Dit maalde maandelijkse collectie van links naar alle nieuwsberichten, whitepapers, publicaties en blog berichten van Microsoft voor de maand April. Dit keer o.a. over: Cloud services, Azure, VSTFS, , HTML5, IE9, DOM in IE9, Windows Phone development, fortify en SDL, Dynamics CRM R4, Forefront, MSProject 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL server…
Microsoft Developer Information
- Windows Phone Developer Documentation Where is it and what’s available. See also: Be a Windows Phone 7 “Rockstar”
- Windows Activation in Development Environments Our product management team members have some new guidance to share with those of you with questions about activation in your development or test environments.
- HTML5, Hardware Accelerated: First IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers Today we also announced the availability of the first IE9 Platform Preview for developers, and our commitment to update it approximately every eight weeks. The Platform Preview, and the feedback loop it is part of, marks a major change from previous IE releases.
- Using Fortify Solutions for a Microsoft SDL Implementation I wanted to let you know about a great paper from Fortify, one of our newest SDL Pro Network Tools members. The paper highlights the Microsoft SDL approach to secure software development and shows how Fortify’s security solutions can help you implement the SDL and create/deploy more secure software.
- DOM Level 3 Events support in IE9 Interoperable DOM Events are a core part of delivering the promise of HTML5’s “same markup.” With DOM Events support in IE9, web developers can write more interoperable code using an event model that is more robust and offers additional functionality not possible in IE’s previous model.
- Introducing IE9’s User Agent String An important change for site developers to know is that IE9 will send the short UA string by default. This change improves overall performance, interoperability and compatibility. IE9 will no longer send additions to the UA string made by other software installed on the machine such as .NET and many others.
- Microsoft Cloud Services: Windows Azure Platform – getting started. Resources for learning and deploying Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric.
- An Introduction to Windows Azure platform AppFabric for Developers This overview paper introduces the Services Bus and Access Control for the Windows Azure platform AppFabric and how they fit together.
- Windows Azure Toolkit for Facebook Now Available One of the exciting announcements we made last week at SXSW Interactive 2010 was the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Facebook. This new toolkit, built by Thuzi in collaboration with Microsoft, enables developers to rapidly develop Facebook applications on Windows Azure.
- VSTFS: Link to virtual environment In Lab Management RC release, you might be using the “share snapshot” feature which essentially provides a shareable link for the snapshots. This feature is very useful when you want to share snapshots with others and expect them to connect to that particular snapshot. On the same line, you might want to have a shareable environment link as well with which users can connect to an environment very quickly.
Microsoft Cloud Services
- Windows Azure Platform – What is it? The Windows Azure platform offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows. See also the whitepapers.
- Microsoft Online Services Announces New Certifications, BPOS-Federal for US Government Microsoft has announced important enhancements and certifications that raise the bar in security and privacy for the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). In addition, we unveiled a new dedicated government cloud as part of the Business Productivity Online Suite, optimized for the unique security and privacy requirements of US government agencies and defense contractors.
- Service Update: March 2010 Release Availability, Features Announced The Microsoft Online Services Service Update for March 2010 is currently being deployed into production data centers and is scheduled to be available to all customers in the next few weeks
- Microsoft’s Data Center in a box…more details emerge Welcome to Microsoft’s data centre evolution (previously called the “Generation 4 vision”). As earlier videos have shown, we’re heading towards the pre-manufacturing every part of the data centre: the IT, mechanical and electrical components as part of Pre-Assembled Components that we call an “ITPAC.” We placed one of these outside the University of Washington recently during Steve Ballmer’s cloud talk.
- Don’t Miss An Episode of The Cloud Cover Video Series! Have you checked out the Cloud Cover Video series? In each episode of this popular and informative series, Ryan Dunn and Steve Marx cover the Windows Azure platform, dig into features, discuss the latest news and announcements, and share tips and tricks.
Windows Desktop and Server – 7 / 2008 / Vista / 2003 / XP
- Announcing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Microsoft is announcing Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Detailed information regarding SP1 will be released over the next several months; but today Windows Server 2008 R2 is announcing that SP1 will deliver two important new features that directly affect Microsoft’s desktop virtualization stack: Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.
- Windows Server in an Amazon Cloud Recently Microsoft began allowing the modification of the terms of some of its Enterprise licensing agreements to allow large customers in the United States to run their Windows Servers in the Amazon Cloud.
- Delegating Printer Management Tasks in Windows Server 2003 If you are familiar with some of the Printing Improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 then you may already know how much easier it is to Delegate Printer Management tasks to non-admin users. Although things are much improved in Win2K8 R2, there are still a lot of Windows Server 2003 Print Servers in use and we are often asked how to accomplish this task with this platform.
- Directory Services: Tuning replication performance in DFSR (especially on Win2008 R2) There are a number of ways that DFSR can be tuned for better performance. This article will go through these configurations and explain the caveats. Even if you cannot deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 – for the absolute best performance – you can at least remove common bottlenecks from your older environments.
- Best practices around Active Directory Authoritative Restores in Windows Server 2003 and 2008 A very common AD disaster is an unexpected deletion or modification of objects. Unlike a bad football match or family meeting, you can prepare for that and make the crisis more bearable. In this blog, I will discuss best practices of Windows Server 2003 and 2008 forest level backup and restore.
- USMT and /SF I’ve seen an emerging issue with USMT that I need to address while our TechNet documentation is updated. If you are using USMT 4.0 for migrations from XP, this is required reading to avoid some very gnarly problems when using the /SF switch in loadstate.
- Cluster: Creating a Cluster Resource DLL (Part 1) In this series of blog posts we will review the Resource State Machine from the Resource Host Server (RHS or Resource Monitor) point of view. Hopefully it will help you to design, develop and debug the Resource DLL you are developing to integrate your application with Windows Server 2008 & 2008 R2 Failover Clustering. See also: Creating a Cluster Resource DLL (Part 2)
- Remote Desktop Services: How to Make a Stateless Image for Virtual Machines in a Virtual Desktop Pool A virtual desktop pool is a group of identically configured virtual machines on a Remote Desktop Virtualization Host (RD Virtualization Host) server. All virtual machines in a virtual desktop pool are identically configured; a user should see the same virtual desktop regardless of which virtual machine in the virtual desktop pool the user connects to. Therefore, when you’re setting up a VDI system, you often want the virtual machines in a pool to be “stateless images,” so that when the user logs off, the virtual machine is reset to a known state. There’s an easy way to do this with Windows Server 2008 R2.
- RemoteApp for Hyper-V (VDI) Deployment Similar to RemoteApp, the RemoteApp for Hyper-V feature allows users to access a specific hosted application remotely, as opposed to the entire desktop. When using RemoteApp, the application runs in the context of a server session; however, RemoteApp for Hyper-V enables remote access to an application running on a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM). That is, this feature allows you to launch applications that are hosted on VMs as remote applications.
- Managing lower version licenses from a license server running Windows Server 2008 R2 This blog explains how to install and manage different version CALs on a single Remote Desktop license server.
- App-Compat: It’s Not Your To-Do List: Using Application Compatibility Tools to Diagnose Problems, Not Surface Them There are a large number of tools available to assist you with application compatibility, and part of the challenge of becoming an app compat ninja is to understand how to apply each of these tools in the most effective way.
- PowerShell: Out-of-band Hardware Management using WS-Management and Powershell This will be the first in a series of posts about out-of-band management. First, “out-of-band” basically means outside of the Operating System. Specifically, a client is managing hardware irrespective of what OS is installed or if an OS is even installed/running. This is possible because the hardware (typically called a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC)) implements some management protocol and in this case, we’re using WS-Management.
- WSUS: Microsoft Security Essentials anti-malware definitions now available via WSUS Microsoft Security Essentials antimalware definitions are now available via WSUS. Microsoft Security Essentials is a core antimalware service for consumers and home-based small businesses that Microsoft released in September of 2009.
Virtualization Technologies
- Announcing the availability of the Beta version of Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V with SMP support As part of our continuing efforts to support Linux as a guest on Hyper-V, we are announcing the availability of the beta version of Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V (version 2.1). In addition to the existing features (networking, storage, and fastpath boot), the 2.1 release adds additional features noted in the post.
- Windows Virtual PC – no hardware virtualization update now available for download The update to Windows Virtual PC to support running on systems without hardware virtualization is now available for download.
- Hyper-V: Dynamic Memory Coming To Hyper-V see also: Dynamic Memory Coming to Hyper-V Part 2…
- Hyper-V Snapshots: Suggestions for Success While working with customers, I have frequently run into situations where they need help with Hyper-V snapshots. Help with understanding what snapshots are, how to use them, best practices with them, or, in worst case scenarios, they may need help in recovering them in order to use a VM.
- Explaining Microsoft RemoteFX Microsoft announced during its Desktop Virtualization Hour that Microsoft RemoteFX, a platform feature being developed for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will bring a rich, connected user experience to the virtual desktop market. So what is RemoteFX, and how are Calista and RemoteFX related
- App-V: Troubleshooting Common RTSPS Issues with App-V The following are some of the common problems customers may run into when using RTSPS. These are based on specific errors and their likely causes.
- AppPlus and OSDPlus AppPlus has just announced a beta program. It is designed to allow the App-V community to trial the functionality of OSD+, offer feedback and make feature requests, before the first fully available version is released to the public.
- Making Applications Compatible with Windows 7 in a Virtualized Environment When IT professionals think about pairing investments in App-V and Windows 7, the following questions almost always come up as part of the conversation
- MED-V: MED-V demo videos – The complete 8 part series The Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) video series is designed to help IT professionals wishing to learn more about the administrative and management tasks in MED-V. This series provides step-by-step guidance around common tasks that would be performed by IT professionals to deploy MED-V.
SQL Server
- SQL Server Makes the Cover of the Economist When I read the article, I found this stunning bit of information: did you know that Wal-Mart handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases at more than 2.5 petabytes – the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress?
- How It Works: Bob Dorr’s SQL Server I/O Presentation I put a presentation together quite some time ago going over various SQL Server I/O behaviors and relating them to the SQL Server I/O whitepapers I authored. I keep getting requests to post the presentation and the information is relevant from SQL 7.0 to SQL Server 2008 and beyond. Here are the RAW slides and my speaker notes. You can read the reference materials outlined in details on the final sides for completeness.
- SQL Server Authentication Troubleshooter
- Enabling Partition Level Locking in SQL Server 2008 In this blog, we will provide additional details on a well-hidden feature in SQL Server 2008 – partition-level locking. But before we illustrate the feature, here’s a bit of background about lock escalation and lock granularities.
- PowerPivot: PowerPivot Component Architecture Establishing a managed, self-service BI environment entails deploying the PowerPivot for Excel 2010 add-in on workstations running Microsoft Office 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 on SharePoint application servers. These deployments can be performed independently. However, planning and coordination are required to determine the best deployment sequence and configuration options, provision adequate storage capacities and system resources, and optimize the managed BI collaboration environment for high availability and performance.
- Comparing Analysis Services and PowerPivot As more customers are getting aware of PowerPivot, they’re looking for more guidance on when to use it vs. SQL Server Analysis Services. This post is our view of the BI landscape and how SQL Server Analysis Services and PowerPivot satisfy needs across the organization.
Exchange Server
- Exchange Online updated to provide 25GB mailbox by default
- Top 10 Exchange Storage Myths Many of you have heard about the changes we’ve made in Exchange 2010 that combine to give you the ability to use less expensive storage and deploy large mailboxes. There have been many discussions around the choices you have around Exchange storage, and along the way we’ve heard some interesting questions. To add some clarity to the discussion, we’ve put together some resources to bust some of the most common myths and misperceptions that we have heard.
- Playing Shell Dojo with Transport Rules In this post, we’ll take a look at how transport rules can be created and managed in Exchange 2007, and how it’s been simplified in Exchange 2010. For creating one-off or a small number of transport rules, the transport rules wizard in EMC provides an easy-to-use interface.
- GAL Photos in Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 Luckily, you won’t need to turn to your alter-ego to do this. Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010 make this task a snap, with help from AD.
System Center
- Client Deployment with System Center Part 1: Application Management We start our first in the series on ‘Client Deployment with System Center’, and logically we begin with one of the biggest challenges every customer in the world faces. Applications.
- CM: Updates to the Discovery Documentation If you’ve had questions or problems with discovery, we encourage you to read the updated documentation. However, if you’re interested in a quick summary of some of the key pieces of information that customers needed, we put together our “Top Ten Clarifications for Discovery” list.
- Customizing Hardware Inventory in Configuration Manager 2007 using NOIDMIF Files The IDMIF and NOIDMIF collection can be used to extend Configuration Manager 2007 client inventory information reported by clients. NOIDMIF files extend the hardware inventory information for existing Configuration Manager 2007 clients. IDMIF files are used to add information to the site database for devices and objects that are not Configuration Manager 2007 clients.
- OM: New Tool to Assist with Planning and Sizing Operations Manager 2007 R2 Deployments the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Sizing Helper is an interactive document that helps you plan and size deployments of Operations Manager 2007 R2.
- Exchange 2007 Management Packs do not automatically monitor Exchange servers By default, the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Management Packs for Operations Manager 2007 will not automatically start monitoring of any Exchange 2007 Servers even if you have imported the Management Pack. This means that the servers won’t automatically show up in the Exchange views in the monitoring section of the console.
- DPM: How much can I shrink recovery point volumes with DPM2010 The script discussed in the blog finds out how much recovery points volumes could be shrunk on DPM2010.
Office SharePoint Technologies
- SharePoint Workspace (SPW) 2010 Explained As part of Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, SPW 2010 brings much needed capabilities into the desktop. A key feature in SPW 2010 is the ability to take an entire SharePoint site offline. This is probably one of the most requested features of Office since the introduction of SharePoint Files Tool in Microsoft Office Groove 2007, or simply Groove 2007.
- Configure SharePoint Server 2010 for Mobile Device Access Today’s post describes how to setup your SharePoint server environment so you can take advantage of mobile access.
- What is Time Intelligence? Time Intelligence is advanced functionality you can use in dashboards and scorecards that you create by using PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer. Time Intelligence enables you to create and use dashboards that display up-to-date information for dynamic time periods.
- Integrating Help into SharePoint 2010 Solutions This post focuses on features that developers and solution-distributors can use to integrate their Help into the SharePoint 2010 Help System.
- Managing SharePoint Designer 2010 SharePoint Designer 2010 is a powerful application used to build custom sites and solutions on the SharePoint platform. It’s a great way to create and customize pages, views, forms, data sources, workflows, and more. But there are some tasks in SharePoint Designer that give SharePoint administrators real heartburn because of the potential problems it creates for them.
Microsoft Office System
- Get Office for Today or Tomorrow Today’s post is just a quick status update to keep everyone in the loop on the progress Office 2010 is making, as well as to provide finalized details for our Office 2010 Technology Guarantee. In addition to the Office 2010 Technology Guarantee, were excited to confirm that Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 are on schedule and will release to manufacturing (RTM) next in April.
- Office 2010 Assessment & Planning The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an assessment and planning tool targeted at IT Professionals to help them begin the deployment process. The tool inventories your current environment and assesses the readiness of those computers for migration to the new technology, in this case Office 2010.
- Excel: More about collaborative editing in Excel Web App I’m going to delve into some of the finer details of collaboration using Excel Web App. If you haven’t already read Collaborative Editing Using Excel Web App however, please start there. It goes over what is supported, how it works, our presence UI, as well as some interesting collaborative scenarios that this feature opens up. Today’s post is really a “Part II” to that post.
- Outlook: Schedule View in Outlook 2010 Microsoft Outlook 2010 has a new feature called Schedule View that makes it easier to schedule time with your co-workers. Schedule View is a new horizontal layout for the Outlook calendar that displays many calendars at the same time.
- Customizing your conversations experience (plus video)! Conversations in Microsoft Outlook 2010 are an effective way to manage your e-mail messages. We hope you enjoyed the videos that we shared with you. If you are a power user of Outlook, you might want to tweak some settings to make Conversations work even better for you.
- Visio: Improved CAD Support in Visio 2010 Now in Visio 2010, we’ve addressed this issue by adding the ability to read the latest AutoCAD file formats while providing the same CAD functionality as Visio 2007.
- Visio Services: Details for Administrators In previous posts we’ve introduced Visio Services and shown you how you can publish your Visio diagrams to SharePoint. We’ve also given you a quick introduction on how to install and configure Visio Services. In this post, we’ll cover more details for IT Administrators about running Visio Services in SharePoint 2010.
- Project: Tips and Tricks: Add a custom bar to your print legend A popular request for printing project plans is have the legend display a custom bar that you’ve created in your project to highlight specific tasks. For example, if you want your printed project to display pink bars tasks in your project to indicate proposed task cuts AND you want the legend on the printed report to display this custom bar, you need to do more than just format specific bars with a new color. You also need to create a custom bar style that matches the bar formatting. Let’s look at this more carefully.
- Project 2010: Introducing Delegates In Microsoft Office Project Server 2007, the timesheet surrogate feature exists to allow one timesheet user to give the management of their timesheet to another user — send updates and so forth. This is great for timesheets, but there are many other parts of Project Web App where you may want to delegate your duties to another user or users but you can’t because a delegation feature doesn’t exist. Based on this need, the delegates feature was born in Microsoft Project Server 2010
- Access: Data Macro Aliases and the Where Condition Demystified Whenever I debug a data macro, one of the most common mistakes I find is misusing aliases, especially in the Where Condition of a ForEachRecord or LookupRecord data block. This blog post is an attempt to demystify this area. Hopefully, by the time you are done reading this you will have a firm grasp of how to use aliases in data macros.
Forefront
- Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server Virus Bulletin test results In the last round of testing for the March publication of Virus Bulletin, Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server clearly exhibited outstanding performance and produced stellar results.
- How to publish Citrix XenApp 5.x with UAG 2010 While we do have some information in the release notes (see Publishing and Authentication), this might be confusing for some and may not work without additional configuration for all versions of Citrix XenApp.
- Identity and Access Management Every day most of us take for granted people’s ability to login, authenticate, and access the data they need. The question is how do all of the Microsoft components fit together to accomplish this? Here is a high-level breakdown of what each of the products in this solution do and some ways on how they work together.
Microsoft Dynamics
- CRM: R4 Import Data Wizard – Tips and Tricks The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online “Import Data Wizard” supports .csv, .txt and .xml file format for source data input. It also supports upload of multiple files in one Import session in compressed file format (.Zip). A .zip file can include files of .csv, .xml, or .txt file types.
- Using Command Patterns for Integration Scenarios One of the most common IT projects for business application developers is integration solutions between multiple systems. In the CRM world it is not uncommon to see integrations to/from various application and services such as ERP systems, social networks, application providers like campaign marketing, etc.
- Top Ten Microsoft Dynamics CRM sites for 2010 Check out the most popular content and community areas available to help you create the perfect experience for your business. This is usually the most popular handout we provide at conferences and now you have it without the long plane trip.
- GP: Feature of the Day: Personnel Maintenance Workflow In Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010, a Personnel Maintenance workflow is available which helps a business institute controls around employee data. The workflow submit process has been added to Payroll Personnel Maintenance. You can configure the employee record to require workflow for sensitive employee data.
Security
- Security Bulletin MS10-018 Released We released MS10-018 out-of-band due to increases in attacks against Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 using the vulnerability discussed in Security Advisory 981374. See also: Active Exploitation of CVE-2010-0806
- Getting a reputation: How SmartScreen looks at URLs I’d like to talk a bit about how we determine the reputation of different URLs and IPs and use this to protect against spam, phishing, and other abuse in Internet Explorer and Windows Live Hotmail.
- What we know (and learned) from the Waledac takedown Recently, following an investigation to which various members of the MMPC contributed, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit initiated a takedown of the Waledac botnet in an action known as Operation b49, an ongoing operation to disrupt the botnet for the long term.
How Microsoft does IT
- Maintaining High Availability for Microsoft.com Microsoft.com is a large and heavily visited site, yet it maintains high availability ratings because of a carefully planned infrastructure, team collaboration, and use of technology for maintenance, monitoring, and change management.
Other Information
- Microsoft Live Mesh Microsoft provides several free and effective tools for you to store and synchronize your files and documents via the Internet. Live Mesh, Windows Live Sync and Windows Live SkyDrive are all part of the company’s online arsenal. But there’s been confusion over what these services do and how they potentially integrate with and complement each other. With cloud computing being such a hot topic, I thought I’d look at Live Mesh specifically and in comparison with Sync and SkyDrive.
- Zune HD 64GB Coming April 12 What can hold up to 16,000 songs, or 20 hours of high definition video, or 25,000 pictures? A Zune HD 64GB that’s what!
- Email in a world of social networking Recently we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.
Monthly Reminders of Good Information Sources:
- Security Page – Links to Key Information
- Malware Protection Center The Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) provides world class antimalware research and response capabilities that support Microsoft’s range of security products and services. With laboratories in multiple locations around the globe the MMPC is able to respond quickly and effectively to new malicious and potentially unwanted software threats wherever and whenever they arise.
- HotFix & Security Bulletin Search See also the Contact Us: Hotfix Request Web Submission Form
- Microsoft Solution Accelerators are free, authoritative resources to help IT professionals proactively plan, integrate, and operate IT systems.
- Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle policy provides consistent and predictable guidelines for product support availability at the time of product release.
Support WebCasts
List of Upcoming WebCasts: http://www.microsoft.com/events/webcasts/upcoming.mspx
List of Previous WebCasts for on demand viewing: http://www.microsoft.com/events/webcasts/ondemand.mspx
See the Top Ten List of the most popular webcasts.
Recent Security Bulletins (Security Bulletin Archives)

