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Here are some resources for your High Availability planning efforts for Hyper-V:

• Hyper-V Planning and Deployment Guide
• Design for a Failover Cluster in Which All Nodes Run Hyper-V
• Hyper-V Step-by-Step Guide: Hyper-V and Failover Clustering
• Requirements and Recommendations for Failover Clusters in Which All Nodes Run Hyper-V
• Checklist: Failover Cluster in Which the Servers Run Hyper-V
• Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster Management Update (KB 951308)
• You cannot configure a Hyper-V virtual machine by using Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering when the virtual machine uses a storage device that is managed by a third-party clustered file system or a third-party replication solution (KB 958065)
• Stop error message on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has the Hyper-V role installed: “STOP 0x0000001A” (KB 957967)
• Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.0.1
• Configuring Virtual Networks
• Implementing Disks and Storage
• Planning for Backup
• Blog: step by step overview of building the two node failover cluster on iSCSI
• Blog: Failover Clustering Options
• Hyper-V Hardware considerations
• Backing Up Hyper-V Virtual Machines
• Hyper-V Clustering Options

Guidelines for Developers

The 64-bit versions of Windows 7 support more than 64 logical processors on a single machine. This paper provides information about the changes that some applications and drivers that run on Windows require to support this expanded number of processors.

This information applies for the Windows 7, 64-bit edition, operating system.

Included in this white paper:

• Terminology
• Architectural Overview
• Group Creation
• Group, Process, and Thread Affinity
• System Thread Pool
• New and Changed Types and Macros
• Application Modifications
• Kernel-mode Driver Modifications

Download: MoreThan64proc.docx

Microsoft Live Labs is releasing Thumbtack, an easy way to gather and share links, photos, and text, from different Web sites and save all of the data in the form of a collection to a single place at: http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/. Thumbtack allows users to share and collaborate with others on collections by providing the ability to directly email the content or by allowing them to publish their collection to the Web with a number of options including RSS, Atom, HTML and Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. Thumbtack collections can also be embedded in personal websites and blogs

Full Article – http://bink.nu/news/microsoft-live-labs-releases-thumbtack.aspx

Microsoft has apparently seen the light, and is readying versions of Office applications that will be available for free on the Web.

Reuters reports that Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, has said Microsoft will launch a wide range of online Office and Office applications, with some of them, including Word and Excel, available for free.

Full Article – http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_expect_free_online_versions_of_office

Billed as one of several new Aero Desktop Enhancements in Windows 7, Aero Peek is new to this operating system and is one of many technologies that Microsoft has implemented over the years to combat problems caused by excessive multitasking: If the users opens too many windows on the desktop, it’s easy to lose track of those windows and the desktop, the latter of which can contain valuable shortcuts and other icons and, in Windows 7, any number of desktop gadgets.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/ff_aero_peek.asp

I’d like to expand on something I wrote last week in the SuperSite Blog and discussed in the most recent episode of the Windows Weekly podcast, taking into account feedback I received from both readers of the blog and from some Microsoft employees who wish to remain anonymous. I’m referring of course to Microsoft’s decision to finely tune every nook and cranny in its upcoming Windows 7 operating system in a bid to dramatically simplify the system. This work is valuable and necessary. But I’m worried that Microsoft is turning Windows into an OS that is far more like the Mac than previous Windows versions. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. That’s because Windows 7 is turning into something that is simple, but not easy.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_simple.asp

We’ve already heard that Microsoft plans to make use of GPU acceleration in Windows 7, but it looks like the company is also going to be doing its part for the GPU-less out there, with the OS’s new so-called WARP system promising to allow for DirectX 10 acceleration using nothing more than a plain old CPU. Among other things, that’s apparently being done to avoid a recurrence of the Vista-capable debacle that happened last time around, when some systems that were said to be capable of running the OS were, in fact, anything but. According to Microsoft, WARP (or Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) will work with as little as an 800MHz CPU, although it says it’ll work better on multi-core processors with SSE 4.1. To really put it to the test, Microsoft apparently even went so far as to run a few Crysis benchmarks with the system, and managed to clock in a blistering 7.36 fps frame rate at 800 x 600 on a Core i7-equipped PC, which is actually slightly better than what Intel’s current integrated graphics were able to eke out.

Full Article – http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605271/windows-7-allows-directx-10-acceleration-on-the-cpu.html

Following the release of Power Pack 1, the Windows Home Server team has been hard at work looking at a revamped UI, considering splitting the OS in two, and putting together the next update. Today a minor software update of Windows Home Server (WHS) has been released via Windows Update. According to KB Article 957825, this is primarily a bug fix release:

Full Article – http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/11/25/november-update-for-windows-home-server-full-of-improvements

Our next update, in mid-December, will address how scrolling works. We’re making the new Hotmail work more like the Classic version for those of you with the reading pane turned off. When we moved to the new version we optimized for screen resolutions that were 1024×768 and above. In smaller resolutions like 800×600, we’ve seen cases where the browser scroll bars overlap the message scroll bars, making it harder to move through your messages. Our next update will fix this problem, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to work on this.

Full Article – http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2008/11/25/hotmail-team-listens-to-feedback-continues-updates.aspx

This is a heads up that Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is in the final stages of getting released and should be out in a couple of days. The next step for the Exchange team will be to release the Update Rollup onto the Download Center and then publish it to Microsoft Update. Microsoft Update publishing will happen 2-3 weeks after the Download Center publishing, due to internal policies and processes. We will let you know when this happens.

Full Article – http://bink.nu/news/update-rollup-5-for-exchange-server-2007-sp1-is-almost-out-the-door.aspx

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 17, 2008 — Today, at a launch event in San Francisco, Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft Corp., was joined by customers and partners to announce the availability of Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online for businesses of all sizes in the United States. These subscription services offer businesses a new way to purchase, deploy and manage the industry-leading e-mail and calendaring solution, and the industry-leading solution for portals and collaboration.

“Customers are embracing Microsoft’s software and services strategy en masse because of the choice and flexibility it gives them,” Elop said. “Today, we bring business-class communications and collaboration technologies to the cloud, and we are committed to delivering more capabilities in the months ahead. No one has done what we are doing at this scale, and I’m certain that our customers will continue to take on these solutions as our offerings grow.”

Full Article – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/nov08/11-17ExchangeSharePointOnlinePR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Nov. 17, 2008 — At the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (Microsoft RDS), the newest version of its robotics programming platform. Microsoft RDS includes a simple programming model to support building asynchronous applications, a set of visual authoring and simulation tools to aid in application development, and tutorials and sample code to help developers get started.

This is Microsoft’s third major release of Microsoft RDS and builds upon its previous versions, which have received support throughout the robotics community, from students to researchers and commercial developers. More than 250,000 copies of Microsoft RDS have been downloaded and more than 60 hardware and software companies support or use the platform as a part of their products.

Full Article – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/nov08/11-17RoboDevelopmentPR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

One of the most compelling features of the Windows Home Server is the automated image backup to the network share. However if you find a home server a little too much (or expensive) like I do, then you’d be glad to know Windows 7 will make the job of making “Windows Complete PC Backups” at least half as easy by allowing you to backup straight to a network share.

Whereas in Vista you could only do a complete backup to hard disk or DVDs (with files you could backup to network share), taking it one step further to the network share makes it much easier to do backups especially since you can’t backup to the same drive as the operating system. And I don’t think anyone will juggle 71 DVDs to backup their 500GB hard drive. I guess now’s as good a time as any to buy a NAS device.

If your a student and you haven’t seen Microsoft Dreamspark, your missing out on some great offers. Simply signup, verify your student status, and receive FREE Microsoft software.

http://channel8.msdn.com

Right on the heels of VS 2008 SP1 the VS 2010 CTP is available for download as a Virtual PC 2007 image (so it is HUGE – best to use a tool to download the image).

Check out the new WPF based XML Editor (basically building on top of the new WPF Text Editor) as well as the brand new XML Schema Designer (more of a viewer currently though) which adds to the XML Schema Explorer in Orcas SP1 and add multiple designer views such as a Graph View and a Content Model View to make working with XML Schemas really easy and intuitive.

Here are some screenshots of the improvements that we shipped in this CTP. We would love to hear your feedback about any of these tools.