I missed Visual Basic’s 20th birthday this weekend. I remember I started using it around VB 3.0 than took some time off until a few years ago. Nice to see it is still relevant today! From BASIC on the old C64 to DOS and GWBASIC then to Visual Basic, I had a good experience with it. I’ve moved to C++ and Visual C++ a bit more lately, though.

You might ask after two-decades how VB can keep re-inventing itself to face modern and future challenges. The answer is quite literally that – re-inventing itself. OK, more accurately re-writing itself. The VB compiler is being re-written from the ground up in Visual Basic and its syntactic and semantic analysis services exposed through a managed API that exposes parse trees, expression binding, assembly production (and more) to enable a world of new scenarios including REPL, VB as a scripting language, and more. It’s all very exciting! As a VB user for … half my lifetime, now, it’s great to look back and be proud of where VB has been, happy with where it is, and especially excited about where it’s going!

Two employees of Microsoft have been fired due to their involvement in the recent leaks of the upcoming operating system Windows 8. Although this is currently still a rumor with no word from Microsoft, it is from a well known leak tracker. I am awaiting the first legit beta from Microsoft on Windows 8, and am getting excited! I’m hoping I could be an official beta tester this round.

Microsoft is currently compiling different versions of Windows 8 that require a “red pill” licensing check to enable certain features. WinRumors understands that most of the publicly leaked builds are from branches of Microsoft’s build process that do not contain a specific DLL required for loading a number of new Windows 8 features. It is understood that certain branches of Windows 8 contain extra components that activate with a specific Windows key. The components likely unlock the full Tablet immersive UI of Windows 8, one that the company is working hard to keep under wraps.

The Windows Home Server team has announced that you can now go through an online evaluation of Windows Home Server. There is a temporary site that it is available on, and will soon be switching over the the Microsoft.com domain. I tried Windows Home Server 2011, but found it lacking in what I was trying to accomplish, so I went for the Small Business Server 2011: Essentials, which has turned out to be a great decision and has exceeded my expectations.

Today I am pleased to say the online evaluation experience for WHS 2011 is now ready. This provides customers the ability to walk through both client and server interaction freely, or follow a suggested demonstration path with the evaluation manual which will also launch with the online experience. Available 24 hours per day, it provides a super simple way to experience WHS without the need for SBS hardware,

Microsoft is close to accepting that Live Messenger’s voice and video capabilities are sub-par in a bid to buy Skype for 7 billion dollars. Skype is a great buy, and I really like the service.

A deal represents Microsoft’s most aggressive move yet to play in the increasingly-converged worlds of communication, information and entertainment. Skype connects more than 663 million users around the world via Internet-based telephony and video, making it a key technology platform for a new generation of Web-savvy consumers. During 2010, those users made 207 billion minutes of voice and voice video calls over Skype.

The Microsoft ads “I’m a PC” have taken a new twist: they bring the Microsoft Store to your home showing you how your old PC isn’t really up to date. Check this out:

So, you want to go check out Microsoft? They have a visitors center in Building 92 of the main campus in Redmond. I’m going to have to go up there and check it out this summer. Last time I was in Seattle, I didn’t have time to head out that way. Linked site has a good Photosynth of the visitors center.

I headed over to the Visitor Center with my trusty Nikon in hand last week and too around 600 photos – hoping to create an amazing synth. It turns out it’s harder to get a synthy synth that I thought and with the low and changing lighting environment of the Visitor Center, it’s made even more tricky. With an hours snapping done, we had real guests knocking on the shutters so I had to pack my gear and get out – hopefully I’ll get back there soon and improve upon the synth but for now, here it is. Note that you can click on the highlighted sections in the right hand panel to zip around the space.

Microsoft’s free antivirus program has done poorly on the first antivirus test in 2011. Partially. In protection against zero day malware attacks, it scored 50%, down 27% from February. It still has a 100% in detection of widespread malware.

So where did the wheels come off the train? Security Essentials struggled with zero-day threats, malicious software which has yet to be analyzed and rolled into an antivirus program’s definition files. The average across all 22 entrants was an 84% detection rate, but MSE only detected half of the samples thrown at it. Even more worrying is that MSE only managed to block 45% of malware during or after execution. AV-Test’s Andreas Marx said that MSE’s lack of effective Web and email scanners were major negatives, and expects that the program’s poor results in the lab are translating into equally poor results in the real world, too.

The forums are going to be down for a while until I can find a new forum software that can stop the spam. I’ve used several different ways to stop it, but it still gets through. I’m looking into vBulletin right now, and it looks like it should be able to tackle the job.

The two big co-founders of the big two are at it. The genius behind Apple (Jobs is a marketing guy, not a techie) Steve Wozniak has told Paul Allen to stop patent-trolling. I agree with the Woz. There is no sense in suing the pants off of people after buying patents. He should be out spending that money investing in companies and people that can create new patents for new innovations. Perhaps that is what is slowing down innovations lately: people afraid of getting sued for patent infringement and not enough capital to make a real revolutionary invention.

The Register reports that Wozniak dedicated some pointed, if not poignant, remarks toward Allen at the Embedded System Conference Silicon Valley in San Jose, Calif., last week.

He reportedly declared: "That patent-troll thing…the other night Paul Allen was speaking at the Computer History Museum and I had four tickets. And I decided at the last minute not to go, because I remembered he’s suing all these companies like Apple and Google–but he’s not suing Microsoft–because he bought all these patents.”

Ok, the sarcasm in the headline was a bit much. But, the rumor that the Windows Phone 7 release from Verizon being launched May 5th was putting too much faith in Verizon. Yet again, it looks like it may come out later… Mid to late May, and possibly May 19th. I’ve pretty much given up on Verizon to release the Windows Phone 7 and am shopping for a good one on the Sprint network. Verizon really botched the launch on this one. Some even say it was intentional.

WinRumors previously expected Verizon’s offering to arrive in late March around the same time as Sprint. According to one source familiar with the situation, Verizon has successfully certified the device for use on its network. WinRumors understands that Microsoft’s internal marketing date is May 5 is now mid-May for the Verizon Windows Phone launch.