A couple of weeks ago, while lamenting Microsoft’s poorly-articulated Previous Versions story, I alluded to an earlier post in which I detailed my attempts to reproduce Mac OS X’s “Time Machine” feature under Windows Vista.

At the time (mid-late October 2007) I found myself stymied by a lack of configurability in Vista’s File Backup utility. Specifically, there was no way to directly specify which files or folders to backup – only highly generalized categories like “Documents” or “Music.” Worse still, Vista File Backup made a habit of skipping files it considered to be part of the operating system, including the myriad .aspx files I had created as part of my web development projects.

Full Article – http://www.pcworld.com/article/155959/windows7_backup.html?tk=rss_news

Microsoft’s developers missed a critical bug in Internet Explorer because they weren’t properly trained and didn’t have the right testing tools, a noted proponent of the company’s secure code development process acknowledged last week.

The bug, which Microsoft patched last week with an emergency update, had gone undetected for at least nine years.

Full Article – http://bink.nu/news/microsoft-explains-how-it-missed-critical-ie-bug.aspx

A few weeks before Microsoft unveiled Windows 7 at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, I gave a presentation about the company’s next operating system for the Boston Area Windows Server Users Group. That presentation was the subject of the previous installment in this series, and with the benefit of hindsight, it may be useful to briefly look back on that presentation and see how its suppositions and predictions have held up over time.

Full Article – http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/win7_shipping_05.asp

Windows XP has been granted yet another reprieve by Microsoft.

The software maker had originally planned to put the ageing operating system to pasture on 31 January 2009, but a “flexible inventory program” means system builders will now have until 30 May 2009 to get hold of their copies.

Full Article – http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/244311/xp-dodges-another-death-sentence.html

Microsoft released today SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3). SQL 2005 version should now be 9.00.4035.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3) contains hotfixes that were included in cumulative update packages for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 from cumulative update package 1 to cumulative update package 9, and fixes to issues that have been reported through our customer feedback platforms. It also includes supportability enhancements and issues that have been reported through Windows Error Reporting.

Related links:

• What’s New in SQL Server 2005 SP3
• List of the bugs that are fixed in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (KB 955706)

Downloads:

• Download SQL Server 2005 SP3
• Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 – December 2008

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