What do you do when you need to read in an entire file and process it as a string? Here is a simple solution. More info

and Service Division that will include the four-year-old start-up EMC just agreed to buy off of him. EMC is paying cash for the Seattle-based Pi Corporation and its 100 engineers. EMC didn?t say how much but Pi was founded using Warburg-Pincus ($$$) money and EMC says the acquisition will likely dilute its EPS this year by a penny. More info

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.' More info

Ingres, the open source database, and Pentaho, the open source business intelligence alternative, have partnered up. They say they're going to integrate key product lines and together chase the BI market, saying it's hot. LogicWorks has become MySQL's first authorized hosting partner in the US. It intends to offer customers a managed MySQL Enterprise database for delivering mission-critical apps, making sure at its end that service levels are met. SAP has certified its Business Suite application and NetWeaver platform on Red Hat on IBM's mainframes, part of the Linux-on-Mainframe program Red Hat and IBM put together last spring. More info

Both Windows Server 2008 and the Vista Service Pack 1 were released to manufacturing Monday with a perspective availability date of sometime in March. Called a bug-fixer almost universally, APCMag says that, based on version and build number, the Service Pack swaps out the original Vista kernel for the new unreleased Longhorn kernel on Windows Server 2008. More info

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. SYS-CON.com here brings you the full text of the letter that Microsoft sent to Yahoo!'s Board of Directors. More info

The evolution of Web sites to dynamic rich interactive applications is a true revolution for users. But for ASP.NET developers tasked with building high-performing scalable applications, it presents major challenges. The features that characterize blogs, wikis, personalized pages, and other data-driven Web 2.0 applications fundamentally change processing, transmission, and rendering workloads, and require new approaches and solutions. In Web 2.0 applications: More info

In response to the commercial release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, the latest version of the most popular Integrated Development Environment for Microsoft .NET Developers, Software FX announced that it has updated and changed the name of its Chart FX for Visual Studio 2005 product to a more simplified Chart FX 7. 'Not only is the name more appropriate now that we have two versions of Visual Studio in the market, but it is more in-line with future product announcements coming from Software FX,' said Rene Garcia, president of Software FX. 'As with any new version of a major development tool like Visual Studio, the adoption curve will take some time and we wanted to prevent unnecessary confusion from customers looking for a solution for Visual Studio 2008.' Mr. Garcia concluded. More info

Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich interactive experiences over the web. The Chart FX Silverlight Add-On extends Chart FX 7 and allows developers to add Chart FX functionality to their Silverlight-based web applications. Software FX will be providing the Chart FX Silverlight Add-On as a free download to Chart FX 7 customers. The Chart FX Silverlight Add-On combines the most complete and robust charting functionality provided by Chart FX 7 through a client/server architecture with the visual richness of Microsoft Silverlight. More info

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides the foundation for building applications and high-fidelity experiences in Windows Vista, blending together application UI, documents, and media content. WPF contains two data sources for XML and objects. To enhance productivity and include WPF applications in lines of business, you need to employ best practices and guidelines in reusing existing internal frameworks through WPF data binding capabilities. That way enterprises will benefit from advanced accessibility, data-driven UIs, and the highly stylized data visualization inherent to the WPF platform. More info