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News

• EU drops two Apple iPhone antitrust investigations

  The European Commission has dropped two antitrust investigations concerning Apple's iPhone after the company reversed two policies that drew the regulator's scrutiny.

• Visual Basic developers get access to Windows Phone 7

  Microsoft on Thursday began offering tools enabling Visual Basic developers to build applications for the Windows Phone 7 mobile phone platform.

• Applications weakened by third-party code

  The use of third-party code in applications represents a big security risk for companies, according to a study from security vendor Veracode.

• IE9 has Google Chrome on the run

  Google released Chrome to reignite competitive development of browsers, and now it is playing catch-up on at least one front: hardware-assisted acceleration.

• Adobe adds HTML5 controls to Illustrator

  Adobe Systems has released an add-on package for its Illustrator CS5 design editor that will allow developers to export their designs to the Web and mobile platforms, using the emerging HTML5 set of Web formats.

• Intel upgrades parallel development suite

  Intel will release on Thursday an upgrade to its parallel development toolset for Windows application developers, adding both a tool to walk developers through parallelism, as well as support for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 IDE.

• Google technologist derides Oracle's lack of developer focus

  When it bowed out of the JavaOne conference this year, Google cited Oracle's lawsuit over Java use in Google Android. But one Google technologist suggests a second possible reason for Google's reticence: Oracle's lack of focus on developers.

• ActiveState prepares Python for databases

  ActiveState has updated its distributions of the Python programming language so that they provide developers easier access to databases, as well as new ways of creating GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces), the company announced Wednesday.

• Alcatel-Lucent buys mobile apps dev-tool vendor OpenPlug

  Alcatel-Lucent has acquired OpenPlug, the creator of ELIPS Studio, a tool that allows developers write an application once, and then translate it into native code that can run on iPhones and Android-based smartphones.

• Oracle giving student coders free access to JavaOne

  Oracle is hoping to entice a younger generation of Java programmers into its fold by offering students complimentary admission to the upcoming JavaOne and Oracle Develop conferences.

• Vim editor updated with modern language support

  The latest edition of the widely used Vim text editor now supports both the Lua programming language as well as the latest versions of Python and Perl.

• Google adds multitenancy to App Engine SDK

  The latest version of the SDK (Software Development Kit) for Google's cloud platform App Engine comes with multitenancy capability, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

• Microsoft simplifies Visual Studio

  Microsoft is gearing up to release a version of its Visual Studio integrated developer environment that it promises will be easy enough for even business managers to use.

• Google executive frustrated by Java, C++ complexity

  Today's commercial-grade programming languages -- C++ and Java, in particular -- are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk Thursday at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference.

• Twitter's tech problems take a toll on developers

  The recurrent technical problems that have affected Twitter for the past seven weeks have also taken a toll on developers of external applications built for the microblogging service.