ReadWriteWeb

Microsoft used the occaision of the St. Louis Day of .Net conference to demonstrate a new version of its Visual Studio geared for non-professional programmers. Called Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011, the tool is available as a free add-on and download for existing Visual Studio Pro (or better) customers, or as a standalone package that will sell for an introductory price of $200. You can download a free 90-day trial at the link above.

Google's lashing out at competitors over patent claims has set off another round of discussion about the role and value of software patents (be sure to read Microsoft's response). It's an issue that lawyers and technologists have been discussing for a long time.

The nuances of such a debate are beyond the capabilities of a simple poll such as this one, but just to gauge the community's response to the issue, we're asking you: is it time to end software patents?

The nginx Web server and reverse proxy server has already posted impressive numbers in the Web server market as a small open source project. Now the project's creator, Igor Sysoev, is taking a run at turning nginx into a company. Will nginx shake things up?

Apache rules the roost when it comes to Web server market share, no doubt. But nginx is coming up fast. For those not familiar, nginx is a high performance Web server and reverse proxy server. It got its start as a project for Russian search engine Rambler (where Sysoev was previously employed), with an initial release in 2004.

In a surprisingly candid move, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond published an opinionated post on the company's official blog contending that its Android mobile operating system is under "attack" from a "hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents."

Drummond's post is in reference to last week's sale of Nortel's patent portfolio to a consortium of Google's competitors. The purchase of these patents threatens Android's dominant share of the smartphone OS market by making the operating system more expensive for phone manufacturers to license.

Enterprises have long customized Microsoft Office, using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). Now it appears those technologies will have to make room for HTML5 and JavaScript. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports on a new job listing from Microsoft that indicates that the company is adding JavaScript and HTML5 support to Office.

The good news for legacy shops is that, as Foley says, there is no indication that Microsoft is dropping support for VBA and VSTO. But this development advances JavaScript's supremacy in the development world and demonstrates Microsoft's seriousness about the language.

It's been a busy time for the Windows Phone team at Microsoft. On Tuesday, the company announced that the highly-anticipated update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system known as "Mango" had been released to manufacturing. This is an important milestone indicating the final phase of of Mango's development.

Now developers are being offered an updated SDK to complement release: the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 "Beta 2 Refresh." And they can also download a new pre-release build of Mango onto their retail devices, too, says Microsoft.

This week Microsoft Research released Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime, a developer preview of a new product designed for working with large distributed data sets. Microsoft also has a big data analytics platform that uses LINQ instead of MapReduce called LINQ to HPC. Notably, LINQ to HPC is used in production at Microsoft Bing.

But Microsoft is entering an increasingly crowded market. There's the open source Apache Hadoop, which is now being sold in different flavors by companies such as Cloudera, DataStax, EMC, IBM and soon a spin-off of Yahoo. Not to mention HPCC which will be open-sourced by LexisNexis.

Microsoft's products are currently in early, experimental stages and the company may never step up the development and marketing of these to be serious Hadoop and HPCC competitors. But could Microsoft be competitive here if it wants to?

Microsoft has announced that developers building mobile applications for its next big release of the Windows Phone operating system, code-named "Mango," will be able to submit those applications to its app marketplace starting in August. Or more specifically, August 22nd.

This news comes at the same time as a rollout of an updated developer portal is underway. The new "App Hub" will support more geographic markets, private distribution options and will offer better application and account management capabilities.

Microsoft is making it easier for mobile developers building apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone to integrate data from Windows Live into their applications. With the recently released update to the developer platform known as Messenger Connect, Microsoft introduced APIs for SkyDrive, Hotmail and Messenger, which can be used in both websites and mobile apps.

Microsoft is funding a project to make Scala available within the .Net and Mono. The Scala website is running an interview with Miguel Garcia, the developer behind the project.

According to Garcia, you can already use Scala with .Net. There are some limitations now, but he says they will be removed by fall. "If you have a Scala program working on the JVM then for the most part you only need to recompile it with the Scala.Net compiler and it will run there too," he says.