ORLANDO - During a TechEd demonstration of arcade game development using XNA Game Studio Express for novices to the genre, Microsoft Game Technology Group community program manager David Weller (whose online handle is "LetsKillDave") stated his company is exploring the possibility of assembling an online community of XNA game developers, not only for sharing with but also for marketing and selling their works to one another.

If Microsoft goes ahead with this project, Weller said, it may have to be separate from Xbox Live Arcade, which showcases downloadable works from Microsoft and its selected partners.

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Amnesty International issued a warning Wednesday saying Internet freedoms were slowly being curtailed, likening the problem to a 'virus' spreading throughout the world.

Whereas only a handful of countries were initially censoring speech on the Internet, recently those numbers have begun to grow. Additionally, Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are being blamed for not taking an active role in preventing censorship.

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Roaming rates in the EU are set to drop as the bloc agreed to move toward placing caps on what carriers can charge to traveling consumers, despite the protests of the wireless industry.

The roaming caps take effect at the end of this month, with consumers likely seeing the first benefits beginning in August.

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ORLANDO - Perhaps the closest thing to a rock star you find at a technology conference is a guy whose talks are so good, that the same attendees will attend their encore performances. If anyone makes a list of three "rock stars" at TechEd, one of them would have to be Mark Russinovich, the former SysInternals security engineer, now a Technical Fellow with Microsoft.

Russinovich's "Kernel Changes" talks are among the "must see" items on attendees' schedules, and is often the only place where you can find them walking up to the podium to shake the presenter's hand and introduce themselves...before the session begins. Each time, Russinovich mixes the talk up a bit. This time around, he used virtual XP and Vista sessions to demonstrate an interesting new set of priorities on the part of the operating system, as provided by Multimedia Class Scheduler Service.

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Microsoft has released version 6.1 of the Windows Mobile Device Center, which most notably adds support for the Redmond company's newest Windows Mobile 6 platform. The update also enables a PC to access the Internet over a connected phone.

Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 only works with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, and Microsoft Office is required to synchronize contacts and calendar items. The software does not currently support syncing Windows Calendar and Contacts items. Download WMDC 6.1 from FileForum.

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Best Buy finds itself in the embarrassing position of having to explain its lawyer's conduct after he admitted to falsifying documents in a class-action lawsuit against the company.

The suit alleges that the electronics retailer was signing up customers for MSN Internet service without their consent between 1999 and 2003, which resulted in credit card charges the consumer did not authorize. Best Buy received a cut for each customer it registered.

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Dell is rumored to be exiting the HDTV business by the end of this month, a little under four years after it first entered the market to diversify its product portfolio, according to Taiwanese business newspaper Economic Daily. While the company only sells HDTVs in the US and Japan, it was not immediately clear whether the decision was part of the continuing reorganization of the company, or due to poor sales.

The Texas-based electronics maker has pulled out of other sectors in the past, including the music player business. The paper seems to indicate that founder and CEO Michael Dell played a large part in the decision. He returned to the company he founded amid declining revenues and falling market share earlier this year. Since then, the company has begun to focus on its core product: personal computers. Dell had no comment.

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In an attempt to quell increasing criticism over the nation's patent system, the Bush Administration is looking to make changes to require more specific information, and allow the public to comment.

In an interview with the New York Times, US Patent Office director Jon Dudas said that the responsibility for better quality patents should be shared by all, and he planned to address Congress about the issue starting Thursday.

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Microsoft said Thursday that it had reached a cross-licensing agreement with South Korean electronics manufacturer LG, which follows a similar construct to a deal with Novell reached last November.

Through the agreement, LG is permitted to use Microsoft's patents in its products, including those used in Linux devices. In turn, Microsoft has access to LG's patents, including those owned by business solutions provider MicroConnect Group.

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ORLANDO - During an early morning session on Thursday, Microsoft program manager Chung Webster introduced developers to some of the basic concepts of building Silverlight-capable Web applications, including the creation of customizable video controls. The tools Webster used were the Beta 1 edition of Visual Studio 2008, the current beta of Expression Blend 2, and the Silverlight Alpha 1.1 version which uses Web services and C#.

What Webster was implying - and many in the crowd knew he was doing so - was that there is indeed a payoff to be gained from developing Silverlight apps using the strongly-typed C# language. One is the ability to utilize Web services through JSON - not yet SOAP, he said, although Microsoft is currently working with the W3C to make that happen. Another is the ability to use Expression Blend to tinker with the skin of the video control, producing a new set of XAML framework code that can be imported into the project.

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ORLANDO - We've passed the midway point here of this week-long affair, and we're noticing the effect that the more practical, toned down, brass-tacks Microsoft -- without a glistening new operating system hovering twelve months into the future -- is having on attendees. It's a mixed bag, actually. While I happen to like the difference, I've noticed my feelings haven't been shared by everyone here - the presenters, the press, the developers, or the administrators.

Though I've said this before, it continues to amaze me how the type and level of information that, just 30 years ago, would have had to have been taught in colleges, is being presented by one company during the course of one week.

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ORLANDO - Every so often, new products or tools from Microsoft that aren't always "front burner" projects have to be re-announced...and sometimes, even some big news doesn't find a proper place in the cycle. (We've been tripped up by this before ourselves.) This afternoon at TechEd, Microsoft architect evangelist "Chef" David Aiken (complete with white uniform) demonstrated a component called Visual Studio Management Model Designer. He described it as an essential component of .NET Framework 3.0 development, and it is downloadable from Microsoft's CodePlex, though it is probably as official a .NET component at this point as PowerShell was a component of Longhorn as of last year.

The concept of this component is to enable developers to automatically generate code that enables the reporting of their own health and status, based on standards in the midst of being set for Windows. Within a few minutes, applications become capable of producing their own text logs - an essential part of development that is often missed for the sake of compressing the schedule.

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For a video game legend, Wednesday's release of "Pac Man Championship Edition" for Xbox 360 will mark the end of a nearly three-decade career for one of gaming's most illustrious developers.

Toru Iwatani, now 52, will retire from Namco -- the company that helped propel his game to worldwide acclaim -- and turn his focus to mentoring the next generation of developers by teaching at Tokyo Polytechnic University.

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Ahead of Apple's yearly developer conference, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz confirmed Wednesday that the next version of Mac OS X -- code-named Leopard and due in October -- will feature Sun's ZFS file system instead of Apple's HFS+ used previously.

The change to ZFS will bring numerous improvements, including checksums to protect data integrity and the ability to abstract storage space from physical drives using a virtual layer, making it easier to add space. ZFS snapshots also improve backup capabilities, and as a 128-bit file system, potential disk size is virtually unlimited. In addition, built-in compression increases performance by 2-3x, according to Sun.

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Adobe on Tuesday released the first major update to both Acrobat and Reader 8.0, adding support for Windows Vista and remote printing capabilities through a partnership with FedEx Kinko's. Version 8.1 (download from FileForum) also brings integration with Microsoft Office 2007.

Acrobat users can now export Office documents to PDF files by right clicking, as well as preview multi-page PDF files from without Outlook 2007. Adobe has additionally added Flash movie playback for Mac users, removing the need to use QuickTime. The new "Send to FedEx Kinko's" toolbar button quickly sends a document to the company's remote printing service, primarily designed for business users when traveling.

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