Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there.

jQuery 1.7 is ready for download!

Google hopes to upset JavaScript's dominance by introducing a new language, Dart. Dart is designed to be simpler, more familiar, and faster than JavaScript, and Google one day wants to see it everywhere: in the browser, on the server, and maybe even on the smartphone. Those are big ambitions, but before we take a look at Dart and at Google's plans for it, it's worth taking a closer look at JavaScript itself. Why exactly doesn't Google like it?

I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know what keys are pressed when writing with different programming languages.

Starting today, you might begin noticing that things look a little different across Google products. We’re working on a project to bring you a new and improved Google experience, and over the next few months, you’ll continue to see more updates to our look and feel. Even our classic homepage is getting a bit of a makeover.

In the tug of war between Apple and publishers over digital media, the balance of power shifted a bit this week to the side of the publishers.

On Monday, in an unannounced change, Apple did an about-face on controversial rules that required publishers who sold content or subscriptions in iPhone and iPad apps to offer them through the iTunes App Store, with Apple taking a 30 percent cut. It revised the rules to give magazine, newspaper, music and video publishers more freedom to sell their content directly without going through iTunes.

Yep, we're getting some Kinect SDK details now -- Microsoft says you'll be able to write Kinect apps for PC in Visual Basic, C#, and C++, and they're showing off basic coding now... with just a few minutes of work in Visual Studio, they had a program that could draw lines using the wave of a hand.

Over at Microsoft’s MIX Developer Conference in sunny Las Vegas, Microsoft has demoed a new preview build of Internet Explorer 10 (which you too can take for a spin, if you feel so inclined), and also dropped a little premature Easter egg – the build of IE10, and the underlying Windows OS, were both running on a 1GHz ARM chip. Sneaky.

Last week we shipped Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio Express Tools.

In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, SP1 includes a number of feature enhancements. This includes improved local help support, IntelliTrace support for 64-bit applications and SharePoint, built-in Silverlight 4 Tooling support in the box, unit testing support when targeting .NET 3.5, a new performance wizard for Silverlight, IIS Express and SQL CE Tooling support for web projects, HTML5 Intellisense for ASP.NET, and more.

This is the newest Redis stable release. Redis 2.2 is production ready and provides big benefits compared to 2.0 both in terms of performances, memory usage and functionality. To check what is new in Redis 2.2 please read the Release Notes.