Microsoft

Microsoft's open source push continues as the company has open-sourced its Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools and made them available on GitHub.

Microsoft said today that it has tweaked its support options for customers who want to run the latest Intel Skylake processors on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. Microsoft will extend its specialized support options for a year and offer more updates to those customers when its specialized support period expires.

Nearly one quarter of all the servers running in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service are powered by the open source operating system Linux. But you can’t actually run much Microsoft software on those Linux servers.

That’s about to change. Companies will soon be able to run Microsoft’s database software SQL Server on Linux, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie said in a blog post today.

Or at least part of it. A spokesperson clarified that Microsoft will offer at least SQL Server’s core capabilities. Other components will depends on customer demand and feedback.

In a move that was expected and rumored for a long time, Microsoft is buying tool maker Xamarin.

Scott Guthrie, head of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise business, announced the intent to buy Xamarin on February 24, via a blog post.

The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed by either company. Microsoft officials plan to provide more details about its Xamarin integration plans in the future starting at Build at the end of March.

Jim Hanna has joined Microsoft as the director of data center sustainability, a newly created position.

A new app from Microsoft Garage, a mobile software development unit within the Redmond, Wash., giant that focuses on experimental and small-scale apps, has released a new multitasking keyboard app for Android. Dubbed the Hub Keyboard, the app bundles a handful of tools that reduce the need to switch between apps to complete certain actions, helping users stay focused on the task at hand.

Microsoft is laying off "dozens" more employees associated with its mobile business, according to a February 10 report from the Finnish newspaper Helsigin Sanomat.

The cuts are happening in Finland and heavily targeting those involved in marketing, the report says. (Thanks to @teroalhonen for the HS link.)

Gordon F. Kelly of Forbes is at it again, whipping up a frenzy over Windows 10. This time he claims to have found SHOCKING EVIDENCE that Microsoft's telemetry is collecting STAGGERING amounts of data from Windows 10 users.

Sadly, what Mr. Kelly's post* proves is how very, very little he understands about modern computing or networking. Seriously, his article is pure gibberish, technically. But more than 100,000 people have read it so far, and apparently they believe Mr. Kelly.

I feel sorry for those poor benighted souls.

With its engineers involved in more than 2,000 open source projects, you’d have to agree that open source has more than a foothold at Microsoft these days. Most recently, for example, the browser team made the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers both Edge and Internet Explorer open source, for a very practical reason.

Microsoft has announced its intent to make the Windows 10 upgrade for existing Windows 7 and 8.1 users more widely available. In tandem with this, the company has also, at last, offered a good way of rejecting the upgrade and making the notifications about it go away forever.