If you live in one of these countries, tapping on the Marketplace tile will soon (it might a few hours for all the lights to come on) put loads of great apps and games at your fingertips. One important caveat: Your phone will need to have Windows Phone 7.5 installed to access the new stores. (Look here for update instructions.)

If you’re a developer and want to make sure your app lands in one of these new stores, make sure to check out Todd Brix’s post today on the Developer Blog.

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Note The build of this cumulative update package is known as build 10.50.2796.0.

Important notes about this cumulative update package\

• SQL Server 2008 hotfixes are now multilingual. Therefore, the cumulative update package is not specific to one language and applies to all supported languages.
• One cumulative update package includes all the component packages. However, the cumulative update package updates only those components that are installed on the system

Request a download: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2633146

At this early point in our development cycle, I’m not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.

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1) Model extensions for the SCSM CMDB to store additional types of data which are useful for managing a private cloud.

2) Views so that the cloud-related data can be easily viewed in the Configuration Items workspace in the SCSM console.

3) Service request templates for common scenarios related to private cloud management such as provisioning/deprovisioning VMs, allocating capacity pools, creating new projects, and so on.

4) Request offerings based on the service request templates that can be published to the Service Catalog on the self-service portal.

5) Automated workflows in SCSM to automatically fulfill some of the requests.

6) Runbooks for Orchestrator to automatically fulfill other types of requests which need to be executed on other System Center components such as Virtual Machine Manager

Go here to download:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=231143

With the Lync Server 2010 Bandwidth Calculator, you can enter information about your users and the Lync Server features that you want to deploy, and the calculator will determine bandwidth requirements for the WAN that connects sites in your deployment.

Version:	Feb2012	Date Published:	2/2/2012
Language:	English

File Name	Size
Lync_2010_Bandwidth_Calculator.zip	3.8 MB	Download

]]> http://themsgeek.com/2012/02/03/lync-2010-bandwidth-calculator/feed/ http://themsgeek.com/2011/09/18/inside-windows-azure-the-cloud-operating-system/ http://themsgeek.com/2011/09/18/inside-windows-azure-the-cloud-operating-system/#comments Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:15:25 +0000 KenDick http://themsgeek.com/2011/09/18/inside-windows-azure-the-cloud-operating-system/ A great BUILD session hosted by Mark Russinovich which gives you the internals of Windows Azure OS.

I suggest to view the HQ WMV edition of the video so you can see the screen captures and command consoles clearly

• MP4 (iPod, Zune HD)
• Mid Quality WMV (Lo-band, Mobile)
• High Quality WMV (PC, XBox, MCE)

Mark Russinovich goes under the hood of Microsoft’s new cloud OS . Intended for developers that have already gotten their hands dirty with Windows Azure and understand its basic concepts, this session gives an inside look at the architectural design of Windows Azure’s compute platform. You’ll learn about Microsoft’s data center architecture, what goes on behind the scenes when you deploy and update a Windows Azure app and how it monitors and responds to the health of machines, its own components and the apps it hosts.

View in browser

Nice visual timeline of the Windows 8 development process. So with Sinofsky’s reputation I expect that May 2012 can be a realistic RTM date.

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Windows 8 will help protect users with reputation-based technologies when launching applications as well as browsing with Internet Explorer.

Since its release, the SmartScreen filter has used URL reputation to help protect Internet Explorer customers from more than 1.5 billion attempted malware attacks and over 150 million attempted phishing attacks. Application reputation, a new feature added to SmartScreen in Internet Explorer 9, provides an additional layer of defense to help you make a safer decision when URL reputation and traditional antimalware aren’t enough to catch the attack. Telemetry data shows 95% of Internet Explorer 9 users are choosing to delete or not run malware when they receive a SmartScreen application reputation warning.

Microsoft understands that Internet Explorer isn’t the only way users download applications from the Internet, so Windows now uses SmartScreen to perform an application reputation check the first time you launch applications that come from the Internet.

In Windows 7 when launching these downloaded applications, users get the following notification:

In Windows 8, SmartScreen will only notify users when you run an application that has not yet established a reputation and therefore is a higher risk:

The user experience for applications with an established reputation is simple and clean: users just click and run, removing the prompt users would have seen in Windows 7.

SmartScreen uses a marker placed on files at download time to trigger a reputation check. All major web browsers and many mail clients, and IM services already add this marker, known as the “mark of the web,” to downloaded files.

Microsoft expects average users to see a SmartScreen prompt less than twice per year and when they do see it, it will signify a higher risk scenario. Telemetry data shows 92% of applications downloaded via Internet Explorer 9 already have an established reputation and show no warnings. The same data shows that when an application reputation warning is shown, the risk of getting a malware infection by running it is 25-70%. And SmartScreen has administrative controls to prevent the non-techie friends or children from ignoring these warnings.

Here’s a video that shows you Windows Defender and SmartScreen URL and application reputation in action:

High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

For anti-virus Microsoft now has Security Essentials, with Windows 8 it seems the products will finally be merged in to one product. If this impacts anti-trust issues remains to be seen. In my opinion Microsoft is entitled to protect their own product and customers.

Microsoft announced more ant-malware enhancements in protection and performance:

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). ASLR was first introduced in Windows Vista and works by randomly shuffling the location of most code and data in memory to block assumptions that the code and data are at same address on all PCs. In Windows 8, we extended ASLR’s protection to more parts of Windows and introduced enhancements such as increased randomization that will break many known techniques for circumventing ASLR.

Windows kernel. In Windows 8, we bring many of the mitigations to the Windows kernel that previously only applied to user-mode applications. These will help improve protection against some of the most common type of threats. For example, we now prevent user-mode processes from allocating the low 64K of process memory, which prevents a whole class of kernel-mode NULL dereference vulnerabilities from being exploited. We also added integrity checks to the kernel pool memory allocator to mitigate kernel pool corruption attacks.

Windows heap. Applications get dynamically allocated memory from the Windows user-mode heap. Major redesign of the Windows 8 heap adds significant protection in the form of new integrity checks to help defend against many exploit techniques. In addition, the Windows heap now randomizes the order of allocations so that exploits cannot depend on the predictable placement of objects—the same principle that makes ASLR successful. We also added guard pages to certain types of heap allocations, which helps prevent exploits that rely on overrunning the heap.

Internet Explorer. “Use-after-free” vulnerabilities represented nearly 75% of the vulnerabilities reported in Internet Explorer over the last two years. For Windows 8, we implemented guards in Internet Explorer to prevent an attacker from crafting an invalid virtual function table, making these attacks more difficult. Internet Explorer will also take full advantage of the ASLR improvements provided by Windows 8.

Windows Defender.:

The improvements to Windows Defender will help protect you from all types of malware, including viruses, worms, bots and rootkits by using the complete set of malware signatures from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, which Windows Update will deliver regularly along with the latest Microsoft antimalware engine. This expanded set of signatures is a significant improvement over previous versions, which only included signatures for spyware, adware, and potentially unwanted software.

In addition, Windows Defender will now provide you with real-time detection and protection from malware threats using a file system filter, and will interface with Windows secured boot, another new Window 8 protection feature.

When you use a PC that supports UEFI-based Secure Boot (defined in the UEFI 2.3.1 specification), Windows secured boot will help ensure that all firmware and firmware updates are secure, and that the entire Windows boot path up to the antimalware driver has not been tampered with. It does this by loading only properly signed and validated code in the boot path. This helps ensure that malicious code can’t load during boot or resume, and helps to protect you against boot sector and boot loader viruses, as well as bootkit and rootkit malware that try to load as drivers.

The same interfaces for secured boot used by Windows Defender, as well as all APIs used by Windows Defender, are available for use by our antimalware partners to deliver additional protection to Windows customers.

• Improved user experience. We have designed Windows Defender to be unobtrusive for most daily usage, and will notify you only when you need to perform an action, or critical information demands your attention. Windows Defender will also use the new Windows 8 maintenance scheduler to limit interruptions.
• Improved performance. Traditional antimalware technologies are well known for impacting system performance. It’s not uncommon that running antimalware software doubles the amount of time required for core scenarios like file copy and boot. As you read in last week’s blog entry, we have a lot of people working on system performance and Windows Defender dramatically improves performance on all key scenarios compared to common antimalware solutions on Windows 7, while maintaining strong protection. For example, Windows Defender with its full protection functionality enabled adds only 4% to boot time, while dramatically reducing CPU time during boot by 75%, disk I/O by around 50MB, and peak working set by around 100MB.

These same improvements benefit energy efficiency, meaning Windows Defender consumes less power, and gives you longer battery life.

Antimalware partners can participate during the Windows 8 development process so you have the best possible Windows PC experience no matter what antimalware solution you choose. We provide them with resources, such as the technical details of how we architected the performance improvements for Windows Defender, so they have the opportunity to make similar improvements to their products.

Protecting you from malware - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

No need to use WAIK, DISM, x-image, sysprep, WIM2VHD. Even no need for BCEDIT!

In short:

• Boot from the Win8dev DVD or USB
• When in setup the disk selection appears where to install to you press SHIFT-F10
• A cmd window appears.
• Now your drive letters may have shifted so do some DIR commands where you want the put the VHD file also choose a volume that has enough free space.
• Then run diskpart:
  • create vdisk file=d:\win8dev.vhd type=expandable maximum=50000 (for better performance do not use expandable, but creating the VHD may take some time.
    I choose about 50 GB in size
  • select vdisk file=d:\win8dev.vhd
  • attach vdisk
• Now alt-tab back to the disk selection window and click refresh, the VHD volume should appear, select it to install Windows in it.
• Click next, Windows will install and reboot into next phase of Windows 8 setup
• After another reboot the new Metro style boot menu appears where you can choose to boot from Windows 8 or Windows 7. Advanced options lets you set the default and change timeout. Also troubleshooting options are here.
• The default is Windows 8 and it will run direct on your hardware

A bit longer guide but with screenshots is here:

www.hanselman.com

“We reimagined Windows,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, in his keynote address to the thousands of developers in attendance. “From the chipset to the user experience, Windows 8 brings a new range of capabilities without compromise.”

The company also highlighted a variety of new features in Windows 8, including the following:

Touch-First User Interface

• Metro style. Windows 8 introduces a new Metro style interface built for touch, which shows information important to you, embodies simplicity and gives you control. The Metro style UI is equally at home with a mouse and keyboard as well.

• Touch-first browsing, not just browsing on a touch device. Providing a fast and fluid touch-browsing experience, Internet Explorer 10 puts sites at the center on new Windows 8 devices.

More Ways to Engage With Powerful, Connected Apps

• Powered by apps. Metro style apps built for Windows 8 are the focal point of your experience, filling your entire screen so there are no distractions.

• Apps can work together. Apps communicate with each other in Windows 8. For example, you can easily select and email photos from different places, such as Facebook, Flickr or on your hard drive.

• Your experience syncs across your devices. Live roams all the content from the cloud services you use most — photos, email, calendar and contacts — keeping them up-to-date on your devices. With SkyDrive, you can access your files, photos and documents from virtually anywhere with any browser or with Metro style apps in Windows 8.

Enhanced Fundamentals

• The best of Windows 7, only better. Windows 8 is built on the rock-solid foundation of Windows 7, delivering improvements in performance, security, privacy and system reliability. Windows 8 reduces the memory footprint needed — even on the lowest-end hardware — leaving more room for your apps.

• Preserving power-user favorites and making them better. For those who push the limits of their PC, Windows 8 features an enhanced Task Manager and Windows Explorer and new, flexible options for multimonitor setups.

New Developer Opportunities

• Windows Store. The Windows Store will allow developers to sell their apps anywhere Windows is sold worldwide, whether they’re creating new games or familiar productivity tools.

• Build using more languages. Windows 8 lets you leverage your existing skills and code assets to create great experiences using the programming language you prefer.

• Rich hardware integration leads to richer experiences — particularly for games. DirectX 11 gaming power underlies Windows 8, allowing the easy creation of full-screen games with smooth, flicker-free action.

New Generation of Hardware

• One Windows — many shapes and sizes. Support for ARM-based chipsets, x86 (as well as x32 and x64) devices, touch and sensors means Windows 8 works beautifully across a spectrum of devices, from 10-inch tablets and laptops to all-in-ones with 27-inch high-definition screens.

• Always connected. With Windows 8, new ultrathin PCs and tablets turn on instantly, run all day on a single charge and stay connected to the Internet so your PC is ready when you are. Next-generation system on a chip (SoC) support will also enable greatly extended standby and low-power states.

• Tap the full power of your PC. Windows 8 runs on PCs and is compatible with the devices and programs you use today on Windows 7, without compromise, to deliver the performance you expect of a PC.

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move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another. In fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed – it’s all software magic, developed by Truong Do who by day is a developed for Microsoft Dynamics. The software is easy to setup and in addition to enabling drag and drop of files, you can lock or log in to all PCs from one PC, and as a whimsical bonus is it allows you to customize your Windows logo screen with the daily image from Bing or a local collection of pictures

Download Now [1.1mb]

More info: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2011/09/09/microsoft-garage-download-mouse-without-borders.aspx

News via: www.activewin.com

The throughput capacity of a file server can be expressed either as the maximum number of operations per second or a maximum number of users supported by the configuration. These values are influenced by several factors, some of which include processor speed, available memory, disk speed, network throughput and latency, and the speed with which SMB requests are processed.

This release is an updated release to v1.0. It includes support of File Server in the Windows Clustering configuration. Windows Clustering allows system to be built with redundancy, which provides high availability to tolerate hardware failures. With a two node clustering, you could setup more than one virtual file server instance, and have FSCT clients run load against all the instances. In this release, a new section “Running FSCT against a singleton Windows Cluster” will describe the setup and steps for running against a Windows Cluster.

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….in a traditional shutdown, we close all of the user sessions, and in the kernel session we close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

See video: High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

See full atrticle:

Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8 - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Full Story at Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx

Here is a quick reminder of some of the features included in the next version – and these are just a few of them. For a full list of features visit Windows Intune on Springboard.

• Software Distribution: With this release, administrators can deploy most Microsoft and third-party updates or applications to PCs nearly anywhere over the Internet.
• Remote Tasks: IT can remotely perform the following tasks on Windows Intune managed PCs from the administration console: Full scan, Quick scan, Update Malware Definition, and Restart.
• Read-Only Access: IT pros and partners can give select administrators read-only access to the administration console so they can view PC information as needed, but not perform any configuration tasks.
• Enhanced Reporting: Create hardware reports based on new hardware filters for common hardware characteristics. Additionally, you can now create and save report parameters to make it easy and efficient to run a report again in the future.

How do you get this next release?

• Current Subscribing Windows Intune Customers: Your service will be automatically upgraded in the few weeks following October 17; no action is required of you. Two weeks prior to your upgrade date, you’ll see an alert displayed in the Windows Intune administration console indicating the exact date and time when your subscription will be upgraded.
• New Windows Intune Customers: Sign up on October 17 to receive the latest version immediately.
• Beta Customers: The beta service will conclude on November 17. After this date, you will not be able to access your beta account and all account data will be deleted. We highly recommend that you remove the client software and restore computers to their pre-beta state.

Full Story At Source

The key DPM 2012 features that will be available for BETA validations are -

• Centralized Management (Built on the Ops Manager platform)
  • Centralized Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  • Remote Administration
  • Remote Recovery
  • Push To Resume Backups
  • Role Based Access
• Continued Best of Breed Application Support
  • SharePoint Item Level recovery without restoring Content DB
  • SQL FILESTREAM support
  • SharePoint RBS support
  • Hyper-V Item Level Restore from a DPM running in a VM
  • Faster protection of VMs on stand-alone Hyper-V servers.
• Fresh DPM 2012 Console User Interface
• Data Source Extensibility Framework
• Certificate Based Protection of non-AD machines
  • File Server
  • SQL Servers
  • Hyper-V servers
  • Clustered Data sources
  • Secondary DPM servers.
• Tape Enhancements:
  • Enhanced Granular Media Co-Location
  • Tape Reliability Enhancements
• Multiple DPM DB databases share a single remote SQL Instance
• Upgrade support from DPM 2010

We do not recommend to deploy this Beta into Production. This Beta is not supported by Customer Services and Support (CSS). If you have questions, please visit the DPM 2012 Beta Forum on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dataprotectionmanager
Help improve SCDPM 2012 Beta by submitting bugs to the Connect Feedback Center.

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It’s exciting to have this opportunity to share the improvements we’re making to the file management capabilities of Windows Explorer. Explorer is one of the most venerable parts of Windows with a heritage you can trace back to the “MS-DOS Executive” in Windows 1.0!

The new ribbon

The Home tab is focused on the core file management tasks, and we’ve put all the major file management commands there in prominent locations: Copy, Paste, Delete, Rename, Cut, and Properties. We’ve also given new prominence to two popular heritage features, Move to and Copy to, along with exposing a hidden gem, Copy path, which is really useful when you need to paste a file path into a file dialog, or when you want to email someone a link to a file on a server.

The new Home tab

The Home tab is the heart of our new, much more streamlined Explorer experience. The commands that make up 84% of what customers do in Explorer are now all available on this one tab:

Overlay showing Command usage % by button on the new Home tab

The Share tab is for sharing files by typical methods like zipping them up and emailing them to a friend, or burning them to optical media. Or you can quickly share files with other people in your home group or your network domain. It also provides one-click access to the ACLs for the currently highlighted file.

The new Share tab

The View tab provides access to options for view customization. We’ve enabled one-click access for turning on/off the Navigation pane, Preview pane, and Details pane, a live preview gallery for the different icon display sizes, quick access to sorting and grouping by column, the ability to quickly add columns, plus easy access to three hidden features: show file name extensions, show hidden items, and hide selected items.

The View tab

The customization options for the Navigation pane are also much easier to access – in the drop-down menu, you get one-click access to them, including a new option to show or hide favorites.

Navigation pane options

The file menu and other tools

The file menu lets you quickly open new Explorer windows, access your shortcuts, and change folder and search options. It also includes a hidden feature that we love, Open command prompt, and a really useful new command, Open command prompt as administrator, both of which launch a command prompt with the path set to the currently selected folder.

File menu

We’ve provided a variety of contextual tabs that activate in the context of specific files and folders, and for tasks like searching, managing libraries, viewing pictures, and playing music. One of the best examples is the new Search Tools contextual tab which launches when you click in the search box.

Search tab

The Search tab surfaces a bunch of hidden gems that most people are not aware of, but that could solve some common problems for them. You can quickly adjust the scope of any search, filter by common date ranges, file type, file size, and other properties like the author or name. Then you can save these searches for future use.

Here are examples of some of the other Explorer context tabs:

Library Tools

Picture Tools

Disk Tools

Designing for a wider screen

When considering the ribbon UI, we knew we had to be conscious of one of the primary customer concerns we hear about: screen real estate. As we looked at ways to mitigate this issue, we dug up some more telemetry data for Windows 7:

This approach gives you a new Details pane that is much easier to read, makes better use of widescreen formats, and preserves screen real estate for the main file/folder pane. The exact number of lines might vary a bit from PC to PC depending on what add-ins you have, but for the out-of-the-box configuration running full screen at 1366 X 768, you can actually fit two more lines on the screen than you could in Windows 7.

And this comparison assumes you have the ribbon open. If you collapse the ribbon (double-click the tab, or click the Minimize arrow on the right side of the ribbon), you get even more vertical real estate with our new approach.

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Dong Yu, researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, and Frank Seide, senior researcher and research manager with Microsoft Research Asia, have been spearheading this work, and their teams have collaborated on what has developed into a research breakthrough in the use of artificial neural networks for large-vocabulary speech recognition.

The Holy Grail of Speech Recognition

Commercially available speech-recognition technology is behind applications such as voice-to-text software and automated phone services. Accuracy is paramount, and voice-to-text typically achieves this by having the user “train” the software during setup and by adapting more closely to the user’s speech patterns over time. Automated voice services that interact with multiple speakers do not allow for speaker training because they must be usable instantly by any user. To cope with the lower accuracy, they either handle only a small vocabulary or strongly restrict the words or patterns that users can say.

The ultimate goal of automatic speech recognition is to deliver out-of-the-box, speaker-independent speech-recognition services—a system that does not require user training to perform well for all users under all conditions.

Full Story At Source