With 2008 drawing to close, Microsoft is at a crossroads between its past and the cloud computing future. But that doesn't mean that the software giant's most traditional products won't continue to impact us in the year ahead. Today, I'd like to take a short side trip and look both back at 2008 and ahead to the year that's coming...

Like many places we’ve spent the past few weeks under quite a bit of snow, which is pretty unusual for Seattle! Most of us on the team took advantage of the snow time to install test builds of Windows 7 on our home machines as we finalize the beta for early 2009—I know I felt like I installed it on 7000 different machines. We’re definitely looking forward...

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used). The technical team jumped on the problem immediately and isolated the issue: a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year. The...

Commerce Server 2009 (formerly known as Commerce Server 2007 code name “Mojave”) delivers the ability to increase your business reach by making it possible to sell via multiple channels using an out-of-the-box shopping site, SharePoint Commerce Services, and the Multi-Channel Commerce Foundation. The new out-of-the-box shopping site leverages SharePoint...

I've been putting Windows 7 Beta candidate builds through their paces for over a month now, and with build 7000 finally making its way into the hands of testers around the world, I thought it might be time to highlight a few of the more interesting changes that have appeared or evolved since Microsoft issued its M3 ("milestone 3") release...

It's been over a year since Citrix first demoed "Project Apollo," their solution for remoting Vista Aero glass to clients. Displaying Vista Aero glass over a remote display protocol like ICA or RDP is complex, because Aero requires a GPU to render the complex graphics. (It's not as simple as just enabling the "themes" service...

How does one review a supposedly new version of a product that they have, in reality, already been using for months? It's not easy, believe it or not: The Beta version of Windows 7 (build 7000) that Microsoft will later deliver to tech beta testers and then, in January, to the public, is nothing more than a very finely tweaked version of the various...

When you visited a computer on the network by typing \\computername into the address bar, Explorer showed you a Printers folder if the computer had printer sharing enabled. But starting in Windows Vista, the Printers folder is shown regardless of whether the remote computer is sharing any printers. Why did this change? Communicating with the remote...

I will keep on adding the resources which I would find useful to help customer upgrading from SQL Server 2000/SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 White paper written by experts SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide SQLCAT Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/archive/2008/12/08/ultimate-guide-to-upgrading-to-sql-server-2008.aspx MSDN Link...