tools

The latest member of Microsoft's Visual Studio family is one step closer to a final release.

Microsoft today is releasing the second beta of LightSwitch, a software tool aimed at developers who want to build business applications that run as both native and Web applications.

The new version, which becomes available MSDN subscribers today, and everyone else on Thursday, adds a handful of new features from the previous beta, all aimed at increasing what can be done with the software.

The first is support for publishing applications to directly to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud services platform. This is … Read more

Twitter today told developers explicitly that they should stop making third-party clients, citing repeated privacy policy violations and an inconsistent user experience.

Ryan Sarver, who leads the company's platform team, said in an announcement on the company's developer discussion group that existing third-party clients can continue to operate but they will be held to rigorous standards of privacy and consistency. The micro-messaging company said it now makes the top five Twitter clients (including its Web site) and says 90 percent of its active users use its apps at least once a month.

The key quote is:

Microsoft's and Ford's collaboration on Sync, the in-vehicle communications and entertainment system, is headed across the pond.

Earlier today, Ford CEO Alan Mulally announced the company's plans to bring Sync to its European models. He spoke at this week's CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany.

Ford will begin with the 2012 model of the Focus. Other models that will ship with the technology installed have not been announced yet.

Sync was first introduced by Microsoft and Ford at CES in 2007. The technology is based on Microsoft Auto, the Windows CE-based embedded OS, which is also … Read more

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Doodle-4-Google gets the search giant into more privacy trouble because of the possibility of storing children's Social Security numbers

iPad 2 might get a launch date as early as next week

Amazon Prime customers get Instant Streaming video with over 5,000 titles

China launches an official government search engine with Panguso

Mint.com gets new "Get Out of Debt" tools

Yahoo! Video gets rid of user-generated content, so download your uploads before March 14th

Microsoft today announced 19-year company veteran Satya Nadella will replace Bob Muglia as head of its server and tools business.

Nadella, who had previously headed up research and development for Microsoft's online services division, was also the lead for the company's business solutions team and a lead engineer in its server group. Microsoft says Nadella's new role as president of the server and tools business is to "oversee the overall strategy, engineering, marketing and product development for Microsoft's server, tools and cloud platform efforts."

The news comes a month after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer … Read more

If you've ever uploaded photos to Facebook or other social networking sites, you know that it has some limitations. Of course, they make it easy for you to upload your photos and share it with your friends, but what if you wanted to do some minor edits to remove red eyes, crop images, add special effects, watermarks and more?

I am one of the worst photo sharer amongst my friends because it's just too tedious and time consuming. I have to go edit the image size (Facebook's maximum file size is 15MB, which is great, but some … Read more

Finding App Store apps that aren't featured prominently on the front page generally tends to revert into the proverbial needle-hunt in the haystack. Good news: new search tabs have magically appeared as of this morning, making app-browsing just a little easier.

The new pull-down search categories, as seen above, cover price, rating, platform, release window, and the like. They appear when using the search function, and can help narrow down a wide field of apps (such as, say, "dog apps"). It's a solid first step, but it doesn't help address flaws that are already in … Read more

One of my favorite features in Apple's iOS is the quietly-hidden capability to take screenshots. Back when I was doing deep dives on iPhone apps for stories, the feature was just there, and it worked. Outside of CNET, it let me do things like grab pictures from sites (before that feature was officially added), and put together quick step-by-step how-to guides for friends and family, turning the device into less of a consumptive tool, and into something that would help me get work done without a computer.

But in the past few months of me putting Microsoft's Windows … Read more

After three rounds of betas, Microsoft tomorrow is releasing a finalized version of its Webmatrix Web development software. The software, which was first introduced in July, gives users tools to create and manage Web sites while staying compatible with Microsoft's Visual Studio and SQL Server products.

The company expects a fully-baked version of the software to make it more attractive to first-time users. "The majority of the users are going to be new to this. That's one of the explicit goals here," Brian Goldfarb, the director of developer platform marketing at Microsoft, told CNET in an … Read more