MS Unwraps Latest Visual Studio and .Net Framework

"I think the LINQ feature is really the No. 1 new feature in Visual Studio," Greg DeMichillie, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, told, All programmers write programs that access data, using either Visual Basic or C# with SQL, DeMichillie noted."
Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 have been released to manufacturing and are now available for MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscribers to download, the company announced Monday.

Included in Visual Studio 2008 are enhancements such as visual designers for faster development with the .Net Framework 3.5, significant improvements to Web development tools and language enhancements that speed development with all types of data, Microsoft said. The platform provides developers with all the tools and framework support required to create compelling, expressive, Ajax-enabled (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web applications, it added.

.Net Framework 3.5, meanwhile, builds incrementally on the new features added in .Net Framework 3.0, including feature sets in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows CardSpace. Version 3.5 also contains a number of new features to avoid breaking changes, Microsoft said.

250 New Features
"Visual Studio 2008 delivers over 250 new features, makes improvements to existing features including performance work on many areas, and we've made significant enhancements to every version of Visual Studio 2008, from the Express Editions to Visual Studio Team System," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft.
"In Visual Studio Team System in particular, I'm pleased with the progress we made in scalability and performance for Team Foundation Server (TFS)," he added.
Although the products are now available for download, they won't be officially released until February.

Web 2.0 Functionality
Visual Studio 2008 delivers improved language and data features, such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ), that make it easier for individual programmers to build solutions that analyze and act on information. It also provides developers with the ability to build applications that target the .Net Framework 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5, supporting a wide variety of projects in the same environment, Microsoft said.

New tools speed the creation of connected applications on the latest platforms including the Web, Windows Vista, Office 2007, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008, while other additions help improve collaboration in development teams, including tools that help integrate database professionals and graphic designers into the development process.

New features in .Net Framework 3.5 deep integration of LINQ, ASP.Net Ajax and new Web protocol support for building WCF services including Ajax, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), REST (Representational State Transfer), POX (Plain Old XML), RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Atom, and several new WS-* standards.

Together, Visual Studio and the .Net Framework reduce the need for common plumbing code, reducing development time and enabling developers to concentrate on solving business problems, Microsoft said.

Hitting a 'Sore Spot'
All programmers write programs that access data, using either Visual Basic or C# with SQL, DeMichillie noted. LINQ makes it easier to write code that queries databases, and so is a particularly important addition because it "really hits a sore spot for developers," he explained. "Virtually 100 percent of customers will end up using that feature."

Life Cycle Management
.Net Framework 3.5 will also help visual designers create and manage graphically rich Web 2.0 software, Melinda Ballou, program director with IDC told, in addition, Visual Studio 2008's TFS makes improvements in both performance and version control, she said.

"My main concern about Web 2.0 development is the need to do better quality testing," Ballou added. Web 2.0 applications, because of their complexity and incorporation of diverse types of data, require different steps in managing the life cycle, she noted.

"I look forward to companies such as Microsoft and others providing effective life cycle management support for both Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture (SOA)-based software," Ballou said.

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Three up-and-coming Mobile Platforms

Microsoft-backed Zumobi (previously ZenZui,) will be a free downloadable application featuring 16 tiles (application widgets) that zoom in with touch, tap, or button clicks. Users can customize tiles by picking from the device or Zumobi's online gallery. Zooming into a tile takes you into the always-on application, which contains multiple search functions and a banner ad. Developers, keep an eye out for the software developer's kit announcement. Users, keep an eye out for the upcoming beta.

Mobio lets users create a portal of Web applications on their mobile phones. Since the applications, currently totaling 40, are all provided by Mobio, they share a similar look and feel across all handsets and carriers. Mobio, as a platform, renders images and sizes so users will share an identical experience, regardless of handset and carrier differences.

FoneMine is one Web 2.0 company that's working to make the Internet more mobile-friendly by offering business partners an XMS-powered scalable platform to build mobile applications for consumer use. Businesses using FoneMine's integrated mobile services can quickly create Java applications using widgets, voice, data messaging, and social networking.

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Microsoft Details Windows Server 2008

Yap you heard it right its windows server 2008

Windows Server 2008 will be launched in eight different flavors, four of which will include the software giant's Hyper-V virtualization tech. Microsoft might be a late arrival to the virtualization game, but the company's commanding presence in the data center means that Windows Server 2008 should have considerable traction at launch.

Microsoft used its TechEd IT Forum 2007 conference in Barcelona, Spain this week to detail its forthcoming Windows Server 2008 platform lineup, which will integrate a complete set of virtualization capabilities when it launches next February.

"With more than one million downloads and evaluation copies, we've built Windows Server 2008 based on a solid foundation of customer feedback, which is reflected in the product's ease of management, security enhancements, and overall reliability," said Microsoft vice president Bob Kelly.

Kelly also said Microsoft's key virtualization hypervisor, known as Hyper-V, will be made available as a stand-alone product. "The unprecedented range of customer choices and the virtualization enhancements will help customers tailor solutions built to fit virtually any business need," he said.

Server Smorgasbord

Microsoft might be a late arrival to the virtualization game, but the software giant's commanding presence in the data center means that the effort should have considerable traction right from the get-go. According to IDC, Windows server products generated $5.0 billion or 38.2 percent of all server OS revenue in the second quarter of this year -- up by 4 percent from one year earlier.

"It's still very, very early," said Microsoft's System Center & Virtualization general manager Larry Orecklin. "With less than 5 percent of the servers out there actually virtual today, the industry is still in its infancy."

Windows Server 2008 will be launched in eight different flavors, four of which will include the software giant's Hyper-V virtualization technology. The Standard and Enterprise editions with Hyper-V will ship with a limited number of virtual instances per license, while the Datacenter edition with Hyper-V will include unlimited virtual instances per license.

Microsoft will launch a stand-alone Hyper-V Server product for customers consolidating existing servers running Windows Server 2003 that have not yet validated Windows Server 2008 in the infrastructure, noted Microsoft Windows Server senior director Zane Adams. The retail price of Microsoft Hyper-V Server is pegged at just $28.

"They can buy Microsoft Hyper-V Server and consolidate using that," he said. By contrast, new customers "can buy Windows Server 2008 Edition, which comes with the Hyper-V technology, and use that for consolidation," Adams said.

Pricing the Menu

"We believe that virtualization should be a feature of the operating system," Orecklin said. With Hyper-V, customers will be able "to use the skills they have developed on managing their windows environments and apply that to virtualization," he explained.

Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition, including Hyper-V and five client licenses, will be priced at $999, while the Enterprise version with 25 client licenses will cost $3,999. The Datacenter edition with Hyper-V is expected to be priced at $2,999 per processor, whereas the iteration for Itanium-based systems will cost $2,999 per processor.

Microsoft expects to release five additional server flavors that do not incorporate Hyper-V technology, including new platforms targeting Web development as well as the deployment of servers based on Intel's Itanium microprocessor.

The iterations of the Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter products without Hyper-V will cost $28 less than their virtualized counterparts. In addition, the retail price of Windows Web Server 2008, which likewise does not support Hyper-V, is being pegged at $469.

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Intel's New Chips Called 'Revolutionary Move'

New to the Intel lineup of 45-nm chips, which IC Insights analyst Rob Lineback called "revolutionary," are 15 Xeon server processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2 GHz up to 3.20 GHz, with frontside bus speeds up to 1,600 MHz. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40 GHz.

On Monday, Intel unveiled a new generation of processors that are built on an entirely new transistor formula designed to improve performance while decreasing wasteful electricity leaks.
Gordon Moore, Intel's cofounder, said the technology responsible for the new processors represents the biggest transistor advancement in 40 years.

The processors are the first to use Intel's Hafnium-based high-k metal gate formula and also the first to be manufactured on the company's 45-nanometer manufacturing process, further boosting performance and lowering power consumption.
Nearly Twice the Density

The new 45-nm processors boast nearly twice the transistor density of previous chips built on the company's 65-nm technology. That is up to 820 million transistors for each processor using Intel's new formula.

Combining these advancements with new processor features clears the path for Intel to design products that are 25 percent smaller than previous versions and thus more cost-effective, the company said. In addition, the new technology gives Intel the ability to pursue new opportunities for ultramobile electronics.

"As devices shrink the scaling of the device sizes tends to play against them," said Rob Lineback, senior market research analyst at IC Insights. "They don't work as well as they get smaller and thinner. Leakage has been one of the biggest problems the industry has faced in recent technology generations.

But, he said, Intel's advancement has the potential to create better transistors that do not leak current and basically perform better switching.

High End of Desktop

The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad core processor, one of the new 45-nm chips, aims to please hardcore gamers and media enthusiasts. Enhancements such as a larger L2 cache and support for new Intel media instructions are designed to help bring desktop performance to "extreme" new levels, Intel said.

Also new to the Intel lineup are 15 dual-core and quad-core Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2 GHz up to 3.20 GHz, with frontside bus (FSB) speeds up to 1,600 MHz, and cache sizes of 12 MB. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40 GHz, an FSB of up to 1,600 MHz, and cache sizes of 6 MB.

"This is a revolutionary move, but Intel isn't the only one doing it," Lineback said. "The question is whether Intel will essentially control the type of material and the processes that other companies are going to have to use to follow them. Intel's is not the only way. It may be the best way, and that's what we have to wait and see." It will probably be at least a year before AMD can match Intel's technology, Lineback said. "This is an attempt by Intel to stay ahead, and not only ahead in this generation, but guaranteeing it can be even further ahead even at 32 nanometers."

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Free E-Books

Do you want to learn Adobe Photoshop or may be programming in Visual Basic/C ++. Okay I’ll tell you a way to learn it without wasting any money. As you know you see a lot of books in may shops teaching you how to learn software’s and may other things, but the problem is it cost a lot, may be MRF 300 and above for just one book. After today you don’t have to buy a single book again. I found this cool Site that has may eBook for FREE. Most the eBooks are in PDF files format. Cool hahah

www.dl4all.com/category/e_books/

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Hackers Could Hijack Your iPhone

iPhone users will have to be just as vigilant in following "safe surfing" practices as PC users if they want to avoid having their systems taken over by hackers. A newly identified vulnerability in the Safari browser is among the first serious holes that could be exploited -- but given the device's popularity, more are almost sure to follow.

A hole in the iPhone's security apparatus could allow a hacker to take complete control of the device, warn researchers at Independent Security Evaluators, who identified the flaw.

The exploit is delivered via a malicious Web page opened in the Safari browser on the iPhone, according to ISE. There are at least three vectors from which a device could be infected:

An attacker-controlled wireless access point: The iPhone learns access points by name (SSID, or service set identifier). Therefore, if a user ever gets near an attacker-controlled access point with the same name and encryption type as an access point previously trusted by the user, the iPhone will automatically use the malicious access point. This allows the attacker to add the exploit to any Web page browsed by the user by replacing the requested page with a page containing the exploit.

A misconfigured forum Web site: If a Web forum's software is not configured to prevent users from including potentially dangerous data in their posts, an attacker could cause the exploit to run in any iPhone browser that viewed the thread.

A link delivered via e-mail or SMS (short message service): If an attacker can trick a user into opening a Web site that the attacker controls, the attacker can easily embed the exploit into the main page of the Web site.


Admin Privileges
Once the browser opens the malicious Web page, arbitrary code embedded in the exploit is run with administrative privileges. In ISE's proof of concept, this code reads the log of SMS messages, the address book, the call history and the voice mail data, and then transmits the information to the attacker.

However, code could be embedded to interfere with anything that the iPhone can do, notes ISE. "It could send the user's mail passwords to the attacker, send text messages that sign the user up for pay services or record audio that could be relayed to the attacker," the firm says.

"As is described in the preliminary research paper, the attack isn't necessarily a serious vulnerability," Shane Coursen, senior technical consultant at Kaspersky Lab, told MacNewsWorld. "What is more serious is that all applications ... are being given administrator privileges." Coursen added the caveat that these statements are subject to ISE's research holding up under peer review.


No Surprise
The discovery is hardly causing shock waves in the security community. The iPhone has an unusually high profile, and there is a temptingly large number of people who already own the device. Also, smartphones are increasingly vulnerable to hacks, given their sophisticated computing processes.

The Safari browser is the obvious chink in the iPhone's armor, David Finger, product marketing manager for TrendMicro, told MacNewsWorld. "By making Safari available on the Windows platform, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has made it much more likely for hackers to target the OS," he said, referring to Windows' huge share of the market compared to the Mac's.

Apple will probably be able to close the hole, Finger added, "but the fact that they found it shows the iPhone is not invulnerable -- and, perceptually, that is important." While the iPhone's popularity leaves its users particularly vulnerable to unwelcome attention from the world's malware community, the larger threat applies to every smartphone owner. "Yes, Apple is a huge brand and the race is, no doubt, now on to exploit the vulnerability," Mark Sunner, chief security analyst at MessageLabs, told MacNewsWorld. "But the bigger problem is not the iPhone in particular, but the fact that small handheld devices are becoming mini-computers in functionality. As with laptops, as the devices become more sophisticated, the potential for exploited vulnerabilities increases in tandem." WiFi poses a huge potential threat for smartphones, Kaspersky's Coursen pointed out. "Once we start to see more cafe-style WiFi hotspots and more WiFi-enabled smartphones, rogue hotspots are going to be a big headache," he predicted.


Modifying Behavior
What this all means is that users of any smartphone device will have be trained to be just as careful on the phone as they are online, said Ron O'Brien, security analyst for Sophos.

"Ultimately, it is the behavior of the user that leads to the vulnerability being exploited," he told MacNewsWorld. "Browsing to an infected site or logging onto a fictitious WiFi site requires user interaction. Such exposure is typical of a laptop or any portable device that allows access to the Internet."

Smartphones hold more than enough personal data that is of interest to hackers. As for the iPhone specifically, it has now been proven that it can act as a physical vector.

"Having control over a device that allows the sending of spam is quite powerful," Coursen remarked. Though common sense precautions could alleviate many of the risks, he has his doubts that any will be quickly adopted en masse.

"The ISE gives several best-practice suggestions, all of which will work perfectly to avoid the exploits they have described in their paper," Coursen said. "Unfortunately, the suggestions mirror those given to PC users for many years -- yet we still see PC users falling victim now and again."

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Firefox User on Danger

Software engineers at Mozilla are working on a fix for another protocol handing issue affecting the company’s flagship Firefox browser. The flaw originally reported in February 2007 and independently discovered by Petko D. Petkov, turns a little-used Firefox feature into a security risk that could lead to cross-site scripting attacks.

Explains:
The problem is that the “jar:” protocol handler does not validate the MIME type of the contents of an archive, which are then executed in the context of the site hosting the archive. This can be exploited to conduct cross-site scripting attacks on sites that allow a user to upload certain files (e.g. .zip, .png, .doc, .odt, .txt).

The “jar:” protocol is designed to extract content from compressed files. A vulnerability note from US-CERT suggests there may code execution attack scenario: This vulnerability may allow an attacker to execute cross-site scripting attacks on sites that allow users to upload pictures, archives or other files. If the user opens the malicious URI with a Firefox Addon, an attacker might be able to execute arbitrary code. The bug has been confirmed in fully patched versions of the open-source browser. In the absense of a patch, Firefox users should avoid follow untrusted “jar:” links on suspicious Web sites.

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