Microsoft said Wednesday it has completed work on its long-delayed Windows Vista operating system and plans to release it to consumers January 30. The announcement means Microsoft is on track to meet its revised release schedule. Jim Allchin, co-president of the Microsoft division that includes Windows, said in a conference call that Windows Vista’s code was released to begin manufacturing copies early Wednesday.

Just a year after releasing its primary tool set for building applications on Windows, Microsoft has announced a set of new technologies aimed at helping developers build next-generation interactive applications for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office System and the Web. In a keynote address at the Visual Studio & .Net Connections conference (also known as DevConnections), Scott Guthrie, general manager of the Developer Division at Microsoft, laid out the new products Microsoft is making available to developers to promote a better development experience on the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system. Windows Vista is expected to be released to manufacturing any day now.

A shortage of information technology graduates from Western universities is leading companies to call on developing countries to meet research demand, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia’s internationally renowned education system became a cheap talent pool for the West. Now dozens of Russian language Web sites offer computer programming jobs in the United States, alongside visa support and language training.

Microsoft has released a security advisory with workarounds for a critical zero-day vulnerability affecting Windows users and warned that malicious hackers are already exploiting the flaw in live attacks. The advisory provides prepatch mitigation for a bug in Microsoft XML Core Services, formerly known as the Microsoft XML Parser, a service that lets users create applications that interoperate with the XML 1.0 standard. The vulnerability is caused by an unspecified error in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX Control and is rated "extremely critical" by security alerts aggregator Secunia.

Microsoft continues to work to integrate dynamic languages into its set of offerings for developers, and is prototyping a method for facilitating data manipulation via dynamic languages. Microsoft officials have said the company has big plans for increased support for dynamic languages, starting with its Python implementation and moving to more dynamic languages. In a session at the DevConnections conference, David Ebbo, an architect on Microsoft’s CLR (Common Language Runtime) dynamic language team, and Jeff King, a program manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, discussed how Microsoft has implemented IronPython on the company’s ASP.NET platform.

Police in Chile arrested four suspected computer hackers for allegedly belonging to a group accused of breaking into thousands of government Web sites around the globe, including NASA’s. The "Byond" team has been under investigation for eight months with the cooperation of authorities in the United States, Israel and several South American countries, police chief Gerardo Raventos said. He said the group infiltrated more than 8,000 sites, including that of the U.S. space agency. "These people did not act seeking money, but just for fun," Raventos said. The four were arrested Monday in the capital of Santiago and the nearby cities of San Bernardo and Rancagua. Prosecutor Mario Schilling said they could be charged with "electronic sabotage" and face prison terms of up to five years.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, at the company’s first European-based Convergence conference that kicked off in Munich Nov. 6, is working hard to show that Microsoft is on top of the tech revolution–at least when it comes to offering its enterprise resource planning technology on demand. During his keynote address on the first day of Convergence, typically an ERP-focused conference held in the United States, Gates announced that the Dynamics suite of applications is going live–as in Microsoft Live, the company’s answer to the on-demand movement. Microsoft’s Live initiative is based on a future where desktop applications are augmented with add-on, online services.

The name Outlook Express will go away when Windows Vista ships. Instead, there’s going to be a free email client called Windows Mail. For a sneak peek at Windows Mail, plus Vista’s Windows Calendar and Windows Contact, read this interesting article.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Last week’s pact between Microsoft and Novell has led to widespread speculation over the long-term impact on the adoption of open-source software. Under the deal, the companies will work on ways to enable Novell’s Linux distribution, Suse, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system to work better together. They also reached a patent truce in which users of the other’s software can’t be sued for infringement, and Microsoft agreed not to sue noncommercial open-source developers. On Monday, Microsoft’s Bill Hilf, general manager for platform strategy, spoke further about the deal with IDG News Service, addressing how Microsoft views its intellectual property relative to Linux.

Microsoft is investigating reports of a vulnerability in a Windows ActiveX control that could allow an attacker to remotely take control of a computer, according to an advisory issued Friday. One security company rated the vulnerability critical, while Microsoft said it allows only limited attacks. The vulnerability, which is not patched yet, affects certain versions of Windows running Microsoft XML Core Services 4.0, a set of tools that allows programmers to use scripting languages to access XML documents.