Microsoft has solidified the time frame for the release of its Team Foundation Server and will be releasing a preview of another key piece of Visual Studio technology, a company executive said at the VSLive conference here. In a keynote address, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of developer tools at Microsoft, said that in the next week or so, Microsoft will "make the first CTP [Community Technology Preview] drop of Visual Studio Tools for Applications." Somasegar also said the TFS (Team Foundation Server) component of VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) will reach release candidate status by the end of this week and will reach RTM (release to manufacturing) status in March.

Microsoft and European Commission officials planned a meeting in Redmond on Monday as the software giant tried to avoid the possibility of a daily fine of 2 million euros, a Microsoft official said. The European Commission has threatened the fines (about $2.4 million a day) against Microsoft for failing to comply with a ruling made nearly two years ago over antitrust violations. The Microsoft spokesman said company officials would present a proposal to license inspection of some of the company’s source code, but a European Commission spokesman said it was by no means clear the offer was relevant.

Advertising software maker 180solutions has dropped its lawsuit against Zone Labs, a move that comes two months after it accused the Web security company of unfairly classifying its software as "high risk." Two months ago, 180solutions filed suit to try to force Zone Labs to change the classification and the wording of its warnings. Zone Labs sent prompts that told some customers that 180solution’s software monitored their keystrokes and mouse movements. Sean Sundwall, a spokesman for 180solutions, suggested that the lawsuit served its purpose, as Zone Labs has since altered the classification of 180solutions’ software from "high risk" to "suspicious."

Microsoft has begun emailing its corporate customers worldwide, letting them know that they may need to start using a different version of Office as a result of a recent legal setback. The software maker said Monday that it has been forced to issue new versions of Office 2003 and Office XP, which change the way Microsoft’s Access database interacts with its Excel spreadsheet. The move follows a verdict last year by a jury in Orange County, Calif., which found in favor of a patent claim by Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. Microsoft was ordered to pay $8.9 million in damages for infringing Amado’s 1994 patent. That award covered sales of Office between March 1997 and July 2003.

Google will face off against the United States government in a federal court on Feb. 22 over whether the Department of Justice can force the search giant to turn over records from its database. The conflict stems from a subpoena demanding information on searches, which Google refused to comply with, citing privacy concerns. The government is attempting to gather data to support a child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. Under that law, the government could punish pornography sites that made content easily accessible to minors. However, Google contends that supplying the information would violate the privacy of its users, as well as divulge trade secrets that could help its competitors.

A shake-up in the management and responsibilities of some of Microsoft’s key Windows client and server team executives could be in the cards when Jim Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft’s Platforms, Products and Services division, retires at the end of the year. While Allchin stressed in an interview with eWEEK that no decisions had been made in this regard, he did float the possibility of some significant staff changes at that time.

Customers and partners who’ve been holding their breath waiting for Beta 2 of Windows Vista before getting serious about testing Microsoft’s next-generation operating system can exhale. There will be no single, catch-all Beta 2 of Vista, according to Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft’s Platform Products & Services Division. Instead, Microsoft is planning to rely increasingly on CTP (Community Technology Preview) builds to get its feedback from Windows testers.

A federal judge Friday sentenced a convicted hacker known as "illwill" to two years in prison for selling the code, or software blueprint, for Microsoft Corp.’s closely guarded Windows programs. William Genovese, Jr., 29, pleaded guilty last year to one count of unlawful distribution of trade secrets for putting Microsoft’s source code for its Windows 4.0 and Windows 2000 programs on his Web site and selling it. The plea agreement called for a sentence ranging from 10 months to 30 months in federal prison.

Cybercriminals in the United Kingdom face the prospect of tougher sentences and modernized laws to ensure a greater number of convictions for computer-related crimes. A Police and Justice Bill introduced by the Home Office includes sections relating specifically to the modernization of U.K. law to better deal with those who have committed Internet-related crime. Although the bill recommends reform for general areas of U.K. law enforcement–ranging from dealing with school truants to greater stop-and-search powers for police–the fifth section, entitled "Miscellaneous," includes important revisions to the current Computer Misuse Act (CMA), including a suggested maximum 10-year prison sentence for individuals maliciously impairing the operation of a computer, or hindering or preventing the access to programs or data.

Microsoft has released a revision of the Simple Sharing Extensions guideline it first detailed in November, which is aimed at improving the way applications such as calendaring tools allocate data updates to help process RSS feeds more effectively. In a posting to Microsoft’s RSS Team blog, Jack Ozzie, vice president of development at the software giant’s Groove Networks subsidiary, said the firm has made significant progress with the SSE specification.