Introducing .NET Framework 4.5

“Last week at the BUILD conference, we had the pleasure of announcing the next version of the .NET Framework and releasing a developer preview at the same time. We have so many new things in .NET 4.5 to discuss with our developer community – we’re excited to have this opportunity to begin a discussion about each of them.”

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Samsung Seeks Dutch Ban on Apple Smartphones, Tablets

“Samsung made comments early Friday about going on the offensive with its ongoing patent dispute with Apple, and it appears to be putting its money (and its lawyers) where its mouth is. The Korean company just filed a complaint with The Hague, seeking a ban on all sales of Apple’s smartphones and tablets due to alleged infringement of four of its wireless mobile technology patents. Dutch site Webwereld.nl has the details of the new complaint filed with The Hague, which relates specifically to 3G mobile networking technologies, as well as technologies governing the transfer rate of data to mobile devices over a cellular network. Samsung’s complaint covers Apple itself, as well as five other private companies that manage Apple’s sales and distribution channels in the Netherlands.” I’ll be following the Twitter feeds from The Hague closely coming Monday when the meeting about possible FRAND licensing takes place. Let’s hope Samsung manages to pull an injunction out of all this.

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Samsung v. Apple: FRAND Hearing in The Netherlands

So, the hearing about the supposed FRAND status of the three 3G patents Samsung is asserting against Apple in The Netherlands is under way. Samsung is currently pleading, and they claim that Apple has wilfully and systematically infringed these patents. They further state that Apple has refused to license the patents since the introduction of the iPhone 3G, even though Samsung offered licenses. As usual, WebWereld’s Andreas Udo de Haes is covering the proceeding live on Twitter (in English). Update: Samsung offered two FRAND license options (per-patent and as a package deal). Apple declined. Apple also refused to sign an NDA, delaying negotiations (all according to Samsung, of course). Update II: Apple retort: we only buy chips from Intel, and they have a license. Second, Apple claims Samsung didn’t demand a license until 2010. Update III: Massive Apple fail: lawyer reveals the percentage Samsung is demanding for its patents – this is highly confidential information. Update IV: If Apple can convince the judge of this one… Ouch!

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Gtk+ 3.2 Released

The latest version of GTk+, version 3.2, has been released. While this new release contains many smaller, less invasive changes, it also has experimental support for two very important new features. First, the ability to run Gtk+ applications inside a browser using HTML5. Second, initial support for the Wayland display server.

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MySQL.com Hacked to Serve Malware

Well, this is embarrassing. MySQL.com has been hacked (fixed by now), and was turned into a platform serving malware to unsuspecting visitors. The criminals did this by injecting a script which redirected visitors to a website which uses the BlackHole exploit pack, which probes the browser used and serves up an appropriate exploit. Computer security blogger Brian Krebs saw root access to MySQL.com being offered for $3000 only a few days ago.

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Mozilla Firefox 7.0 Released

Mozilla has released Firefox 7. Unlike releases of Firefox 5 and Firefox 6 which were relatively minor upgrades to the browser, Firefox 7 includes a number of significant improvements, most important of which is probably the drastically reduced memory usage.

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Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Released

Starting today, Microsoft is pushing out the first major update to its Windows Phone operating system, to 98% of Windows Phone users (the other two will just have to wait). It’s loaded with changes and improvement, and this time around, the rollout process appears to be pretty smooth. Another nice touch: Mango beta users (right here) will get the update to the final version like everybody else – you won’t have to downgrade to NoDo as previously stated.

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Microsoft, Samsung Sign Patent Licensing Agreement

This is the biggest one yet. Microsoft’s professional extortion campaign – the third side of the same triangle it shares with Apple and Oracle – has finally hit Samsung. The two companies have signed a patent licensing agreement concerning Samsung’s use of Android, in which a rumoured fee of $15 (!) per device will flow from Seoul to Redmond. Not entirely coincidentally, that’s about the price of a Windows Phone 7 license.

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How Adobe Flash Lost Its Way

Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister. ‘The bigger picture is that major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps. That’s long been the case on iOS and other smartphone platforms, and now it’s starting to be the norm on Windows. Each step of the way, Adobe is getting left behind,’ McAllister writes. ‘Perhaps Adobe’s biggest problem, however, is that it’s something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn’t make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?’

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GNOME 3.2 Released

GNOME 3.2 has been released. It’s basically a collection of relatively small updates, improvements, and bug fixes. As whole, it’s a pretty big upgrade, but there’s nothing really that stands out to me – probably because I don’t use GNOME3 myself so I really have no idea where it’s lacking (if at all). Any GNOME3 users care to shine a light on this one?

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