Microsoft

Shipping with Vista Beta 2, there is a new security feature called Address Space Layout Randomization (a.k.a ASLR); other than being a mouthful, this helps defend against buffer overrun exploits. It does this by moving the entry points into the system dll’s around randomly in memory. Its all about odd, and there are 256 locations it can be loaded in, or in other words there is a 1/256 chance of getting the address correct. This will help make the attacks such as return-to-libc (which start with a buffer overflow) harder. This of course is not a replacement for writing poor code or fixing the actual overruns found, but it would certainly go a long way in reducing automated attacks that use this exploit. ...

You might have heard that Microsoft has “renamed” WinFX to .NET 3.0 and all the hoopla that created. So, effectively .NET 3.0 will be .NET 2.0 + WinFX. Hmm, given that WinFX is part of Vista (albeit some bits ported back for XP), what happens if I want to install it on Windows 2000, is that still supported? And so when the “real” new version of the CLR ships, would that be called .NET 4.0? Hmm… ...

If you are part of the Office 12, you might have already received the email detailing that Office 12 is out at http://beta.microsoft.com . On the other hand, it is also available on MSDN if you have Universal Subscription. If you don’t have either, seems like Microsoft has opened the beta to more people, and you can get the beta 2 (which will run till Jan 07) from here . ...

Believe it or not, approximately 5 months are SQL 05 went RTM, Microsoft has released the first service pack for that which includes the database mirroring functionality. You can get a list here of all the things fixed and the press release here . I have not tried this myself yet, so cannot comment, but I wonder if it would cause any issues to BizTalk and SharePoint among other things. I’ll post any issues I find over the next few days here. ...

If you have had the pleasure of playing with Rotor in the past then you would be glad to know that MS recently released the version 2.0 of Rotor. This of course is officially called “Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure” and can be downloaded from here . Don’t let the 21.6 mb download fool you, when you extract it and build it you need over a gig of space (mine currently is just a tad under 1.4 gb). If you want to understand the CLR and how it performs Rotor is the best way to go about it. ...

I was trying to setup Sharepoint “v3” which is part of Office 2007; the Beta 1 Technical Refresh installs without a problem, but when I try and configure Sharepoint it fails in Step 2 and I get the error shown below. You can click on the image to see the full size. However, when I trawl through the log file, I did find a few exceptions, a couple of which are listed below. The only reason the font is small on those is so it would fit and render fine in here. You can copy and paste that in notepad or something and see if in a bigger font; alternatively you can download the log file (see the end of this posting). ...

If you go to the Computer Management tool in Longhorn (Dec CTP), then you will something called the System Stability Chart, which shows you how stable the system has been including Software Installs/UnInstalls, Failures (including Apps, Drivers, Hardware, Windows), etc. Its pretty cool and should help narrow down cause of failures - quite helpful in a corporate environment. Here is a screen shot from one of my VMs. ...

As part of the settlement with Sun, all the products containing MSJVM will be discontinued from MSDN Subscriber download in late December (which means any day now). Here is the list of products you won’t be able to download after this: Microsoft Application Center 2000 Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit Microsoft DCOM for Windows 95 v1.1 Microsoft Embedded Visual Tools 3.0 (2002 Edition) Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 & 2000 Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions Microsoft Handheld PC 2000 SDK Microsoft Infrared Communications for Windows 95 DDK Microsoft ISA Server 2000 Microsoft Plus! 98 Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 Microsoft SNA Server 4.0 Service Packs 3 & Service Pack 4 Microsoft System Management Server 2.0 Microsoft Visual C++ (Alpha Systems) Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 6.0c & 6.0d Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows 2000 DDK Microsoft Windows 98 Microsoft Windows 98 DDK Microsoft Windows CE SDKs & DDKs Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ 6.0 Microsoft Windows ME Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 DDK System Stress for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 & Windows 2000 If you don’t have these on already, I would suggest downloading them and keeping them now. More information on this can be found here . ...

As you might be aware, Microsoft released its OneCare Live service in Beta, below are the screen shots of those on my machine. So far there is not any noticable deprecation in performance.

If you read my earlier post you would know you could not get WinFX running with the RTM version of VS 05, but now that MS publicly just released the Nov CTP of the WinFX that is compatible with VS 05 RTM, so you can breathe in peace. :) As always there are three pieces you need to get to, one is the WinFX Runtime itself (2.68 mb), two is the VS 05 WinFX Extensions (2.32 mb), and lastly the SDK (929 mb - yep its big) if you desire. The SDK is just documentation and does not include the runtime. ...

Office 12 Beta 1 was release today, unfortunately due to various NDA clauses, I cannot get into too much detail at this time. But slashdot has the story and there are screen shots of it by pcmag here . All I can say is that this is probably the only time I am more excited about this than when I moved from Lotus Notes to Outlook 98. :) ...

Microsoft announces that the next version of Exchange, its upcoming Windows Server “Longhorn” Small Business Server and its Centro infrastructure solution for midsize businesses will only be released as 64-bit. More on the story here .

At long last VS.NET 2005 (code named Whidbey) and .NET 2.0 are shipped! You can download them from MSDN, and don’t really need to wait till Nov 7th (the official launch date). w00t! :o)

Seems like Microsoft has said , the XP SP3 bits going around are fake as it is not sp3; not sure who to believe, in any case you should not be updating any “real” machine you use and depend on.

HotFix has a list of some of the things that are going to be included in XP SP3; PC World also talks about it .

Check out the new features which are part of the next Sharepoint release .

Now that the PDC is done, I can get to talk a little more about Office 12, I have been playing with it for a few weeks and has some very interesting things, but more on that later this week. But, now you can get the proposed schema for Office 12 applications. This of course is draft and is a preview, so I won’t start writing anything against this other than your own learning purposes. ...

WinITPro is reporting that SQL Server 2005 will ship without data mirroring as they won’t be able to meet the ship date in November this year. This will be a big blow as I know some people already incorporating that in their design of some solutions. What is interesting is why did it take MS so late to realise they won’t be able to make the feature for RTM? ...

Business Week has a interesting cover story about the issues at MS internally and how the employees feel the company is doing. It makes one think of the troubling signs ahead.

At PDC, Microsoft announced that there will be subsets of Avalon available on other OS’s including Macs where one of the demos at the PDC was actually running on a Mac. There is no linux bits that I am aware of (yet), but its coming soon I would suppose. Ben Galbraith (from Sun) has a post talking about this albeit a skeptical one. ...

If you have been thinking of getting a new machine or upgrading your existing one, you might want to hold off a bit on that if you can for another few months as it seems like Windows Vista (what was called as Longhorn), will have some pretty hefty hardware requirements - e.g. you would need a AGP with at least 128 mb RAM (preferably 256 mb). If you want to run the 64 bit edition, then as the smallest memory chunk that a program can allocate increases, the overall memory usage also goes up, which means you need double the memory of 32 bit. So if you are using 1 gb for 32 bit, you need to get 2 gb for the same load for 64 bit. For most geeks these requirements is not an issue, but what of your average joe who cannot afford these or even understands what it means? ...

Check it out here .

A colleague of mine, pointed this out and seems like MS has released the Beta 1 for Longhorn (now called Vista), on MSDN . If you are universal subscriber you can download it. But, its a hefty 2.GB d/l! Below is my screen shot from my login. ...

Don’t have the time or technical expertise to secure and manage a computer on a daily basis? Windows OneCare is a comprehensive PC health service that helps make your PC experience hassle-free. This includes comprehensive PC health checks including antivirus, firewall, anti-spyware.

From OSNews: Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn . They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches. ...