Windows Server 2008 CTP packs IIS punch
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Fat lady goes back to trailer Two months after releasing a "feature complete" third Windows Server 2008 beta, Microsoft has added new features to the planned operating system's code base.â¦
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Unpatched Windows machines are vulnerable to latest adware attack
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Microsoft gives us an update on Windows Home Server
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In a blog post on Monday, the development team for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 showed screen shots of an enhancement to Outlook Web Access that enables encrypted e-mails to be sent and received through a Web browser. The demo marks the return of S/MIME support, which had been introduced to OWA before, but which had temporarily disappeared with the first release of ES 2007.
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Part of the recently-released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP was a slew of long-awaited updates to Internet Explorer. Along with patches for the browser, SP2 also included features such as the ability to block
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Electronic forms capabilities added to application server.
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With an absence of fanfare, but otherwise on schedule, Microsoft opened up its download page for Service Pack 2 of Windows Server 2003, both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Perhaps most importantly, enterprises won't have to wait until Longhorn to be able to utilize Windows Deployment Services, the company's new image-based system for pre-composed, remote Windows installations.
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SurfControl (LSE:SRF), a leading provider of global on-demand, network,  and endpoint IT security solutions, announced the release of the  SurfControl Web Filter Appliance with Microsoft ISA 2006 support.
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The Open-Xchange Server software is released for download.
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As both Bill and the Zend Developer Zone announce, the latest version of the FastCGI extension for IIS has been released:   Microsoft is eager to announce availability of the Go Live release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download from the IIS community site, www.iis.net. The Go Live release is the last step in the Microsoft beta process and represents thehighest level of quality and reliability. For the first time, customers have a license that permits them to deploy the FastCGI Extension on their production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.   Bill answers a few key questions - like "is it ready for production?" and "where do I get it?" while the Zend Developer Zone gives more of the background on the path the extension has taken, how it's supported and what sort of future Microsoft has planned for it.
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OK, we had an extended breather from our last look at BIND's zone file pri.example.org. It's time to finish up and get a sense of what these records mean. To go off-topic a little, recently, I had the task of setting up two OpenLDAP servers and putting together a test environment for a project with several developers and several applications including some LAMP applications. Without a working knowledge of DNS, the project would have gone amuck.
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Companies that deploy Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista in tandem could see more than a threefold increase in networking performance, according to a Microsoft-commissioned study.
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Microsoft is preparing a wave of enterprise products, including the long-awaited update to Windows Server.
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Microsoft has released bulletin MS04-039 reporting a security vulnerability in Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and in Proxy Server 2.0, and has also announced the availability of the patches to resolve these issues.
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Second update enjoys stealthy debut Microsoft has released a major update to Windows Server 2003 to make the enterprise software package more stable and easier to manage.â¦
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Analysts believe it's Viridian, the virtualization application, that will drive adoption of Windows Server 2008.