Today Microsoft is announcing Bing, a new search service, launching in beta in Europe as part of a series of global product enhancements. The new search service, located at www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide by Wednesday 3rd June. Microsoft has designed Bing to help people quickly find the information they need on daily routine searches and in order to accomplish tasks, including making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.

Today Microsoft Corp. has reached a significant milestone with the Release Candidate (RC) of the highly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, now available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader public availability will begin May 5 on the Microsoft Windows 7 site. The RC milestone is a result of feedback from millions of customers and partners around the world. It indicates the operating system is entering the final phases of development and is ready for partners to develop new applications, device drivers and services, and ready for IT pros to evaluate Windows 7 and examine how it will operate in their environment.

At this year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2008), Microsoft® was quite forthcoming with specifics about the future for developers on the Microsoft .NET® platform. In this article, we will take a quick look at some of the upcoming features in the .NET 4.0 Framework, the new Microsoft F#® language, and discuss the long-term vision Microsoft has for the .NET Platform in the years to come.

The .NET Micro Framework version 3.0 was released and announced at the Embedded Systems Conference In Boston on Tuesday, October 28, 2008.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.

Microsoft Corp. today provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).

The Novell-led Mono project this week made the first, though incomplete, public release of Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, a browser plug-in that competes with products such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, JavaFX, and Apple QuickTime.