Storm Source Software has released version 1.4 of its GPS.NET global positioning SDK which is now integratable with all versions of Visual Studio .NET and .NET SDK versions 1.0 and 1.1, and has enhanced wireless support including Bluetooth. Other new features include support for waypoints, UTM coordinates and Lat/Long-UTM conversions, minimum travel speed and time, and support for Garmin protocol. The company claims that a number of issues like variations between the way devices handle data, need for accuracy analysis, inbuilt error handling procedures, multiple device compatibility etc. make GPS .NET a much better option than creating a home grown GPS app from scratch. The SDK exposes an object-oriented and event-driven object model with 250+ members, and comes with detailed documentation and examples .

No sooner than Google came up with price range for its IPO, trouble came from an unexpected quarter. A latest variant of MyDoom did what probably no virus has tried before. Instead of ferreting the local or network drives for email addresses, it decided to do it the way everyone else does—fire off queries to web search engines. Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista all took a performance hit. A McAfee researcher categorized the effect as an ‘inadvertent DdoS attack’ as infected machines were prone to send off thousands of queries to search engines to identify active email addresses.

Microsoft has released the first Beta version of its much-anticipated Visual Studio 2005 development environment. The release has been accompanied with what are christened ‘Visual Studio 2005 Express Products’ (also in Beta version). These comprise lightweight tools “for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students who want to build dynamic Windows applications and Web sites.” The six products released in this family are Visual Basic 2005 Express, Visual C# 2005 Express, Visual C++ 2005 Express, Visual J# 2005 Express, Visual Web Dev 2005 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express . These products are easy to install and provide a less complicated UI for beginners. Microsoft believes there are 18 million nonprofessional programmers as against 6 million professional ones. Pricing details for final release are not available yet.

PHP project has released the latest XML "reloaded", performance enhance version of PHP, one of the most popular web scripting language around. The XML support has been redone around the libxml2 library (an originally Gnome based project reputed for its portability and support for a wide range of standards) and a new SimpleXML extension is added for easy access and manipulation of XML as PHP objects. Also, new SOAP module makes PHP Web Services enabled as never before. PHP 5 also includes a new MySQL extension named MySQLi which enables developers to exploit many new features of MySQL. Also, embeddable database engine SQLite has been bundled with the distribution. Low-level socket streams are another new fearure. The new Zend Engine 2.0 brings around a complete overhaul in the manner PHP handles Object. Objects are now handled through references, as they should be in a modern OO language, instead of PHP’s old model where they were handled as primary data types and copied on every assignment. This brings around significant performance enhancement, but also a few worries regarding backward compatibility. However, Andi Gutmans, cofounder of PHP, has ensured the PHP developer community that maximum effort has been put into maintaining backward compatibility and there should be very few issues regarding porting of old websites to the new PHP.