News of “Windows XP Mode” hit on Friday afternoon more or less simultaneously with Microsoft’s post on The Windows Blog announcing that the RC is looking good for next Thursday. Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, who are hard at work on Wiley’s Windows 7 Secrets book and were briefed on the tech back in March, describe XPM as host-based virtualization, and suggest that this might mean that going forward, client versions of Windows may include a Hyper-V-based hypervisor.

It’s not exactly included in 7, though. XPM (which will consist of that virtual environment and a fully licensed copy of XP with Service Pack 3) will be downloadable for those Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate Editions users who want it. But once it’s installed, it’s notably well-integrated — install an app inside the XP environment and without further ado it’s published to Windows 7 as well. That’s right, XP and Win7 apps running on a single desktop. (This ought to sound familiar to Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization users, but you Virtual PC users have some joy to look forward to. It may also ring a bell with users of Parallels on the Mac.)

Release of XPM is expected to be simultaneous with Windows 7′s release later this year.

www.betanews.com

France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization. It gradually adopted other open source software applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and incrementally migrate to Ubuntu.

At the current stage of the migration, it has adopted Ubuntu on 5,000 workstations. Based on the success of this pilot migration, it plans to move forward and switch a total of 15,000 workstations to Ubuntu by the end of the year. It aims to have the entire organization, and all 90,000 of its workstations, running the Linux distribution by 2015.

A report published by the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory provides some details from a recent presentation given by Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who says that the Gendarmerie has been able to reduced its annual IT budget by 70 percent without having to reduce its capabilities.

Since 2004, he says that the Gendarmerie has saved up to €50 million on licensing and maintenance costs as a result of the migration strategy. He believes that the move from Windows to Ubuntu posed fewer challenges than the organization would have faced if it had updated to Windows Vista.

“Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users,” said Lt. Col. Guimard. “Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

Support for open standards is a key part of the Gendarmerie’s emerging IT policy. Standards-based technologies give it more freedom to choose which vendors it adopts and also makes it easier for the Gendarmerie to interoperate with other government networks. It has found that open source software is better at handling open standards. Linux has also simplified remote maintenance tasks.

Linux has also been adopted by several other government agencies in France. The French National Assembly runs Ubuntu on over 1,000 workstations and the Ministry of Agriculture uses Mandriva Linux.

The success of the Gendarmerie Ubuntu migration reflects several emerging trends in IT. First, it represents the rising influence of community-driven distros which are largely supported internally by the organizations that adopt them. Analysts have noted a growing preference for this approach which can be cheaper than adopting a conventional enterprise distro like Red Hat with annual commercial support contracts.

The Gendarmerie migration also demonstrates the significant cost savings that governments can get from adopting open source software. As the global financial downturn continues to put pressure on budgets, governments are going to increasingly look to open source software as a way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direction from Canada and the UK.

www.arstechnica.com

The software giant said that its new Open XML Document Viewer works within Firefox and can be used on Windows and Linux platforms without needing a local installation of MS Office.

Microsoft said its new Firefox-friendly OXML* viewer would improve translations between formats including “direct interoperability” from OXML to HTML formats.

The company has also made version 2.5 of the OXML/ODF Translator available today as an add-in for MS Office 2003, 2007 and Windows Vista XP. It provides interoperability between the two rival formats, said Microsoft.

There’s also a software development kit (SDK) for Java developers who want to fiddle with OXML documents.

Redmond has been heavily pushing the interoperability envelope over the past 18 months. But its efforts to be seen to be a more open vendor were overshadowed by the contentious ratification of OOXML as an international standard in April this year.

Microsoft has also had the European Commission on its back for much of the year, with the anti-trust arm of the EC carrying out an on-going probe into alleged anti-competitive business practices by the company.

So today’s announcement will be seen – by MS at least – as going some way to placate the firm’s naysayers.

Oh, and Microsoft will undoubtedly be responding to another rival that stole a march on the firm’s inability for users to view OXML docs outside of Office 2007. OpenOffice 3, which was released in October, can already allow users to view OXML documents without needing to buy Office 2007.

“Achieving interoperability between document formats requires the IT community coming together to test implementations and develop tools to promote interoperability over time,” said Microsoft interoperability manger Jean Paoli.

“We’re pleased to see the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) events fill this important role over the past several months and result in real-world tools and solutions that will help vendors meet the interoperability needs of customers.”

Microsoft is a member of the DII working group, which includes rivals such as Novell, Dataviz and QuickOffice. It was formed in March to look at ways of improving interoperability between OXML and competing XML-based doc formats such as the open source OpenDocument Format (ODF).

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) ratified ODF as an international standard last year. In 2007 Microsoft tried and failed to see OOXML given the same status, despite trying to fast-track the process.

It was second time lucky for Redmond in April 2008 when the ISO confirmed that OOXML had indeed been ratified even as bitter protests rattled on throughout the summer months.

www.theregister.co.uk

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/dec08/12-03DIIBrusselsPR.mspx
http://www.codeplex.com/OpenXMLViewer
http://www.codeplex.com/OpenXMLViewer/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=19713

In a software-centric world where we already have many, many languages to program in, from scripting to bytecode compiled languages, to frameworks on top of languages and embedded languages, now Redmond wants to bring ANOTHER language to the table, titled ‘M’ (for Microsoft?).

The new language is to be a part of Microsoft’s new Oslo development and service-oriented strategy, incorporating features from XAML while being textual and domain-specific. M is to be used directly with 2 other components to be released with M along with Visual Studio 2010: Quadrant, a tool for building models visually, and a repository for storing and viewing models in an SQL database.

Microsoft has not said much other than that about the new language, but it will presumably be a compiled .net language (goodbye true native code), and from what Microsoft said, M is to strive to be cross-platform…. with a catch.

By “cross platform”, Microsoft means, “cross platform as long the other platform authors write a backend for the code, and the SQL database MUST be hosted on MS SQL, a proprietary Microsoft Windows service”. It makes perfect sense for being cross platform, if you are Microsoft and trying to purchase many copies of Windows (therefore generating revenue, and presumably the version is Vista or win2k8 since XP is out).

Another source says the language is actually their ‘D’ language (and no, Microsoft did not originally invent D either), only revamped to fit into their new Oslo modeling strategy and renamed to a further letter down the alphabet to attract new interest in an old product. While this may be mostly true, D, which was never really promoted as a .net compilable language (it just kinda disappeared) had many flaws and never really caught on although some were enthusiastic about it (just like Bill Gates said we would write code for OS/2 for the next 10 years after its release).

The fundamentals and principals of the language are attractive, especially for OOP, but its ties to MS SQL and .net would only really make it attractive to Windows-specific applications, although its integration with ASP.net is unclear at this point. The mono project does a descent job of allowing .net code to run on non-windows platforms, and if M adheres to the same standards then after a given time M-written applications will be penguin-friendly as well if Microsoft can get around the MS SQL dependency.

Time will only tell how many will actually use the language outright before Microsoft finds a way to force programmers to use it, most likely by dropping support for some features in all languages except M to promote its usage. For now it appears that the only “non-visual” C/C++ code encouraged for usage with Windows by Microsoft is in fact Windows itself, given the fact that Microsoft’s programmers are on Microsoft’s payroll. But if all newbie programmers learn these new languages, who will manage the billions of lines of C and C++ we currently use in the future, unless it is implied to be completely be rewritten? I’m sure the folks from the original Bell labs team would be interested in the answer to these questions as well.

www.thecoffeedesk.com