Andy Lees, head of Microsoft's Windows Phone division for more than three years, has been moved by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer into a new "time-critical" role that somehow combines Windows Phone and Windows 8. Terry Myerson, who led Windows Phone's engineering efforts, will take over the management of Windows Phone, adding business development and marketing to his existing engineering responsibilities.

First reported by AllThingsD, Lees will retain his "President" title, at least for the time being. However, it's not clear who will report to him; Mary Jo Foley is reporting that all Lees' previous direct reports will now answer to Myerson.

A month after releasing a temporary workaround to block malware exploiting a Windows kernel vulnerability, Microsoft today issued a patch for all supported releases of Windows aimed at putting an end to attacks based on the Duqu worm.

Duqu, reminiscent of last year's Stuxnet threat, has reportedly been used in Europe, Iran, Sudan, and the United States. The attacks exploited a vulnerability in Windows' TrueType font engine, letting hackers gain access to the Windows kernel and run shell code, providing the ability to install programs, manipulate data, or create new accounts with full user rights. Last month, Microsoft issued a temporary workaround shutting off access to the dynamic link library that allows applications to display TrueType fonts, at the expense of displaying the fonts correctly.

Today's patch eliminates the need for a workaround, fixing the code in all supported versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2003 and 2008. While not mentioning Duqu by name, Microsoft described it as a fix for a "Vulnerability in Windows Kernel-Mode Drivers" and said, "The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted document or visits a malicious Web page that embeds TrueType font files... The majority of customers have automatic updating enabled and will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically."

The patch came on Microsoft's regularly scheduled Patch Tuesday, which included 13 security bulletins addressing 19 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. Four patches, including the Windows kernel one, require a restart, while all others come with the possibility of a restart. Three, also including the kernel patch, are rated critical. One other critical patch addresses a flaw that could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted webpage in Internet Explorer, with the patch including kill bits for four third-party ActiveX controls. The other critical patch targets a vulnerability in Windows media Player and Media Center that could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted video file.

Microsoft originally planned to issue 14 bulletins, rather than 13, but one was delayed because it would have broken an application shipped by an unnamed "major third-party vendor." "We’re currently working with that vendor to address the issue on their platform, after which we’ll issue the bulletin as appropriate," Microsoft said. With today's bulletins marking the last Patch Tuesday of the year, Microsoft said it has issued 99 bulletins in 2011, with critical bulletins account for 32 percent, a lower number in percentage and absolute terms than in most previous years.

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Microsoft has rolled out a big update to its Azure cloud computing platform to make it cheaper, easier to manage, easier to scale, and easier to use with popular open source software.

Full details of the price improvements can be found on the Azure blog. Data transfer costs have been reduced, and the maximum SQL Azure database size has been tripled, to 150GB, with no chance in price. Service Bus pricing has also been simplified, with the new pricing effective from April 1st, 2012. Until then, Service Bus will be free.

To improve management, Microsoft has deployed a new Metro-styled management portal for SQL Azure, streamlined the way the service is billed, and provided a new real-time usage tracker. Again, more details on the blog.

In addition to the larger database size, SQL Azure now has a new "SQL Azure Federation" feature. This makes it easier to scale out database applications through use of sharding. Sharding is a way of improving database scalability by breaking up tables or databases across multiple servers, with each server holding some subset of the data. As long as the data is spread evenly across the servers, this greatly increases concurrency, as different requests should be sent to different servers, where they can then be fulfilled in parallel. SQL Azure Federation automates the sharding process, allowing new servers to be added and data to be reorganized between shards without interruptions.

Microsoft is continuing to work hard to make Azure—and by extension, Windows itself—play nicely with popular open source tools. In conjunction with Joyent, the company has sponsored contributions to node.js, and as a result of this work—which is still ongoing—the node.js 0.6.x stable branch includes Windows as a first-class platform. Redmond has just released an Azure SDK for node.js giving node.js users access to Azure's blobs, tables, and queues. The SDK is also available via npm (node package manager).

Back in October, Microsoft announced that it was bringing support for Apache Hadoop to Azure. The first limited preview of Hadoop is now available to select customers.

Redmond is also working with 10gen to bring the MongoDB NoSQL data store to Azure. A preview of MongoDB that runs on Azure and uses Azure storage to persist data was released earlier this month, and Microsoft has now published guidance on how to use MongoDB and node.js together on Azure.

The software giant continues to work to improve the experience of Java developers on Azure, too. The Azure plugin for Eclipse has been upgraded, with new features including the ability to remotely debug Java applications running within Azure. Microsoft has also produced a set of tools to help use Apache Solr, the enterprise search platform based on Apache Lucene, on Azure.

More details about Azure's open source interoperability can be found at Microsoft's open source blog.

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Microsoft has released version 5 of its Silverlight browser plugin and runtime environment. Among other new features, the 7-12MB download gives Silverlight developers a 3D API based on Direct3D, PostScript printing, hardware-accelerated H.264 video, and the ability to create "trusted" in-browser applications that can escape Silverlight's usual sandbox—something that previously required an out-of-browser application.

The new version is available for Windows, where it supports Internet Explorer 7 or higher, Firefox 3.6 or higher, and Chrome 12 or higher, and Mac OS X, where it supports Firefox 3.6 or higher and Safari 4 or higher. For the first time, the plugin also has a 64-bit Windows version, allowing Silverlight to run in 64-bit Internet Explorer.

Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service has outperformed Microsoft's Windows Azure Storage and all other major providers in an extensive study testing the feasibility of businesses using cloud services for primary storage, data protection, and disaster recovery.

Nasuni, which sells data protection services that work across any type of cloud storage, says it has been testing the 16 largest cloud storage providers (CSPs) since April 2009 to determine the best services for its customers. Ultimately, only six of the 16 providers passed Nasuni's testing—in addition to Amazon and Microsoft, the other winners were Nirvanix, Rackspace, AT&T Synaptic, and Peer1 Hosting. Both AT&T and Peer1 use EMC's Atmos platform on the back end, although EMC itself discontinued its own public cloud based on Atmos.

Microsoft has quietly launched a new service to help Windows and Office users get the most out of their PCs. AnswerDesk is an online version of the Answer Desks found in Microsoft's retail stores, which are in turn modeled on Apple's successful Genius Bars, providing users with personalized consulting on their computer problems.

Each AnswerDesk consultation starts with a free chat—online or over the phone—with an AnswerDesk support rep. If the free consultation isn't sufficient to answer your questions or fix your faults, you pony up some money—$49 for an hour of one-on-one Windows or Office training, $99 for an hour of Windows or Office troubleshooting, $99 for two hours of virus removal and malware protection, or $99 for two hours of PC performance tuning—and the support tech remotely controls your PC to perform their task.

Microsoft promises a jargon-free experience, which suggests that the service is aimed more at the beginner end of the customer spectrum. The services are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, though training sessions need to be scheduled in advance.

The endeavor is a little surprising when one considers that Windows and Office already, in theory, come with support. Retail copies of the software qualify for phone support from Microsoft directly. And for OEM copies of Windows, which make up the majority of sales to end-users, part of the deal that OEMs agree to in order to pay lower prices for the software than retailers is that they will take on the support burden themselves.

For Microsoft to step in and offer high quality support to end-users directly suggests that existing OEM support avenues aren't doing the job properly: that Windows and Office users are suffering poor support experiences at the hands of the OEMs, and that these poor experiences are damaging perceptions of Microsoft's software. It's understandable that Microsoft would want to improve its image, but harder to see why it should let the OEMs get away with providing a poor experience in the first place.

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Team Foundation Service Preview, Microsoft's cloud-hosted beta version of its Team Foundation Server application lifecycle management, received its first major update today, offering improved performance, better notifications, a clearer user interface, and richer oversight of projects.

Team Foundation Service is built on Team Foundation Server (TFS) 11; the as-yet unreleased successor to TFS 2010. TFS 11 will be available as both traditional on-premises software and an online version hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. The online version has been available as an invitation-only preview since Microsoft's BUILD conference earlier in the year, and it's this online version that is being updated.

TFS is designed to handle most parts of the software development lifecycle; it includes a source repository/version control system, it handles bug reports and feature requests, it builds software and runs tests. With TFS 11, Microsoft is building in greater built-in support for agile methodologies (in particular scrum iterative development), integrated support for code reviews, and more.

There are third-party hosted versions of TFS 2010, and Microsoft uses TFS 2010 behind the scenes in its Codeplex open source project hosting service, but TFS 11 is the first version with first-party cloud hosting, and the first to see new fixes and updates rolled out to the cloud first. As the product matures, Microsoft will remove its invitation-only constraint, and later on remove the "preview" branding, at which point it will start charging customers that use the service. The company will also produce migration tools, to enable users to move both to and from the cloud-hosted version.

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