Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

This makes me sad: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/10/rip_mr_burgermaster.html My own personal connection to Burgermaster is manyfold. My first article for Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ) was about the Burgermaster segment in Windows 3.X. When...

A long, long time ago I wrote quite a bit about PE files, OBJ files, compilers, linkers, etc... Thus, it warms my heart to see the VC++ linker adding a dedicated thread for writing PDBs, and achieving a nice performance boost as a result. http://blogs...

In my previous post , I described the requirements and purchasing decisions around a new Windows Media Center based PC, running Windows 7, and acting as a no-touch appliance. When I left off, I had purchased an HP s5100z PC and added an HD 4350 Video...

Recently I decided it was time to jump back whole hog into the Windows Media Center experience now that Win7 is baked. In these next few posts, I’ll explain the choices I made and the process I went through to get a first class experience. I had last...

This is truly cool stuff. VHDs are no longer "just" a virtualization file format. They're baked into the OS. Yes, you can boot an entire OS from a single file. You can create a VHD from the Disk Management Console without having Hyper-V installed. ...

I've been waiting for quite a long to post this information. Hyper-V now supports systems with up to 64 cores (we call them LPs). This is 4x the number supported in the original release just 9 months ago. The devs on my team write the code and did...

If you're still using the original Hyper-V that runs as part of Windows Server 2008, this is a big deal. While Windows 7 is getting all the attention, the equivalent server version (Windows Server 2008 R2) is also available as a release candidate....

My new favorite "Nerd" feature in Win7 involves the Resource Monitor (not surprisingly.) It's mesmerizing at times... Ever had a program get "stuck", where it seems to be quite obviously waiting for something, but you don't know what? Install programs...

While the Windows 7 UI is currently getting most of the "What's new?" attention, I'm a system guy at heart. I gravitate towards the tools and features that let me understand what's going on. Why does program 'X' take so long to load? Which of my dozens...

While there's much press coverage about Windows 7 hitting beta, the availability of the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta is also big news for me personally. In particular this beta brings the first public look at the next iteration of Hyper-V. There's several...

I've been somewhat quiet in my blog lately, posting vary sparsely in 2008. Consider this the "reset", wherein I resolve to be more frequent in my updates. In a blog post over two year ago, I mentioned that I'd joined a new group at Microsoft, and was...

Stealing a page from Mark Russinovich's blog here. I've been going batty trying to play ripped DVDs residing on my WHS box through my XBox 360. I'd done all the due research, and had followed all the various directions around making symbolic links...

I was quite sad to hear the news this morning (via email) that my friend, Paul DiLascia has passed away suddenly. I don't know all details yet. I've heard he passed away on Sept. 3rd, but the MSJ/MSDN network just heard of it in the last day or...

Last night my wife took me to the Met for dinner. Midway through dinner I glanced over at the adjoining table, and was quite surprised to see Jim Allchin , along with two other people. And earlier in the day, I actually sat at the same table with another...

Likely you've already seen this elsewhere, but if not, WHS has RTMed! http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2007/07/16/ship-it.aspx Yes, it's been awhile since I posted. I've been running the "nearly" RTM bits for about a week now. Prior to...

In a previous post , I lamented the loss of SoftIce. Now, we truly are at the end of an era. Compuware is closing its development lab in New Hampshire. This is where tools like BoundsChecker, SoftIce, TrueTime, SmartCheck, CodeReview, and many others...

Yes, it's been awhile since I posted anything on this topic. My bad. My WHS box is happily purring along in the closet. I took it down for a few days while I went through a whole memory upgrade experience. The details are unimportant. The net result...

One of the cool features of IIS 7 is it's modular architecture . It lets you create just the IIS you want, with minimal attack surface area. Alas, one of the greatest consumers of my time lately is determining why things no longer works like on IIS...

Here's what it looks like when I'm at work, accessing my home network via Windows Home Server. I've blocked out certain private data. Clicking on any of the machines starts up a Remote Desktop connection, which can be full screen or hosted in the...

This morning my wife was firmly ensconced on the couch with the puppy, catching up on her shows on Media Center. Sensing some free time, I snuck upstairs and began poking around at getting remote access working with Windows Home Server. The real...

See the Windows Home Server blog for details.

(Switching away from WHS for the moment...) In my current work life, I've been playing extensively with the Crimson APIs, which in Vista/Longhorn server attempt to unify the NT event log and ETW tracing. From what I've heard, there was a major effort...

Andre asks: what is the effective size of the server if i have 4 250GB disk? is it 0.5TB or 1TB? The short answer is "It depends". Specifically, it makes a difference what folders you enable duplication on. Worst case, your 1 TB of physical...

Is here: http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/ No real news on my own WHS box. Still hanging in there, dutifully doing backups every night on all four client machines. When I looked at the memory usage last night, it was hanging around 540MB, but didn...

No, you're not missing any posts. I've jumped from Day 4 to Day 8. Last night WHS box passed the "Yep, still looking good" test, and got promoted to the dark closet beneath my stairway. No keyboard, mouse or monitor anymore. Just the AC cord and an...