Microsoft will hand out three developer toolsets on Tuesday, in hopes of spurring programmers to create applications for Windows Vista, Office 2007 and the Web.

The software giant is hosting two developer conferences--Microsoft TechEd Europe in Barcelona and VSConnections in Las Vegas--where it plans to announce the release of the tools.

One announcement will be for .Net Framework 3.0, the software 'plumbing' needed to run and build Windows Vista applications. The software, available as a plug-in to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005, lets developers write applications that use Vista's new user interface, security features and communications system.

Microsoft is expected to make Windows Vista available to business customers at the end of this month and to consumers in January of next year.

The second launch is for a plug-in to Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office, for building applications that use Excel, Word and other programs in Office 2007. The update is expected to be in broad release early next year.

This add-on will enable developers to write applications that take advantage of the new 'ribbon' user interface and other features with Office 2007, said Brian Goldfarb, a group product manager at Microsoft.

Microsoft is also scheduled to release the second beta to its Web development tool kit, called ASP.Net AJAX and code-named Atlas.

This test version is expected to be generally available around the end of this year, when it will be offered as a free download under one of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses, Goldfarb said.

Time and again, people have come up with innovative ideas. Sometimes these ideas are powerful enough to cause a revolution, such as the mobile computing revolution. In this article, we will look at how the desire to show in practice that current mobile phones have enough processing power to run a full-fledged web server led to the birth of a unique project in 2004. This project aimed at running a fully-functional web server on a mobile phone and should be accessible from any browser over the Internet.

An MIT researcher has a vision: Four hundred huge offshore wind turbines are providing onshore customers with enough electricity to power several hundred thousand homes, and nobody standing onshore can see them. The trick? The wind turbines are floating on platforms a hundred miles out to sea, where the winds are strong and steady

What really excites Schmidt, and where he's putting some of brainy Google's best minds, are the smallest things of all: virtual golf games, flight simulators and hotties in a security box.

The US giant is gobbling up small developers as it focuses on cellphone Web services, writes Alan Sipress
When Google quietly bought a software shop called Android a year ago, neither the suitor nor the quarry revealed much about the terms of their attraction.

Most PC users are all too familiar with Ctrl + Alt + Del, but how many of us know the origins of this button combination?

Toshiba will soon put its second generation of HD DVD players on sale in the U.S.

The Tokyo company kicked off the high-definition movie battle in the U.S. earlier this year when it put its first generation of HD DVD players on sale.

They were soon followed by a machine from Samsung Electronics for the rival Blu-ray Disc format.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in the film glides through security in minutes, checked by a full-body X-ray with shoes on and carry-on in hand. He doesn't step through a bulky X-ray machine, he doesn't take off his belt, he doesn't even have to empty his pockets of loose change.

In 2006, that's not so far from reality.

Yotam Margalit, the director of marketing for General Electric's homeland security group, offered details Wednesday of a project intended to modernize security at San Francisco International Airport

California's attorney general could file criminal charges within a week in the boardroom spying scandal at Hewlett-Packard Co., a spokesman said Wednesday, and experts say the company's top brass and third-party detectives are all possible targets.

Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, did not say who would be charged or what the charges would be. He also emphasized that it may take longer for the detailed investigation to produce charges

Here's a video of two Zunes engaging in some safe exchange of content. First you pick a song, hit share, and a list pops up of the Zunes nearby. Not too speedy, but decent enough so that you're not sitting there twiddling your thumbs