Ken Schaefer

The Windows team confirmed to TechBeta participants today that there would be no November CTP. Whilst Build 5259 was distributed to TAP customers, it was an IDW/IDS build and didn't go through the process required to get it to CTP quality.

On a more positive note, the team stated that they hope to be feature complete in December, and that the plan is to have a CTP available in December. Additionally, via an internal discussion list at Avanade (where I work), Toshiba has released beta LDDM drivers to customers for Tecra M3 and M4 (tablet) laptops. Hopefully these will be available to the public soon. Robert McLaws will probably be happy!

Well, it's got to be seen to be believed. Behold the coolest AD attribute!

After seeing this, I had to do some googling. According to comments on Christian Weyer's blog this is an implementation of part of RFC1274, but I think that's someone at Microsoft having a bit of a lend. The only reference in that RFC that I can see to drink, is an example of how to request a new attribute.

Something that came across my inbox today - the relaunch of TechNet and MSDN virtual labs. Hosted by Microsoft using Virtual Server technology, each lab includes a set of learning tasks totalling 90 minutes. The whole setup is capable of supporting 1200 concurrent users. Example labs include ISA Server, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, SMS 2003 and Sharepoint Portal Server. Links to: TechNet Virtual Labs and MSDN Virtual Labs

Rumour has it that build 5259 will be the November CTP, and it's due to be released Nov 18th or 19th. Time to check your usual sources (Connect or MSDN downloads)

I've played around with a few builds of Office 12. With Beta 1 being released to a widespread user base, I'd like to highlight Jensen Harris' blog, which deals with the hows and whys of the UI changes in Office 12. There's some fantastic information there. If you're new to Office 12 - go check it out! Now!

The blog isn't dead - but it's been pretty quiet (even more than usual!). I've been working on a Kerberos/Delegation article, but due to the amount of information I'm now splitting it into four separate articles. As I slowly work my way through these, I've collated some other information that you guys might find useful.

At Microsoft's ITForum being held in Barcelona, Microsoft announced that a number of upcoming products - notably Exchange 12, SBS Longhorn Server and the new midmarket infrastructure offering Codename Centro (an upsized SBS type offering) would only be available for 64bit platforms (presumably x64, except Exchange which might also be available in Itanium/ia64).

Obviously this is a contentious move, since you wouldn't be able to install these products on existing 32bit hardware. On the other hand, pretty much all server hardware sold these days (and probably half the desktop hardware) is 64bit capable (e.g. Intel's Xeon with EMT64 CPUs).

You can get more information on this announcement from the Microsoft website.

Something to think about for the future though if you're planning hardware purchases today. And "no" Exchange 12 will not be using SQL Server as a storage engine (well, that's not the plan at this stage). Exchange 12 will continue to use Jet/ESE. Kodiak (the version after Exchange 12) is currently rumoured to be the release that moves to SQL Server

If you've ever been interested in knowing how large scale IIS implementations are managed, you don't want to miss webcasts coming up next week involving members of the team that manage Microsoft.com.

Included topics include microsoft.com's architecture (Mon 7th), configuration management strategies (Tue 8th), change management (Wed 9th), monitoring and operations management (Thu 10th) and identifying and debugging issues (Fri 11th).

If you want an idea of the scale of MS.com's operations, the main microsoft.com website has around 300,000 concurrent connections at any one time, with 70 million page views and 13 million unique visitors a day. The WindowsUpdate site gets around 150 million unique scan requests a day, and supports 12,000 page requests/sec. All this runs on an infrastructure of around 1600 (mostly quad-proc) servers. Pretty impressive!

You can get details of all these webcasts, and signup, at the main IIS Webcast Page.