Microsoft is trying to foster more interest in embedded software, encouraging amateur developers to experiment with programmable components in devices from toasters to televisions.

The "Spark Your Imagination" developer program for hobbyists and academics was announced at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose. In a joint agreement between Microsoft and hardware makers, the company said it is trying to boost interest in noncommercial software development around Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 and Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition.

In this all-new book review shootout, we put four books to the test. Read on to learn how Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom by Ben Hammersley, Content Syndication with RSS by Ben Hammersley, Beginning RSS and Atom Programming by Danny Ayers and Andrew Watt, and Hacking RSS and Atom by Leslie M. Orchard stand up to our editorial review.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Vendors and enterprises alike are faced with a new email threat landscape, where spam is increasingly laced with malware and targeted attacks have become more common. IT pros have a lot to consider–both in terms of technology and best practices–as they deal with the growing email security challenge. How do you take control of email–ruthlessly or humanely?

In the latest death knell for Outlook Express, Microsoft announced Thursday that it will turn off access to its Web-based Hotmail service from the desktop email software at the end of June.

Outlook Express users who want to continue to access their Hotmail accounts offline after June 30 are being encouraged by Microsoft to download its free Windows Live Mail software.

Users will still be able to use Outlook, the big brother of Outlook Express, to read their Hotmail messages offline, but first they may have to upgrade their Outlook Connector synchronization software, according to information posted online by Scott Hammer, a Microsoft email support manager.

Microsoft is set to start testing privately a consumer Software + Service bundle code-named "Albany," an all-in-one bundle of Office Home and Student, Windows Live OneCare, Office Live Workspace and various Windows Live services.

Microsoft began signing up testers for Albany in March. Earlier this week, Microsoft sent a note to potential Albany testers, informing them that they would hear soon whether they’d been selected to participate and, once they had gotten the nod, to download the Albany bits from Microsoft’s private Connect site. On April 18, Microsoft acknowledged that the Albany beta was about to begin.

The White House isn’t the only government office bungling its document management responsibilities, according to a new report that claims there is an "appalling lack of progress" in moving federal agencies to electronic record keeping.

Instead, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) said April 16 that the government is clinging to "outdated, inefficient and ineffective paper record keeping systems" when readily available off-the-shelf software is available for the task.

With the recent release of WordPress 2.5, the popular open-source blogging application has greatly improved its already good administration and blogging management interface and has made it much easier for bloggers to add widgets and do extensive customizations of their blogs. That’s right, the best blogging platform just got better.

Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft’s mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.

"Microsoft fundamentally, as a whole, has changed dramatically as a result of open source," Ozzie said. "As people have been using it more and more, the nature of interoperability between our systems and others has increased." That means that from the very start when Microsoft begins developing new products, it considers what components it will want to open up to outside developers, he said.

As PC users clamor for Microsoft to continue to support Windows XP, company CEOSteve Ballmer called the Vista OS "a work in progress" at an annual Seattle event. "It’s a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from. You never want to let five years go between releases," he said.

While Microsoft recently extended the date when the XP software will be available for low-cost PCs, it doesn’t plan to listen to some other complaints, including that Vista is too big. "Vista is bigger than XP and it’s gonna stay bigger than XP," Ballmer said. "We have to make sure it doesn’t get bigger still."

Security vendor PC Tools has questioned the usefulness of the threat lists used by many security companies to warn of current malware attacks.

The problem, according to the Australian company, is that the lists–which are now regularly issued by almost every security software company–measure volumes rather than the underlying danger of a particular type of malware.