  We briefly review certain aspects of cosmic microwave background anisotropies
as generated in passive and active models of structure formation. We then focus
on cosmic strings based models and discuss their status in the light of current
high-resolution observations from the BOOMERanG, MAXIMA and DASI
collaborations. Upcoming megapixel experiments will have the potential to look
for non-Gaussian features in the CMB temperature maps with unprecedented
accuracy. We therefore devote the last part of this review to treat the
non-Gaussianity of the microwave background and present a method for
computation of the bispectrum from simulated string realizations.
