On December 6, 2007, FASA founder Jordan Weisman announced that his new venture, Smith & Tinker, had licensed the electronic gaming rights to MechWarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies from Microsoft.

In 1983, Microsoft announced the development of Windows, a graphical user interface ( GUI ) for its own operating system ( MS-DOS ), which had shipped for IBM PC and compatible computers since 1981.

Microsoft announced at the conference its intentions to develop a successor to both Windows NT and Windows 3. 1's replacement ( Windows 95, codenamed Chicago ), which would unify the two into one operating system.

Microsoft announced that they have discontinued the separate release of WinFS for Windows XP and Windows Vista and will gradually incorporate the technologies developed for WinFS in other products and technologies, notably Microsoft SQL Server.

At the Professional Developers Conference ( PDC ) 2008, Microsoft also announced Windows Server 2008 R2, as the server variant of Windows 7.

Both Red Hat and Microsoft announced plans to drop Itanium support in their operating systems due to lack of market interest ; although, other Linux distributions such as Debian remain available for Itanium.

Similarly, Microsoft announced Language Integrated Query ( LINQ ) and DLINQ, an implementation of LINQ, in September 2005, to provide close, language-integrated database query capabilities with its programming languages C # and VB. NET 9.

In February 2011 Nokia announced its decision to drop Symbian technologies and base their future smartphones on Microsoft platform instead.

On 5 January 2010, a senior manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft announced on his official blog that Microsoft had just requested to join the SVG Working Group of the W3C in order to " take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users ," although no plans for SVG support in Internet Explorer were mentioned at that time.

When TrueType and the license to Microsoft was announced, John Warnock of Adobe gave an impassioned speech in which he claimed Apple and Microsoft were selling snake oil, and then announced that the Type 1 format was open for anyone to use.

On October 27, 1998, Microsoft announced that the name of the final version of the operating system would be Windows 2000, a name which referred to its projected release date.

It would have consisted of all Keen games packaged together for Microsoft Windows and Pocket PC, but it never got out of the planning stages, and was never even officially announced.

On April 16, 2012, Microsoft announced that Windows Media Player would not be included in Windows RT, the line of Windows designed to run on ARM based devices.

On January 12, 2006 Microsoft announced it had ceased development of Windows Media Player for Mac.

In 2009, Nigeria's EFCC announced that they have adopted smart technology developed by Microsoft to track down fraudulent emails.

Nonetheless, on January 11, 1995, Microsoft announced that it had licensed the Mosaic technology from Spyglass, which it would use to create Internet Explorer.

At the 2008 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced Azure Services Platform, a cloud-based operating system which Microsoft is developing.

In November, 2010, TurboHercules announced that it had received an investment from Microsoft Corporation.

In hindsight, Cairo was a much more difficult project than Microsoft had anticipated and, as a result, NT and Chicago would not be unified until Windows XP — albeit Windows 2000, oriented to business, had already unified most of the system ’ s bolts and gears, it was XP that was sold to home consumers like Windows 95 and came to be viewed as the final unified OS.

Initially started as a project within Apple inc to provide a replacement for the Mac OS, it was later spun off into a joint venture with IBM, for the purpose of building a competing platform to Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP, as part of the AIM alliance.

* Cairo ( operating system ), the internal Microsoft code name for a 1990s technology project

In hindsight, Cairo was a much more difficult project than Microsoft had anticipated and, as a result, NT and Chicago would not be unified until Windows XP.

Cairo was the code name for a project at Microsoft from 1991 to 1996.

Allchin's first high-profile project at Microsoft was the Cairo operating system that was originally intended to replace Windows NT.

He was a founding employee of DreamWorks SKG and a lead designer on the Cairo Operating System project at Microsoft.

* Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center ( CMIC ) was founded in 2006 by Tarek Elabbady and currently headed by Hussein Salama.

Following the demise of the Microsoft / IBM joint development agreement, he was an architect, development manager and key contributor to Cairo, working for Jim Allchin and, later, Anthony Short.

Adam Bosworth initiated and headed up the Quattro project until moving to Microsoft later in 1990 to take over the project which eventually became Access.

It has been ported to Microsoft Windows and distributed with Cygwin and MinGW, to DOS by the DJGPP project, to Novell NetWare and to Android via various terminal emulation applications.

Winelib, a part of the Wine project, is the inverse of Cygwin-it is a free and open source compatibility layer for Unix-like operating systems on the x86 or x86-64 architecture that can allow programs written for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems.

IBM veterans from the PC project disputed the book's description of events, and Microsoft described it as " one-sided and inaccurate.

Cutler had been developing a follow-on to VMS at DEC called Mica, and when DEC dropped the project he brought the expertise and around 20 engineers with him to Microsoft.

The lead developer on the Mach project, Richard Rashid, has been working at Microsoft since 1991 in various top-level positions revolving around the Microsoft Research division.

However, a project was launched internally to evaluate the looming competitive situation with Microsoft Windows 95, the major code quality issues in the existing OS / 2 product ( resulting in over 20 service packs, each requiring more diskettes than the original installation ), and the ineffective and heavily matrixed development organization in Boca Raton and Austin.

On December 17, 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces ( and adding a scene-graph API too ).

Microsoft licensed this technology back from Citrix and implemented it into Windows NT 4. 0 Terminal Server Edition, under a project codenamed " Hydra ".

* Microsoft Terminator, a program analyzer research project

Vassal is in turn an outgrowth of the VASL ( Virtual ASL ) project, and uses Java, making it accessible to any computer that can run a modern JVM, while the other three are Microsoft Windows programs.

Malvar was a senior researcher and manager of the Signal Processing Group at Microsoft Research, whose team worked on the MSAudio project.

Development of the Microsoft Windows port of CVS has split off into a separate project named CVSNT and has been more active in extending the feature set of the system, even porting the changes back to the UNIX platform.

* C # ( and other. NET languages ), via Code Contracts ( a Microsoft Research project integrated into the. NET Framework 4. 0 )

Just prior to its acquisition by Microsoft in 2000, Bungie released the source code to the Marathon 2 engine, and the Marathon Open Source project began, resulting in the new Marathon engine called Aleph One.

The project leader for Bob was Karen Fries, a Microsoft researcher.

Valve, set up by former Microsoft employees, had difficulty finding a publisher for the game, with many believing that it was too ambitious a project.

However, in May 2004, Microsoft was reported to have shelved the NGSCB project.

*" Fremont ," codename for a Microsoft project in classified advertising

New in 2008, the purpose of the site is still evolving to complement Codeplex, the open-source project hosting site from Microsoft.

The Microsoft / Borland C ++ compilers had the ability to use this system as soon as it was introduced in Windows 95 and NT, however the actual implementation was undocumented and had to be reverse engineered for the Wine project and free compilers.