On Tuesday, 20 vulnerabilities were patched by Microsoft Corp. and more than half of them were categorized as critical, in 11 separate security updates for Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), Active Directory and the Host Integration Server.

Additionally for the very first time, it was assumed by the company that hackers would be able to come up with exploits for each bug.

A version 2.0 of the development framework has been released by Mono, the project that brought Microsoft's C# and .Net to Linux. A runtime system for C# is offered by this framework and Visual Basic code, instead of the Windows, could be run on the Linux operating system through this development framework. However, the complete .Net environment cannot be imitated by it. 

The Mono project site, on Monday started providing the code for downloading. Now Novell would sponsor Mono, with Miguel de Icaza becoming a VP of development at Novell from project leader initially. 

San Francisco - Software giant Microsoft on Monday announced that it planned to buy back up to 40 billion dollars in stock by 2013.

The company also raised its dividend by 18 per cent to 13 cents a share, sending its stock up some 5 per cent in early trading on Wall Street.

"These announcements illustrate our confidence in the long-term growth of the company and our commitment to returning capital to our shareholders," said Chris Liddell, Microsoft's chief financial officer.

The existing partnership of Microsoft with Linux vendor Novell is bring turned into a joint virtualization offering, which will allow hardware vendors to offer Windows Server 2008 systems that also support virtualized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server software.

Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software will run the Novell Linux package on its server. The companies have united with the aim that the new system will be optimized for the virtualized Linux system, which will give rise to more flexibility for companies to deal and store the operating system.  

Microsoft has introduced new mouse, named Arc Mouse, which can be used in two modes including as desktop mouse ( when fully extended) and as notebook mouse (when folded).