4DotNet Developers Blog

Wederom de maandelijkse collectie van links naar alle nieuwsberichten, whitepapers, publicaties en blog berichten van de verschillende Microsoft product teams. Dit keer o.a. over:  Windows Server AppFabric, MSBuild 4, HTML 5, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, etc..

Microsoft Developer Information

• Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 Available! The Beta 2 for Windows Server AppFabric is available for download today at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric.  We’re encouraging developers and IT professionals working with .NET 4 and Windows Server to download the Beta and provide feedback, as we prepare to release the final version of Windows Server AppFabric to be delivered by Q3 of 2010.
• MSBuild 4 Detailed Build Summary What we were looking for was a quick way to visualize which projects depended on which other projects, how much time they were taking, and how MSBuild was allocating the work to its worker nodes. Enter the Detailed Build Summary.
• New tool and tutorials for learning about Robotics Developer Studio
• Using code coverage to improve fuzzing results I wanted to share with you some of the ways that we are improving our internal security practices, specifically in the area of file fuzzing.
• The SDL and the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors 2010 As you might be aware, a collaboration of industry experts and academia worked together on the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors for a second year to define and describe the most significant programming errors that can lead to some of the most serious software vulnerabilities. As we did last year, Microsoft was involved helping define the CWE/SANS Top 25 for 2010.
• Silverlight 3.0 Datagrid – How to change a cell state? Silverlight 3.0 datagrid can be used to bind to any enumerable collection and display the data in the grid. The data changes in the grid can be propagated back to the bound data using a special type in silverlight called ObservableCollection.
• Hot or Not? HTML 5 If you’re a web developer, you’ve probably heard a lot about HTML 5, the all-in-one standard to replace HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, and DOM Level 2 HTML. The HTML 5 specification is a 500+ page tome that explains in precise detail every element, attribute and feature that’ll power the next generation of Web applications – part documentation of what already makes the Web work today and part innovation
• CSS Crunch: new IE Extension for developers There are many tools in the market that allow you to customize your pages’ cascading style sheets (CSS), but there are actually a very few that do the opposite—scan for all the CSS rules in the document and remove those that are not used. Cleaning out the CSS will not only reduce the bandwidth impact, but will also improve the performance of the browser (minimizing the time spent by the CSS engine to parse the style sheets).
• Using Sensors in You Application – Managed Part 1 So far we covered the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform architecture (I Can Feel You – Using the Windows 7 Sensor Platform), and Using Sensors in Your Application – Native Part 1. This post introduces the managed API for using sensors. In future posts I’ll continue with the native API
• Introducing the Code Gallery Site for RDS Developers
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit This kit is filled with videos, presentations, demos and hands-on labs. The content is great for developers, training partners, and consultants who need to understand and talk about SQL Server 2008 R2.
• VSTFS: Creating a bug on test failure …. One of the common requirements while running E2E build is to log a bug automatically when the test run fails. It is very simple to achieve this functionality by customizing the workflow.
• What is Lab Service Account? Lab Service account is newly introduced in Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 RC release and is briefly discussed here and here. It greatly simplifies the account management of core components (test agent and build agent) used to run tests and deployment workflow.

SQL Server

• SQL Server Servicing plans
• Performance improvement by orders of magnitude when merging partitions in SQL Server 2008R2 Let’s assume we have a table consisting of five partitions and the one in the middle needs to  be dropped.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 UNICODE Compression – what happens in the background? SQL Server 2008 R2 added a much requested feature: Unicode compression. It addresses the need to compress Unicode strings. It is implemented as part of ROW compression, which was added in SQL 2008
• Performance tips of using XML data in SQL Server Here are 3 quick tips from query performance perspective based on real customer experience.
• How It Works: SQL Server 2008 NUMA and Foreign Pages The author has received numerous questions about ‘foreign pages’ so he put this post together to answer the questions.
• Did you start your SQL Server Engine correctly? Often we run into situations where there is a need to add a trace flag or a startup parameter other than the default startup parameters that SQL Server uses. What you may notice sometimes is that even after adding these parameters/flags, the desired behavior from those parameters/flags does not occur.

Product Lifecycle Alert:

• End of Support for Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista RTM On July 13th, 2010, all versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 will also reach the end of support. We recommend those of you still on Windows XP SP2 to install the latest service pack available via the Microsoft Update website – Windows XP Service Pack 3 – or look at moving to Windows 7. Folks still on Windows 2000 will need to look at moving to a more current version of Windows, such as Windows 7.

Security

• Update: MS10-015 security update re-released with new detection logic We have revised the installation packages for MS10-015 with new logic that prevents the security update from being installed on systems if certain abnormal conditions exist. Such conditions could be the result of an infection with a computer virus such as the Alureon rootkit. If these conditions are detected, the update will not be installed and the result will be a standard Windows Update error.
• Cracking Down on Botnets  At Microsoft, we don’t accept the idea that botnets are a fact of life.  We are a founding member of the Botnet Task Force, a public-private partnership to join industry and government in the fight against bots. Given the recent spread of botnets, we are getting even more creative and aggressive in the fight against botnets and all forms of cybercrime
• Microsoft Malware Protection Center Threat Research & Response Blog – a number of interesting posts here.
• Help keypress vulnerability in VBScript enabling Remote Code Execution The MSRC Engineering team has been investigating reports of a vulnerability involving the use of VBScript and Windows Help files.

How Microsoft does IT

• Centralizing and Sharing Business Intelligence See a live demonstration of how Microsoft IT is delivering business intelligence (BI) to 20,000 global users at Microsoft using Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office Excel, PerformancePoint Services, and other Microsoft BI products. In this webcast, we showcase and share technical details and best practices on how Microsoft IT has created a solution to consolidate more than 100 applications from 50 business organizations in a single enterprise report catalog and a BI portal. We also demonstrate how to build a solution like Microsoft CBI, using a solution offering / SharePoint accelerator to create an enterprise BI catalog where companies can deliver BI to their own enterprises.
• Improving Branch-Office Services Through Virtualization To ensure that the services of Microsoft branch offices continue to meet changing business requirements in a flexible and cost-effective manner, Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) has developed a strategy based on the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V. Adopting this approach has enabled Microsoft to deploy a wider range of services, on a more cost-efficient and secure platform, to its branch offices around the world.
• How Microsoft IT Developed Best Practices in Offering PowerPivot as a Service Join us to learn about how Microsoft IT is deploying PowerPivot as a service for Microsoft in collaboration with SQLCAT team. Best practices for technical architecture, configurations, on boarding, training and evangelizing across the enterprise will be shared in this session. We will be providing some in-depth technical details studies surrounding PowerPivot; specifically: Providing PowerPivot as an Online Service for various business groups and PowerPivot High Availability and Scalability.
• Keeping the Messenger service running—on a massive scale In this post, I’d like to focus on some history, basic architecture, and insights into how we deploy Messenger. See also – Windows Live Messenger – a short history

Windows Desktop and Server – 7 / 2008 / Vista / 2003 / XP

• Microsoft DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant – Now Available! Are you using DirectAccess or planning a deployment soon? Reduce your support costs and significantly improve your mobile users’ connectivity experience with the newly released Microsoft DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant (DCA).
• Mark’s Blog: Pushing the Limits of Windows: USER and GDI Objects – Part 1 In this and the next post, however, I will explore two resources managed by the Windows window manager, USER and GDI objects, that represent window elements (like windows and menus) and graphics constructs (like pens, brushes and drawing surfaces). Just like for the other resources I’ve discussed in previous posts, exhausting the various USER and GDI resource limits can lead to unpredictable behavior, including application failures and an unusable system.
• Prevent Loss of Sensitive Information Using the Windows Server 2008 R2 File Classification Infrastructure Today I want to discuss the importance of information classification and how it can be used to prevent data breaches and help organizations with compliance requirements such as PCI, HIIPA, ISO 27001, the Massachusetts Data Protection Law 201 and other similar legislation. See also: Using File Classification Infrastructure (FCI) and AD RMS to automatically protect sensitive information
• Simplify with the Volume Activation Management Tool There’s a new Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) available from Microsoft to help administrators manage Multiple Activation Key (MAK) activation for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage This is a common question.  And as storage has gotten bigger and cheaper, I see it more and more.  So let’s take a few minutes to talk about the mysterious 2 TB limit.
• Windows 7: Piloting Windows 7 – Part 1: Intro and Targeting Users for the Pilot Piloting an operating system is like a mini deployment, you do roughly the same steps you would in a full-blown deployment, but you don’t worry about process polish or scalability as much. Combine that with specific targeting of representative and willing test subjects, and you have a pilot. (See also Part 2 and Part 3 with more to come.)
• Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7 In the coming days, we’ll be deploying a new update for Windows Activation Technologies, the set of built-in activation and validation components built into Windows 7. Called Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7, this update will detect more than 70 known and potentially dangerous activation exploits.
• Windows 7 Battery Notification Messages Over the past week we have seen a little bit of blogosphere activity regarding Windows 7 and batteries, specifically the new Windows 7 message “Considering replacing your battery”. Since this is related to the engineering of Windows 7 we’re going to use this blog to provide an update to people.
• Forrester provides tips to Windows 7 early adopters Today, I’d like to share some insightful findings from a February 2010 report from Forrester Research
• What are the ACT Compatibility Evaluators Really Good For? I receive a number of questions on the compatibility evaluators in ACT that revolve around one central question: what are they actually good for?
• USMT and OfflineWinOld: Taking XP to Windows 7 in a Hurry XP cannot be in-place upgraded to Windows 7. And even if you could upgrade it, most IT admins are wary of in-place upgrades, even if only by reputation. So what do you do? You use USMT 4.0’s new offline migration feature /OfflineWinOld.
• Directory Services: Get Shiny with USMT: Turning the Aero Theme on During XP to Windows 7 Migration By default, USMT tries to copy a user’s theme to the target computer. But XP did not have the Aero theme. Worse, XP’s default theme was “Windows XP” which does not exist in Windows 7. The closest possible match is “Windows Classic” so that’s what USMT uses.
• USMT 4 and WinPE: Common Issues As with any new feature, some common questions start cropping up. Because Windows 7 is being deployed at insanely high rates USMT is becoming a hot topic. Below are some errors people frequently see with USMT running offline migrations in WinPE.
• Performance: Increase VMBus buffer sizes to increase network throughput to guest VMs Under load, the default buffer size used the by the virtual switch may provide inadequate buffer and result in packet loss. We recommend increasing the VM bus receive buffer from 1Mb to 2Mb.
• Cluster: When should I evict a cluster node? I thought I’d post a quick blog on this topic since we run into cases where evicting a cluster node is used as a troubleshooting step. That being said, evicting a node should NEVER be a primary troubleshooting step.
• New Validation Tests in 2008 R2 Failover Clustering Our Validate a Configuration Wizard was so popular that we’ve improved it in Windows Server 2008 R2.  Validate is the tool which verifies that your entire configuration is suitable for Failover Clustering.  It will test the servers, networks, storage, run a series of failover tests, and inventory all the configuration information into saved reports.  It can be run before, during or after deployment as a troubleshooting tool.
• Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters: Networking (Part 1) The sections that follow discuss Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering networking features, functionality and recommended processes for the proper configuration and implementation of network connectivity within a cluster.
• Remote Desktop Services: Microsoft VDI – High Availability Deployment Options The Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Microsoft VDI) involves multiple role services. To develop a true high availability solution for this setup, you need to understand the high availability solution for each role service. This blog post identifies the key pieces of the Microsoft VDI solution and provides details on the high availability options available.
• Announcing the Remote Desktop Protocol Performance Improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 white paper With the release of the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 operating systems, RDP 7.0 is even more feature-rich than its predecessors—enabling new remoting functionality such as accelerated bitmap rendering, multi-media redirection streaming, and network topology awareness. In short, RDP 7.0 is better able to support today’s ever increasingly complex and rich multi-media environment.
• Remote Desktop Session Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2 The white paper, RD Session Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2, is now live on the Download Center.  This white paper describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations.
• Networking: How to query the IP route table of a remote Windows machine using SNMP The following article explains you how to query the list of routes from a remote Windows machine using SNMP and compares the output with “Route Print”.
• PowerShell: PSStandardMembers – The Stealth Property I’ve looked into all of my.format.ps1xml files but I can’t find out where Format-List is getting its default view for, say, System.Diagnostics.Process
• Building on PowerShell: Execution Policies One question we sometimes get asked is why Exchange changes PowerShell’s execution policy from “Restricted” to “RemoteSigned.” Doesn’t that lower PowerShell’s security?

Virtualization Technologies

• Upcoming event, Microsoft Desktop Virtualization Hour, March 18, 9:00 AM PST Looking at desktop virtualization including VDI? Want savings, but unsure of the tradeoffs? Have more questions than answers on the topic?
• Hyper-V: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Hyper-V We are excited to announce the availability of Linux integration components for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4) which provides synthetic network and storage drivers enabling RHEL to work with the optimized devices provided by Hyper-V.  We’ve already submitted these drivers to the upstream Linux kernel in July 2009 (read here for more information) and are looking forward to these being integrated with a future version of RHEL.
• App-V: Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Microsoft App-V 4.6 Now Available! The Solution Accelerator team has released an updated guide: Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6.
• New Whitepaper: Choosing the App-V delivery model
• App-V 4.6 Release Q & A With the launch of App-V 4.6, the author was able to catch up with Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Director of Product Management for App-V for a quick Q&A.
• How to use pre-4.6 MSI packages with the App-V 4.6 client If you have 4.5 RTM packages which use MSI for deployment, then they will have to be updated (4.5 CU1 and SP1 MSIs are not affected by this). There are three ways to update your 4.5 RTM packages.
• MED-V: The importance of the MED-V XML configuration files Do you work in multi-server MED-V environments? Do you currently have a MED-V development environment as well as a production environment? Will you be preparing images in a lab and then pre-staging images in production? If so then chances are you probably ran into the error discussed in this blog post.
• Recommendations for MED-V Image Optimization: Reducing the Image Footprint The bottom line is the deployment of images needs to be as optimized as much as possible to reduce delivery times for images and to make more efficient use of network bandwidth. A key ingredient to optimizing image distribution requires compressing the image to the smallest size possible.
• Prescriptive Guidance for Deploying the MED-V Client via an Electronic Software Distribution Method such as SMS/SCCM This article describes one method that you can use to deploy the MED-V client using SMS/SCCM. The method that is described in this article is not the only method that is available. Additionally, you may have to modify the information in this article as appropriate for your particular environment.
• WSUS:

Exchange Server

• Exchange Server in Depth: Master Concepts and Optimize Your Server Environment The latest release of Microsoft Exchange can help you achieve better business outcomes while controlling the costs of deployment, administration, and compliance. Exchange 2010 delivers a wide range of deployment options, integrated information leakage protection, and advanced compliance capabilities. Check out our free webcasts and podcasts, and then try Exchange 2010 for yourself by taking one of our virtual labs or labcasts.
• Removing a Feature From The Exchange Control Panel For various reasons, there are times when an administrator does not want a part of the ECP to be accessible by some users and they desire a features’ tab or entry point to not be visible at all.
• Announcing the Release of the Exchange Server Pre-Deployment Analyzer You can use the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer to perform an overall topology readiness scan of your environment. When you run the Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer, it provides a detailed report that will alert you if there are any issues within your organization, which could prevent you from deploying Exchange 2010.

System Center

• Opalis Software Availability and Roadmap News We have seen tremendous excitement about the Opalis acquisition from customers and partners alike. This acquisition brings together the deep automation and orchestration expertise of Opalis with the integrated, physical and virtual datacenter management capabilities of System Center. Today we are happy to share a few updates on Opalis Software availability, events and roadmap plans.
• CM: Configuration Manager Support Announcements for March 2010
• Announcing the Release of Configuration Manager 2007 SuperFlows!! The SuperFlow interactive content model provides a structured and interactive interface for viewing documentation. Each SuperFlow includes comprehensive information about a specific Configuration Manager 2007 dataflow, workflow, or process. Depending on the focus of the SuperFlow, you will find overview information, steps that include detailed information, procedures, sample log entries, best practices, real-world scenarios, troubleshooting information, security information, animations, or other information. Each SuperFlow also includes links to relevant resources, such as Web sites or local files that are copied to your computer when you install the SuperFlow.
• New Hotfix available: KB978754 – You cannot import a driver into an OSD image if the driver is signed for only the Windows 7 operating system in SCCM 2007 SP2
• OM: OpsMgr 2007 R2 MP version 6.1.7599.0 is Released! We’ve packed a ton of new features into this release and a full change log is provided in the management pack guide.  At the bottom of this post is a quick run-down of the new features in this release.
• DPM: Upgrade Advisor For DPM 2010 Now Available ! DPM 2010 Upgrade advisor addresses questions on how to upgrade DPM versions ranging from DPM 2007 to DPM 2010, running on OS variants from Win2K3 to Win2K8 R2 using local/remote SQL, with or without disaster recovery and library sharing enabled/disabled.
• New Whitepaper – How to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010 The first WP to be released is about how to protect Microsoft Virtualization environments – including Hyper-V R2, Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 sp1.

Office SharePoint Technologies

• Walkthrough of enabling CRUD for SharePoint 2010 external lists using Visual Studio 2010 In this blog, we will show you how to pull data from an external database into an external list and enable Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) functions to the external list.
• Automatically uploading files from File Server to SharePoint using the File Classification Infrastructure (FCI)  To help address these scenarios, we have recently published the FCI SharePoint Upload PowerShell script (Upload script on TechNet) that can be used in conjunction with the FCI file management tasks (Customizing File Management Tasks) to upload files to SharePoint (Both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 Beta)

Microsoft Office System

• Understanding 64-Bit Office In this post, I’ll help you decide what version is best for you, show you how to install the version you want, provide some background on 64-bit Office, and list some things you should keep in mind.
• OCS: Archiving Report for OCS 2007 R2 The Archiving Report is meant to provide an easy way to pull information out of the archiving database.  It builds on the functionality provided by the Archiving PowerShell script that was written (http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/09/28/584.aspx) and adds a GUI interface, the ability to filter by date, and message formatting.  It has been tested against OCS 2007 R2 and SRS 2005.
• Excel: Windows Touch & Excel 2010 The touch gestures are built into the core of Windows 7 which means previous versions of Excel and many other applications will already respond to touch gestures without any changes. Our goal for Excel 2010 was to ensure these gestures were smooth and predictable when it would be inconvenient to use your mouse or keyboard either because your tablet pc is in tablet mode or it is quicker to simply touch the screen to access information in an Excel file.
• Calculating Excel Models on an HPC Cluster In a previous post, I introduced the work we have done with the Windows HPC team to enable customers to calculate Excel models on a Windows HPC cluster. In this follow up post, I go a little deeper into how we can harness the utility and power of Excel 2010 and Windows HPC to solve complex modeling problems.
• Outlook: The Look and Feel of Outlook 2010 When designing Outlook 2010, we worked hard to ensure that the colors, shapes, and text used within the product provide a pleasant experience and make it easy for you to get work done. We have done this by redesigning parts of the user interface to give Outlook a clean, crisp, high-quality look that is free from distracting visual elements.
• Fix for issue with message sizes in Outlook 2010 Beta Recently, we posted information on the Outlook blog about a bug in the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta that increases the message size of some e-mails messages sent from the Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta. The Office team has been hard at work building a fix for this issue, which is available immediately.
• Better IMAP in Outlook 2010 One of the things we have improved in Outlook 2010 is IMAP accounts. IMAP is a protocol that is used by many e-mail services, including Gmail and AOL. If your e-mail service supports IMAP, you can use Outlook to access your e-mail.
• PowerPoint: Smart Guides in PowerPoint 2010 In PowerPoint 2010 there is a new way to align shapes we call Smart Guides.
• Project: Tips and Tricks for Project Show filtered tasks with other tasks Sometimes when filtering tasks, wouldn’t it be great if you could see filtered tasks with all the tasks, at the same time? Maybe you want to view filtered tasks within the context of all tasks.
• Task Statusing and the new Grid A few weeks back Patrick Conlan posted an overview of some of the Time Tracking investment areas for Project Server 2010. Today we are going to drill in on one such investment area, namely the Statusing feature area.
• Access: Tutorials: Access 2010 Macro Designer Kerry Westphal gives a quick tour of the macro designer and how to write logic for Access Services/SharePoint databases. The macro designer is a revamped editor that allows you to automate repetitive tasks; wire together forms and reports to create productive UI; and implement business logic in Access databases.
• Composite keys in Web databases through data macros A composite key consists of more than one field in an index. They are often used to ensure uniqueness across fields in a record.

Stem of voeg toe aan :