Surely by now you've heard of Windows Vista Complete PC backup and recovery.  No?  Well, if you've ever managed to lose a hard drive, then you know how much fun it is to reinstall operating systems and applications.  Not to mention potentially losing ALL of your pictures, music, documents, and other business and personal data. Just yesterday, one of the managers in my group had the hard drive go belly up on her tablet pc.  If she was running Windows Vista, and if she had…[more ]

Are you up to speed on the new imaging alphabet?  ImageX, BDD, WIM, WSIM, WinPE and various other glorious acronyms are discussed in the screencast below.  In the meantime, let me set the stage for the some of the desktop imaging problems today, and the solutions Microsoft is delivering with the next generation operating system, Windows Vista.  Those technologies are being bundled into the Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007 toolset. The Problem Ok, show of hands…[more ]

If you haven't had a chance to look at Windows Vista and it's instrumentation, eventing and monitoring toolset's, you really should grab a copy when the "release candidate" code becomes available.  You'll be pleased with the improvements we've made to the amount of information that is available, and the tools that let you monitor, analyze, and act on that information. In this screencast, we're going to take a brief drive into the tools that are installed locally on a Windows Vista…[more ]

Surely by now you've heard of Windows Vista Aero Glass. It's the sexy new transparency stuff you see in the operating system. It's very noticeable in a variety of the core applications. However, transparency isn't the only user interface improvement you see in Windows Vista. Of course the most visible change initially is the icon for the start menu, affectionately called the "Pearl". If someone sees an oyster coughing up Vista Pearls, please call me. The Start menu is now faster, more…[more ]

I'm guessing most of you think finding stuff is pretty important.  The Windows Vista development team also thinks search should be an easy to use core operating system feature.  The search feature set in Windows Vista is really multiple parts.  We like to call this set of features Windows Vista Instant Search. The Indexing Service As with most search technologies, you have an indexing service that is responsible for indexing the data.  Duh.  You might think it's easy…[more ]

This month my team kicked off a series of free live seminars.  We are doing a Windows Vista Technical Overview in the first couple of hours, and Exchange Server 2003 and 2007 in the second couple of hours.  So far, the Windows Vista interest has been huge.  In the next few days, I'll be recording all of the Windows Vista demos (as promised).  To kick things off, lets talk about some of the sexy stuff. I'm sure by now, you've seen some demo of Windows Vista.  Most…[more ]

Microsoft has made some recent bets on storage management.  That is good news for me for a variety of reasons.  First, it offers a glimpse of my HDTV future.  What?  Yes, you read that correctly.  I’ll get to the explanation in a little bit.  Second, it means our customers will have a broader range of storage support in Microsoft products.  One of the recent acquisitions we made was from String Bean Software.  We acquired their WinTarget iSCSI Target…[more ]

SQL Server 2005 includes some new encryption capabilities that all administrators, programmers and database analyst should be aware of.  Key and Certificate creation and management is now an integral part of SQL Server 2005.  You have the flexibility to create your own X.509 certificates, use Windows Server 2003 CA issued certs, or use other certs purchased from a trusted certificate authority.   There are a number of levels in the key hierarchy, but you’ll spend…[more ]

A number of changes and improvements have been made to SQL Server 2005.  Did I really need to state that?  One of the big improvements is in the management and security area.  The SQL Management Object (SMO) infrastructure replaces much of what used to be accomplished using SQL-DMO.  SMO is tightly integrated with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).  This…[more ]