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MICROSOFT appears to be in a state of panic, ordering 60 per cent of its new operating system to be re-written amidst a major shake-up of its troubled Windows division. The news follows another delay with reports of a staff revolt over the way that management has handled the development of the operating system.

According to a Volish denizen speaking to smarthouse.com, orders have come down from on high to rewrite more than 60 per cent of the consumer version of Vista in a bid to get it ready for the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas.
Vole has shifted programmers from its Xbox team to help resolve many problems associated with entertainment and media centre functionality inside the OS. They are also working with Intel's Viiv team engineers and it is believed that Viiv could also be stalled to line up with Vista’s launch. At the centre of the problem appears to be the Media Centre code which will not be optional. Apparently they cannot get it to work properly in its current format and will have to make a lot of changes to the code to jack it in.

Source: The Inq

According to bink.nu who cites an unknown Microsoft Employee from the Windows Vista Newsgroups, a new build of Windows Vista is due today.

Paul Thurrott has confirmed the build as 5342 and release date over on his FAQ for Vista pages.

The new build is expected to be released to testers on connect later today and MSDN subscribers.

Windows Vista suffered its latest delay this week as Microsoft announced Vista will not be available for OEM's and Retail outlets until January 2007. This huge set back and re-organisation of the Windows Client Division will cause significant issues for OEM's and Businesses.

Even though Windows Vista Business Editions are due to be available in November 2006 many corporations outsource their PCs to suppliers like Fujitsu Siemens, IBM or Dell which preload Windows Versions onto their machines. For the corporations that image base deploy internally this shouldn't be a big set back but it will be interesting to see what the Christmas sales figures are for new PCs this year.

Source: Bink.nu

The Microsoft Internet Explorer team have confirmed a serious bug that can crash IE when users visit affected websites.

The problem relates to the way the browser handles the createTextRange() function and affects all versions (IE6.x XP SP2 fully patched, IE7 beta). The bug was disclosed publicly last weekend before Microsoft were able to patch the problem.

Lennart from the MSRC blog advised " Our initial investigation has revealed that if you turn off Active Scripting, that will prevent the attack as this requires script. Customers who use supported versions of Outlook or Outlook Express aren’t at risk from the email vector since script doesn’t render in mail (being read in the restricted sites zone)." He said a security advisory would be released in the coming days.

A Microsoft official recently chided Apple for their lack of a public Security Czar, and was (rightly) criticized for hypocrisy. However, Microsoft, for all their faults (and bugs) do appear to be making better efforts to publicize problems and deal with them in a timely matter. As Blogger in Chief Robert Scoble would say, blogs are about conversations - and it's good to see the security team, arguably one of the most important at Microsoft, getting more involved with their customers.

View: Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

The Windows division at Microsoft is about to see a management shakeup according to sources. As early as Wednesday, Microsoft could appoint Steve Sinosky, currently head of the company’s Office division, to oversee Windows development.

The move comes in the wake of yesterday’s announcement regarding Windows Vista being delayed yet again. Vista is the successor to the aging Windows XP, which was expected to be released later this year, but has now been pushed back to early 2007.

Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin currently run the Platform Products and Services division, which includes Windows. Although Allchin has shared leader of the division, he has shifted most of the management and financial responsibilities to Johnson, so he could focus more on technical issues related to Vista.

Sinosky, who joined Microsoft in 1989, has a track record of shipping product updates on time, Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg said. “Clearly things are not going super well with this project and it looks like it’s time to bring a new sheriff to town,” he said.

“It was already embarrassing when highly publicized features like WinFS were pulled. It’s clear the whole Longhorn vision has been somewhat scaled down. When it ships, they really need to ship another Windows 95, not another Windows ME,” Gartenberg said.

Source: CNET News.com

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that they will once again delay Windows Vista, formerly known as Longhorn, until early next year.

The software giant said it will wrap up development of the new operating system this year and make it available to volume licensing customers in November.

Microsoft’s Windows chief Jim Allchin said the company is delaying the broad launch of the product until January 2007. Allchin also stated that the product will still launch in Microsoft’s next fiscal year, which begins in July, meaning that Microsoft’s overall business for next year shouldn’t be affected.

Allchin stated that some of the additional time was for ensuring security levels, and the company is also working on ironing out usability issues. “We’re trying to crank up the security level higher than ever,” Allchin said. “This came down to a few weeks. We’re trying to do the responsible thing here.”

View: Microsoft Press Release
Source: CNET News.com

According to my sources, Microsoft will soon ship an unexpected "refresh build" of Windows Vista to its technical beta testers and some corporate customers. Previously, the company had been shipping only semi-monthly Community Technical Preview (CTP) builds of Vista to testers and other audiences, including MSDN subscribers. The refresh build is currently build 5342, I'm told. It will require different product keys than the previous CTP.

It's unclear why Microsoft has chosen to ship a Vista refresh build at this time, though I'm told the company is using it as a testing board for the extensive feedback they've gotten since the last CTP, which was issued in February. According to my sources, the refresh build will not meet CTP quality measurements, and will ship only in the Vista Ultimate edition, for both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) systems.

Microsoft originally expected to ship a CTP build in April, though that release could slip until May, according to sources. That CTP should be made available to the public via Web downloads.

Source: Wininformant

On Thursday, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Fransisco, Microsoft development manager Andrew Ritz revealed that Windows Vista, the successor to the aging Windows XP expected to be released later this year, will not support EFI booting. Ritz admitted that EFI support will not be seen until Longhorn Server is released in early 2007, and on top of that it will never support a 32-bit processor.

Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system.

This is terrible news for Intel Mac users who have been hoping that they could dual-boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new Macs: not only are their processors not 64-bit (and thus will never be supported by Windows EFI booting) but Windows Vista won't boot on EFI anyway.

"A combination of factors changed our plans. The big one, in my opinion was platform availability. With this huge move to 64-bit based platforms and for us to support it, we needed to see a large heterogeneous sample of 64 bit implementations out there for us to feel comfortable in supporting it." said Ritz.

Source: apcmag.com

Microsoft announced March 7 that it is has acquired application-transfer specialist Apptimum for an undisclosed sum. Formerly Eisenworld, Apptimum, based in Sunrise, Fla., began in 1998 and is best known for PC relocation products branded with the vacation-friendly moniker "Alohabob," named after the founder's father, who lives in Hawaii.

Microsoft's plans for the acquired intellectual property and technology assets of Apptimum are focused on streamlining the application transfer process between older and newer computers, with an emphasis on Window's Vista migration. "Our goal is to make the application transfer experience easier and faster for customers," said Gabriel Dorfman, Product Manager in the Windows group at Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash.

Source: eWeek

Windows Vista won't have a backdoor that could be used by police forces to get into encrypted files, Microsoft has stressed.

In February, a BBC News story suggested that the British government was in discussions with Microsoft over backdoor access to the operating system. A backdoor is a method of bypassing normal authentication to gain access to a computer without to the PC user knowing. But Microsoft has now quelled the suggestion that law enforcement might get such access. "Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows," a company representative said in a statement sent via e-mail.

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Source: News.com