Technology Watch

2005-08-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

Mozilla Foundation creates For-Profit Subsidiary- The Mozilla Corporation

The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation announced yesterday that it's creating a for-profit subsidiary, (The Mozilla Corporation), to more rapidly increase market share for its core product, the Firefox Web browser. Although the Mozilla Corporation will seek to make a profit, future versions of Mozilla Firefox, the Mozilla Thunderbird email application, and other products will remain free and be based on open-source code. According to Web site monitoring company NetApplications, Firefox grabbed 8.7 percent of the Web browser market in July and is the number-two browser behind Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), which still controls 86 percent of the market.

2005-08-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Integrating Speech Recognition Technology into Exchange Server

Microsoft is moving speech technologies into unified messaging by announcing it will integrate speech technologies into a future version of Microsoft Exchange Server. Microsoft announcement is part of a continued effort to make speech mainstream.

2005-07-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

Windows Presentation Foundation/Windows Communication Foundation

Avalon is now known as the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It consists of a display engine and a managed-code framework and was developed to unify how Windows creates, displays, and manipulates documents, media, and the user interface. It is scheduled for release in 2006 and will be available in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and future releases of the Windows operating system.

Indigo is now known as the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It has built in support for the WS-* architecture and a unified API for building connected sytems. It extends the functionality of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 and can be used with BizTalk Server for brokered and unbrokered application-to-application communication.

2005-07-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

Windows Vista, Longhorn Server, and IE 7.0

I am participating in Beta 1 of Windows Vista, Longhorn Server, and IE 7.0. I have downloaded and installed Windows Vista in VMware and I am planning to install the software on another desktop so I can replicate any issues before submitting them as bugs. For the install of Windows Vista in VMware I allocated 512 RAM and 8GB of disk space. I was surprised that the install took over 1 hour and did not request time zone information.