Microsoft: Vista won't support older Visual Studio versions
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InfoWorld - Windows Vista will not support older versions of Visual Studio, a move that will require many developers writing applications for the forthcoming operating system to upgrade to Visual Studio 2005, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.
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Responding to reports of endlessly rebooting PCs that flooded support newsgroups last week, Microsoft said on Tuesday it had pulled an&#160;update designed to prep Windows Vista for Service Pack 1.Although the update -- actually a pair of prerequisite files that modify Vista&#39;s install components -- has been temporarily pulled from Windows Update, Microsoft has not yet produced a fix for users whose machines either won&#39;t boot or reboot constantly.&quot;Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes,&quot; said Nick White, a Vista program manager, in a post to the company&#39;s blog Tuesday afternoon.White downplayed the problem. &quot;So far, we&#39;ve been able to determine that this problem only affects a small number of customers in unique circumstances. We are working to identify possible solutions and will make the update available again shortly after we address the issue.&quot;According to White, Update 937287 was the cause of the problem. In a support document, Microsoft describes that update as one for Vista&#39;s installation software, &quot;the component that handles the installation and the removal of software updates, language packs, optional Windows features and service packs.&quot; Along with a companion update pushed to users starting Feb. 12 and another that was offered to machines running Vista Ultimate and Vista Business in January, the guilty update is required before Vista can be upgraded to&#160;Service Pack 1 (SP1).Shortly after the two prerequisites hit Windows Update last week, users began reporting problems on Microsoft&#39;s support newsgroups. Most said that the update hung as the message &quot;Configuring Updates Step 3 of 3 -- 0% Complete&quot; appeared on the screen. When users rebooted hoping to clear the error, their PCs went into an endless cycle of reboots. A smaller number of users said that their computers refused to boot normally.Some users have been able to regain control by booting from a Vista install DVD and selecting the &quot;Restore from a previous restore point&quot; option.What&#39;s it doing in there?It&#39;s uncertain whether Microsoft knows exactly why Update 937287 is hammering PCs. Even after White posted the company statement to the Vista blog, Darrell Gorter, a Microsoft employee, was asking users to send him system logs. &quot;I still need more log files for the investigations that we are doing,&quot; Gorter said in a message on the support newsgroup. Late last week, Gorter made a similar request on the same message board.Also unclear is the actual extent of the problem. Although White called the number &quot;small,&quot; the traffic on the Vista SP1 newsgroup is heavy. One thread had been viewed more than 35,500 times by late Tuesday.But the problem is not new. Computerworld has found messages describing the endless reboot problem dated Dec. 13, one day after it first offered a Vista SP1 release candidate to the general public. That build of SP1 also required the prerequisite updates, including 937287.Microsoft was not available for comment Tuesday night to answer questions about whether, and if so how, the snafu will impact its plans to start offering SP1 to most users next month. Currently, only beta testers, Volume Licensing customers, and subscribers to TechNet Plus and Microsoft Developer Network have been able to download legal versions of the service pack.That will change in mid-March when SP1 is set to land on Windows Update as an optional update, and again in mid-April when Microsoft said it would start installing SP1 automatically on most PCs running Vista.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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Curtains for Vista in 'H2 2009' Redmond has refused to spike speculation that it is racing to pump out its successor to Vista â Windows 7 â earlier than originally expected.â¦
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Early version of first significant Vista update released to testers. Also, near-final "release candidate" version of Windows Server 2008 to be available within 24 hours.
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Microsoft said on Tuesday that its Visual Studio 2008 IDE (integrated development environment) is now widely available.The tool set was released to Microsoft Developer Network subscribers in November. It is now available to volume licensing and retail customers, the company said in a blog posting.It includes a new version of the .NET framework, version 3.5, which is aimed at taking advantage of two new subsystems Microsoft included in Windows Vista -- WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). WCF is for building service-oriented applications, while WPF is for creating more dynamic user interfaces. Microsoft also built Visual Studio 2008 with the idea of making it easier for developers to create cross-platform applications.Visual Studio comes in various editions, from a free version called Visual Studio Express to a version for entire developer teams called Visual Studio Team System. More information is on the MSDN site.Visual Studio is one of the three products that Microsoft will highlight in a launch event in Los Angeles at the end of next month. The other two are Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Those other new products won&#39;t both be available at that time, however.The new version of Microsoft&#39;s server OS is expected to be available on the day of the launch, but last week Microsoft pushed back the release of SQL Server 2008 until the third calendar quarter of the year. It had said previously that the software would be available by midyear.
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Microsoft this week released a minor update for Windows Vista that adds support for Windows Help files, recognized by their .hlp extension. Such help files have been in use since Windows 3.1, and are still found in a number of applications.
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In a Knowledgebase advisory to developers today, Microsoft is urging developers for Windows Vista who intend for their programs to run under Service Pack 1 not to assume the default search protocol being used by the system is Microsoft's.
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Microsoft announced today that it will soon release -- to a limited number of testers -- a beta version of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. Here's what we know so far.
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Microsoft Corp. defended its decision to limit support for three versions of the Windows Vista operating system to five years rather than the usual 10 years.
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Microsoft denied Wednesday that its software had arbitrarily changed Windows Vista's update settings, saying that users were responsible for the modifications that generated claims of unauthorized patch installs.Reacting to reports that first surfaced last Friday, a program manager for Windows Update said today that an investigation had turned up no evidence the Oct. 9 security fixes had switched settings in Vista's AU (Automatic Updates)."From the customer logs that we received, we found that none of the updates released as part of the October security release have made any changes to users' AU settings," said Nate Clinton in a post to a company blog. "In fact, in the logs we reviewed, AU in all cases was set to 'install updates automatically' prior to the October security release."Vista allows users to turn off AU entirely, tell the operating system to check for but neither download or install any fixes, instruct the mechanism to download files but not install them; or accept all patches without any additional approval.The claims that AU settings had mysteriously reverted to the "install automatically" setting began to trickle into a message forum on the AeroXperience Web site soon after the release last Tuesday of six security updates. Several users said that AU downloaded and installed patches even though they had specifically instructed Vista not to do so.But unlike last month, when a Windows newsletter revealed that Microsoft had updated users' PCs contrary to their instructions, the newest charges were limited to AeroXperience members. No similar reports, for example, were posted to the Windows Update support newsgroup hosted by Microsoft. During September's brouhaha, that newsgroup was thick with messages about the stealth updating.Certain that AU had not run amok and changed its own settings, Clinton fingered users for the altered state of AU. "I want to stress that the Windows Update client does not change AU settings without users' consent. However, AU settings can be set or changed in the following scenarios," he said, and then listed five; all require the user to take action or accept one option from several offered."During the installation of Windows Vista, the user chooses one of the first two recommended options in the 'Out of Box Experience' and elects to get updates automatically from Windows," Clinton said was one possibility. Another: "The user chooses to opt in to Microsoft Update during the installation or the first run experience of another Microsoft application such as Office 2007."Earlier, a Microsoft spokeswoman had been more blunt. "It may be more a case of someone clicking to change their AU settings but not realizing /remembering doing so," she said Tuesday.Users on AeroXperience writing to the forum after Microsoft wrapped up its investigation accepted Clinton's explanation. "The disparity between the Windows Update control panel applet and the OOBE (Out of Box Experience) update settings page (when first running Windows Vista) seems to be what's causing the confusion," said a member identified as Bryant.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Following their public availability on Microsoft's Download Center, two hotfix packs for Windows Vista that improve performance and reliability are now available as optional downloads via Windows Update. They will not, however, be delivered automatically to Vista users.
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Microsoft on Monday released Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005, a major upgrade that adds support for Windows Vista and Office 2007. In addition, Microsoft is now allowing unlimited virtual instances of SQL Server on severs licensed for the Enterprise Edition of the database software.
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Some widely used applications haven't been certified for use with Windows Vista, they may, nonetheless, work.
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(InfoWorld) - In the first year of its release, Microsoft Corp. is expecting businesses to adoptÂ Windows Vista twice as fast as any other version of Windows, with 10 times as many Vista business seats deployed at launch than any previous release of the OS. Despite this optimism, analysts still don't expect businesses to begin adopting Vista in earnest until late 2007 or even 2008, with many waiting for the first service pack version of Vista before they begin considering an upgrade. One reason Microsoft is expecting Vista to be so successful is that the company has made a concerted effort to give customers the tools and training they need to adopt Vista across their businesses, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of the Windows Client Business Group at Microsoft. The company also put test versions of the OS into as many people's hands as possible. For the previous Windows migration, to Windows XP, Microsoft didn't release important tools to help businesses upgrade -- such as a compatibility toolkit to ensure existing applications will work -- until Service Pack 2, which was released nine months after Windows XP shipped, he said. However, with Windows Vista, "we made the beta of the [compatibility] toolkit available with Windows Vista Beta 2," Goldberg said. Microsoft also has opened up test versions of the OS to a wide audience, making Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available to the public. Microsoft expects that at least 5 million users will have access to Vista RC1, all of whom the company has encouraged to provide feedback about the release so it can be as polished as possible before it goes out to business customers in November. Another reason Microsoft expects businesses to warm to Vista early is that the company is doing its share to educate customers on how much money they can save by adopting it, Goldberg said. Microsoft has worked with analysts to develop customer case studies to see how much money business customers can save per PC by upgrading to Vista from their current OS. Al Gillen, an analyst with research firm IDC, does not dispute Microsoftâs calculations for the return on investment (ROI) companies will make on Windows Vista, though he says that companies âdonât get the âRâ unless they put in the âIâ first.â âThe ROI story is exciting, but it requires that customers be mature and agile enough to do what they need to do afterwards,â Gillen said. And while Microsoft may meet its ambitious first-year goals for Vista, that momentum will likely peter out, once pent-up demand has been met, Gillen said. âEighteen months out, the adoption curve will look like any other Windows product,â Gillen said. âItâs hard to move corporate customers faster than they are willing to go.â Microsoftâs bullish projections donât appear to jibe with most current third-party customer surveys, such as one online survey of 314 IT professionals conducted by Computerworld in August. Just 17 percent of IT professionals say they are considering rolling out Windows Vista in the first year. Forty-one percent of respondents said they had no plans to roll out Vista, while 35 percent said they would begin testing Vista only after it ships. Of those who said they were considering rolling out Vista in the near or long-term, the largest group (29 percent) said the cost was the biggest determinant of if and when they would upgrade. That was followed by the hardware requirements (16 percent), the amount of employee training (6 percent) and the amount of IT staff retraining (4 percent). Even if Microsoft doesn't meet its goals for Vista, it's not likely to affect the company's revenue. According to one financial analyst firm, Microsoft stands to lose only about $400 million in revenue in fiscal 2008 if Vista business adoption does not go according to the company's plan, and $2 billion in fiscal 2009. In its most recent fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft reported more than $44 billion in revenue. While the company is optimistic about adoption in its marketing, it is being far more conservative in its financial estimates, analysts said. This is obviously good news for Microsoft, but there is a downside. The longer Vista is available, the more it will cost the company if businesses continue to hold off on adopting the OS. And any negative press or analyst feedback on lackluster Vista adoption could drive Microsoft's stock price down, analysts said. (Eric Lai is a senior writer at Computerworld.)
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Q My new computer runs Windows Vista, but a lot of my older programs don't work right or don't run at all in Vista. Can I put Windows XP on this machine also?
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Perhaps the most oft-asked question by consumers with regard to whether they should adopt Windows Vista is whether their six-month-old or older hardware is too obsolete for Vista to make good use of it. This morning, Microsoft released for free download the XP version of its Vista Hardware assessment tool, whose aim is to tell consumers what they may need to upgrade in order to put the best polish on those heavily anticipated exclamations.
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Microsoft released a refresh of its first service pack for Vista to beta testers on Thursday, indicating the final release might be near.On Thursday, beta users of SP1 received an e-mail from Microsoft alerting them that Vista SP1 refresh 2 is available for download. Microsoft released the latest build, which addressed a small number of bugs that testers encountered in the previous version, to around 15,000 beta users, the company said.Microsoft issued Vista SP1 Release Candidate in December&#160;and a refresh earlier this month. It has said that the&#160;final Vista SP1 will be available to the public during the first quarter of this year, with some reports suggesting that it might come out as soon as Feb. 15.The fact that Microsoft even has a beta of SP1 and has now issued two refreshes to it indicates that the company is trying to be very careful in testing the software and ensuring compatibility, said Andrew Brust, chief of new technology for consulting firm twentysix New York. &quot;They are working hard to under-promise/over-deliver,&quot; he said. &quot;Given the dynamics around the initial release of Vista, that is a prudent course to pursue.&quot;Because it&#39;s quite unusual to issue a beta and multiple refreshes, Microsoft is likely very close to issuing the final public version of SP1, Brust said.That will depend, however, on any problems that testers may find in the newest refresh. If something is broken, Microsoft will have to spend time fixing it, said Chris Swenson, an analyst at NPD Group. &quot;We&#39;re just in wait-and-see mode,&quot; he said.The release of a second refresh doesn&#39;t provide many more clues about when to expect the final version of SP1, agreed Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. &quot;The only thing is that we know they are making progress, but we don&#39;t know how close they are,&quot; he saidStill, the initial indication from people who have been testing SP1 is that it&#39;s pretty solid, so it&#39;s reasonable to think the final version might come out in a couple weeks, Swenson said.The final public release of SP1 could boost Vista sales, at least among enterprise users, since&#160;some companies have said they are waiting for the release of SP1&#160;before upgrading from XP to Vista. Consumers, however, don&#39;t appear to have decided to wait. Retail PC sales were up last year and less than 1 percent of all computers including Macs that sold in retail outlets last year had XP, Swenson said. &quot;It&#39;s more of an issue for businesses,&quot; he said.