March, 2012

Gang, about a month ago we switched a setting on this blog so that only excerpts of our posts appear on the blog’s home page. To see a complete post, you need to click through to that post via the post’s title. We made this change because some of our posts are quite long and we were concerned that having complete posts on the home page forces you to do a lot of scrolling just to see the various posts you might want to read. We’d love your feedback on this. Tell us in a comment whether you like excerpted or complete posts on the home page. Thanks very much!

Hello! This is the second post in what we hope will be a long series of guest posts by Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs). Since the early 1990s, Microsoft has recognized the inspiring activities of MVPs around the world with the MVP Award . MVPs freely share their deep knowledge, real-world experience, and impartial and objective feedback to help people enhance the way they use technology . Of more than 100 million users who participate in technology communities, around 4,000 are recognized as Microsoft MVPs. This post is by Joseph Guadagno, Visual C# MVP . Joseph here. My 2012 Global Summit experience started back in November of 2011. You’re probably thinking, “November, the Summit isn’t until February” and that is true, the actual Summit did not take...

On January 31, we released a draft version of the Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 ebook containing the six boldfaced chapters below: PART I DATABASE ADMINISTRATION (by Ross Mistry) 1. Denali Editions and Enhancements 2. High Availability and Disaster Recovery Enhancements 3. Scalability and Performance 4. Security Enhancements 5. Beyond Relational PART II BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DEVELOPMENT (by Stacia Misner) 6. Integration Services 7. Data Quality Services 8. Master Data Services 9. Analysis Services and PowerPivot 10. Reporting Services That release is available in PDF only, and you can download it via our January 31 blog post . We’re still on schedule to release the final, full, and, yes, free 10-chapter ebook on March 15 , but we’ll have only the PDF ready on that date. We’ll release...

Hello! This is the first post in what we hope will be a long series of guest posts by Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs). Since the early 1990s, Microsoft has recognized the inspiring activities of MVPs around the world with the MVP Award . MVPs freely share their deep knowledge, real-world experience, and impartial and objective feedback to help people enhance the way they use technology . Of more than 100 million users who participate in technology communities, around 4,000 are recognized as Microsoft MVPs. This post is by Marques Lyons, Zune MVP. You can learn more about Marques via his MVP profile . Marques here! For the past four years, I’ve taken a plane from Long Beach Airport to SEA-TAC for Microsoft’s annual MVP Global Summit . During the course of a week at the Summit, I and...

The Microsoft Press Facebook page will host a sample of practice test questions and answers from the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680): Configuring Windows 7 . If you want to play along, check us out - http://www.facebook.com/microsoftpress Here’s today’s question: