ANKUR JAIN

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference is expected to be a coming out party of sorts for the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas.

Primary among the new features in and new direction for Orcas will be advances in how the toolset handles data, sources said. Sources said “The future ‘Orcas’ release of Visual Studio aims to unify the programming models through integrated query capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative API for manipulating and querying XML.”

As both its PDC and the launch of its Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 products loom in the next few months, Microsoft is working on delivering technology to eager users, prepping to RTM VS 2005, deliver a release candidate of the technology and provide a third beta version of a key component. Microsoft will officially launch both Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 on Nov. 7 in San Francisco.

Link

A federal judge on Monday ordered distributors of the popular file-swapping program Kazaa to alter the software, which millions have downloaded, so it can no longer be used for music piracy.

Hailed as a victory by the recording industry that brought the suit, the decision has implications well beyond Australia, where Kazaa executives are based, because Kazaa’s users span the globe.

The ruling released late Sunday night held liable Sharman Networks, the Sydney-based company that has owned Kazaa since early 2002, as well as its chief executive, Nikki Hemming. The Sydney federal judge also found that a Sharman partner, Altnet, violated Australian copyright law. The ruling applied to Altnet’s parent company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, and its chief executive, Kevin Bermeister. Legal scholars said the decision may ultimately lead to the demise of Kazaa, just as a similar injunction by a San Francisco federal judge in July 2000 hastened the death of Napster, the pioneering file-swapping service.

It gave Kazaa two months to include filters to prevent the trading of copyrighted music and tossed out record industry claims of contravention of the Trade Practices Act and conspiracy.

Ruling Text

Links

SAP, Europe’s biggest software maker is focussing on Banking Sector as one of the cores areas for expansion, SAP head Henning Kagermann told Handelsblatt. “We see a lot of opportunity for growth — mostly organic but we will make fill-in acquisitions if we need to buy in certain expertise,” Kagermann told the Financial Times.

The market for SAP has the potential of “around 9 billion euros per annum” for SAP according to Kagermann. SAP currently has a market share of less than ten percent in the banking sector.

The modernization of some 4500 banking systems, the paper writes, will cost some 100 billion euros according to the extrapolations of experts. And the market experts at Forrester Research say that less than half of this has already been done.