Kicking off its annual TechEd developer conference on Tuesday, Microsoft will highlight Silverlight and Oslo by issuing beta versions of the forthcoming Web development tools, and it will lay out its strategy for incorporating application modeling into its portfolio. Google plans to roll out a new incarnation of its hosted site search service for businesses, featuring improved indexing and a new name, while Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard ink a search pact for PCs. Continuing along in that same fray, Wikia search opens to broad participation; the open search engine, founded by Wikipedia honcho Jimmy Wales, will now permit anyone to influence what the index contains and rate the quality of its pages. Informatica revs its data integration platform. The newest iteration of PowerCenter focuses on real-time processing and business-to-business information sharing. And building on an earlier move, Microsoft extends the deadline for XP on low-cost PCs such that the emerging class of very low-cost notebooks and desktop PCs can run the OS, though it remains unclear what limitations Microsoft may put on PC makers to prevent them from installing Windows XP on heartier machines. Related: Join the 200,000 who already signed the petition to Save Windows XP. Software Development