Microsoft Flow, a service that lets you plumb together various cloud-based services to construct workflows, and PowerApps, a tool to enable non-developers to build data-driven business apps, are both out of beta and in production today.
Microsoft said Tuesday that it will issue a fix next week for a Windows vulnerability it says is being exploited by hackers linked to Russia's government.
The company said in a blog post that it would release the fix November 8 as part of its normal patch cycle, adding that a well-known hacking group was already using the newly discovered flaw in a spearphishing campaign. The bug, which was publicly revealed by Google on Monday, can be used to bypass the security in the Windows32K system.
A new Surface Book is headed to retail shelves. It looks just like the original model from last year, but it has an updated processor and a whole lot more battery life.
According to Panos Panay, who runs Microsoft’s Surface division, improving the Surface Book was no easy task. People already love the debut model, with its detachable 13.5-inch screen, 12-hour battery, and chippy performance. In fact, Panay says the Surface Book has a higher level of customer satisfaction than any other portable PC in the Windows universe, and even the MacBook.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Office Corporate Vice President Kirk Koenigsbauer will discuss "the changing nature of collaboration and how we can empower every team to achieve more," according to the company. There will also be unnamed "special guests" at the event.
The invitation to the two-hour event that day doesn't spell out the specifics of what will be discussed beyond team collaboration. It ends with "How can we empower every team to achieve more?"
Microsoft's P language, for asynchronous event-driven programming and the IoT (internet of things), has been open-sourced.
Geared for embedded systems, device drivers, and distributed services, P is a domain-specific language the compiles to and interoperates with C, which itself has been commonly leveraged in embedded systems and the IoT. "The goal of P is to provide language primitives to succinctly and precisely capture protocols that are inherent to communication among components," said Ethan Jackson and Shaz Qadeer of Microsoft, in a tutorial on the language.
Microsoft created a new ventures arm just over four months ago. As of October 4, Microsoft Ventures has invested in 13 companies, officials said today.
Microsoft and the Series A to Series D startups in which it has invested to date are not disclosing the amount Microsoft is investing in each of the companies in its portfolio. But Microsoft has created a new Microsoft ventures site listing the companies it is backing.
A couple of decades ago, Microsoft was the kaiju of network computing. First came MS-DOS, and Windows soon followed. Each simply took over business desktops. Before Novell knew what hit it, Windows was then infused with the DNA of OS/2 and became Windows NT and in turn NT Server. Novell had dominated the early PC networking market, but by the end of the 1990s the company was a shadow of its former self.
Microsoft this week at its Ignite 2016 conference in Atlanta released details of a new cloud-based service for rooting out software bugs.
The so-called Project Springfield tool is a fuzzing service that the software giant has been testing with some customers as well as in-house. Fuzzing is a form of testing that sends random inputs to software programs to spot security holes.
testing looks for vulnerabilities that could open the door for bad actors to launch malicious attacks or simply crash the system, causing delays and other problems.
Microsoft has announced that the next major update to Windows 10 will run its Edge browser in a lightweight virtual machine. Running the update in a virtual machine will make exploiting the browser and attacking the operating system or compromising user data more challenging.
At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for cloud and enterprise, explained that the company wants IT professionals to feel empowered and digitally transform their organizations. Accordingly, Microsoft is focusing on three areas to do this: security, intelligence, and the cloud.
