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The New Service Pack is expected to be available for Technet, MSDN, and Volume Licensing customers on February 17th, with a release to the General public about a week later. Of course these dates can move around a bit. The product was Released to Manufacturing on February 9th.
How much difference will you see after you install this Service Pack?
For most people there won’t be any notable change to what you are doing or any fantastic new features. Unless you do quite a bit with Virtualization, most of this service pack is about compiling the hotfixes and patches. If you look at the notable changes document you will find that the majority of changes revolve around some services that are not used by most people (Direct Access, Failover Clustering, etc…)
For those of you using Hyper-V or VDI, there are some really nice new features. Primarily Dynamic Memory in Hyper-V which will allow a much greater density of Virtual Machines on each server. Microsoft says around a 40% improvement of density per server. RemoteFX is the other big feature which will allow you to Virtualize the GPU on a server to the Virtual Desktop. Giving a much richer desktop experience to client machines, especially the very low cost, very thin client devices.
Starting with Windows Vista and being improved in Windows 7 is the new search capabilities. Searching for content in your computer has never been quicker than it is now.
With the indexing service it is very simple and fairly quick to not only search for a file name but to search the contents of documents and email.
Microsoft builds in filters for many of the common file types (doc, docx, xls, xlsx, txt, etc…) however some third party software has files that are not indexed by default.
PDF files are a very common file that is used that is not indexed by default. You must install Acrobat reader or some other viewer, which will register the PDF extension with the system and start indexing the files.
If you are running the 32 bit version of Windows Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 will automatically install the ifilter program which will allow the system to not only index the file name but also index the contents of PDF files that are recognized as text. Some PDF files recognize the contents as text and other while showing words see them as a picture. Usually this can depend on how the file was created. If you take a Word doc and save as a PDF, Acrobat can recognize the characters. If you scan a document Acrobat will usually see this as a picture of the paper, you can run OCR software to covert to characters.
The tool is still in beta so there are some oddities but it is very thorough in its analysis of a system and how an application can expose that system to threats. The current version only works on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
The setup is very straightforward.
Once the program is installed it does have to run as an administrator.
Microsoft recently unveiled Version 2.0 of Surface. Ok, I know there really isn’t anything you can do with it currently and I certainly wouldn’t spend the money on it now.
It’s just kind of cool and in the future could be really nice.
We have had the ability to publish an Excel Workbook to the web before but we needed to have either SharePoint or save the file as an HTML page and then post. Now with the Office Web Apps you can publish your Workbook to the web in either your website or a blog entry like this one. The advantage of this method is that when you update the data in the workbook it automatically updates the webpage that is displaying the workbook.
It might not be needed for everything but I think it is kind of cool.
Follow this link to get the directions on how to do this. You can also do this with PowerPoint.
Ever wish there was a way to stop people from “Replying to All” in Outlook? You know the scenario: someone from the company sends out an informational email and the next thing you know 25 people decide to Reply to All and the users of your company are flooded with emails that are just not relevant.
For the most part, it is a pretty simple upgrade to SP1. I do recommend that you take the time to verify any 3rd party applications that work with Exchange 2010 (Virus, Spam, or Archiving programs). Many of these applications take a little while to support the updated service pack. Since the update does modify the architecture of the core Exchange services, some of those 3rd party apps may have issues.
Here’s a matrix of the updates required, including download locations and file names:
Hotfix
Download
Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows 7 & Windows Vista
979744
A .NET Framework 2.0-based Multi-AppDomain application stops responding when you run the application
977624
AD RMS clients do not authenticate federated identity providers in Windows Server 2008 or in Windows Vista. Without this update, Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) features may stop working
Request from CSS using the “View and request hotfix downloads” link in the KBA | US-English
Select the download for Windows Vista for the x64 platform.
N.A.
N.A.
979917Two issues occur when you deploy an ASP.NET 2.0-based application on a server that is running IIS 7.0 or IIS 7.5 in Integrated mode
973136,
FIX: ArgumentNullException exception error message when a .NET Framework 2.0 SP2-based application tries to process a response with zero-length content to an asynchronous ASP.NET Web service request: “Value cannot be null”.
977020FIX: An application that is based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 and that invokes a Web service call asynchronously throws an exception on a computer that is running Windows 7.
The Remote Desktop Connection Manager (or RDCMan, for short) is a pretty cool, free tool from Microsoft to help manage all those remote desktop connections.
You can create multiple files with an .rdg extension.
Once you have created a file you can look at the settings.
The settings will allow you to manage logins, gateways, display settings, and other options for all of your connections.
Now just add your servers into the system. You can create groups for them and override the default settings with different connections options.
Once you have the servers added, you can see a preview of each one and just double click on one to connect to it. Switching to another server is as easy as clicking on that one.
Instead of having a bunch of windows open, you can manage all of the connections very easily with this free tool. Give it a try.
PowerShell is this awesome tool that Microsoft is integrating to just about everything. Back to the command line we go. Scripting is really powerful and can really streamline a lot of processes.
One of most common questions I get is, “How do I run a script in PowerShell?”
This might seem really simple until you actually go a run a script.
In the following screen shot I am trying to run the script getver.ps1 which is in the directory ‘c:\temp\scripts’. Since PowerShell looks similar to the command shell you would think that you could just type the name of the script. When you do you get the first response. In PowerShell you have to type the whole path of the script, or if you are in the directory already you can use ‘.\scriptname to call the script. However, you will notice that that doesn’t work either.
Before you can run a script you have to set the execution policy. There are 4 levels.
Restricted – No scripts can be run. Windows PowerShell can be used only in interactive mode.
AllSigned – Only scripts signed by a trusted publisher can be run.
RemoteSigned – Downloaded scripts must be signed by a trusted publisher before they can be run.
Unrestricted – No restrictions; all Windows PowerShell scripts can be run
The default is Restricted. You can set your policy to AllSigned or RemoteSigned which works great in your environment to distribute scripts. If you are just testing and developing scripts you may want to use Unrestricted on that workstation. For a more information on script signing check out this article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.04.powershell.aspx
As you can see I set the execution policy to Unrestricted and then ran the script. The script does run at this point at returns the version of the OS that is running.
Hopefully, this will help get those scripts running.
