microsoft has pledged to "open" will come free of charge, and how payments - if levied - would be collected.