The MSDN Subscription Team Blog

Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Visual Studio 11 Beta, and Windows Server 8 Beta - Now Live on Subscriber Downloads

Andrew Brenner — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:14:46 GMT

MSDN Subscribers can start downloading now from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/

Subscriber Portal Performance Fix

Andrew Brenner — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:55:51 GMT

Since the launch of the new portal, there’s been intermittent slow performance on Subscriber Downloads. Periodically the “Loading” dialog would last for up to 15 seconds. Thanks to all of you who reported this. Last week we released a fix and the issue is now resolved.

As always, please continue to send us feedback if you have any problems on the subscriber portal or ideas to improve your MSDN Subscription experience.

Thanks,

-Andrew

The New MSDN Subscriber Portal is Live!

Mark Curphey — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:19:03 GMT

Mark Curphey here (@curphey on Twitter)

I am delighted to say that we have just released the new MSDN Subscriber portal for all MSDN Subscribers. We used to RTM, we now RTW!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions

The new portal is the culmination of a years worth of great work by my team (you guys rock!) completely re-writing the web infrastructure and front-end user experience. We spent a lot of time earlier in the year researching user goals and current issues and have then been constantly iterating over the prioritized scenarios ever since.

In the new year we will continue to improve the experience (we maintain a big backlog) and will start working on a lot of back-end infrastructure work and the subscriber management experience for enterprise customers.

Watch this space and of course let us know what you think of our work!

Cheers!

- Mark

MSDN-Technet Subscriptions Beta to end on November 16

Bob Vogt — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:24:00 GMT

I want to let you know that the MSDN-TechNet Subscriptions 2.0 Beta will end on November 16. The MSDN-Technet Subscriptions engineering team and I want to thank all of you who used the Beta and provided feedback; it’s been extremely valuable to us. Thank you! We've learned a lot and made improvements based your comments, and we have more improvements planned. We always welcome any feedback that you may have, now and in the future. If you have used the Beta, please delete any bookmarks you've created for specific Beta pages to avoid broken links after the Beta ends. We will be upgrading the 1.0 Subscriptions site to 2.0 in the near future. You can expect more information posted here in the blog in the coming weeks.

Thanks again for all of your support.

Bob Vogt
Program Manager
MSDN-Technet Subscriptions

Update on the Azure download issues

Bob Vogt — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:52:00 GMT

Bob Vogt here.

As Mark mentioned in his last post, we've been investigating the download issues that some subscribers have been reporting. Along the way, we've made several changes the new network that have improved the experience for some but not all you. As a result, we reverted to the older network this morning. Those of you who've been having download issues should see improvements beginning today. I'd like to thank everyone who has provided traceroute and other information. This information has helped us to understand where the problems are and fix them in many cases. Going forward, we still expect to move back to the new download network but not until all of the issues have been resolved.

Our apologies to those of you who've been inconvenienced and thanks for your patience.

-- Bob

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - Now Available for MSDN Subscribers

Mark Curphey — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:38:58 GMT

Mark Curphey here (@curphey)

We have just published the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview files live for all MSDN Subscribers - http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/

Files now live include Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, Team Foundation Server Developer Preview and the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview.

Enjoy !

Investigating Azure Downloads Issues

Mark Curphey — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:18:54 GMT

Mark Curphey here

We are actively investigating intermittent reports of slow download speeds and some files not completing their full download size in some parts of the world. We made changes to the network yesterday and expect to make more later today.

We will be updating the @msdn twitter account with updates as they happen and our support folks are helping users in the MSDN Subscriptions forum.

Our apologies. We are actively working to get everything running and back to normal as soon as possible.

- Mark

Subscriber Files on Azure and Using The Internet Explorer Download Manager

Mark Curphey — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:48:00 GMT

Mark Curphey here ( @curphey). A few weeks ago I mentioned that we had made a decision to remove the additional download manager required for subscribers and were in the process of some engineering work to roll-out that experience to all subscribers. I am pleased to say that we have just deployed a new build and all 15,000+ products that are available to all MSDN and TechNet subscribers can now be downloaded directly from inside of your browser with no additional software needed from our shiny new Azure Edge Content Network based download system. We used to serve up files from 3 global data centers but are now able to take advantage of over 24 global nodes!

That means faster downloads for almost everyone around the world and for the vast majority of subscribers we know this will be a significant improvement. We took great care in analyzing the browser mix of users coming to our site and talking to subscribers around the world. All modern browsers have a download manager built in meaning that the pause and resume functionality is available without the challenges installing extra software, configuring proxies and challenges when running x64 bit versions of browsers. We also appreciate that there are a small number of subscribers who relied on the scheduling feature in the download client to download files during low cost bandwidth periods or low network saturation times and well be posting some workarounds for you in the coming weeks.

The IE team have a great page about the IE download manager here and similar experiences are available modern versions of Chrome and Firefox.

We are closely monitoring the new system but know from our instrumentation that users are getting their downloads significantly faster than on the previous system. We hope you enjoy the faster downloads and love to get feedback.

- Mark – http://www.curphey.com

Quick Update on Subscriber Downloads

Mike Kinsman — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:28:00 GMT

Hey Everyone,

Just a quick update today on that super-fast Azure CDN Mark was talking about in his last post.

Yesterday we moved some files over to use that CDN, and we made a few changes so that no Download Manager is needed to download these files. When you download from Subscriber Downloads, if you've picked one of these files, you wont be prompted to run the FTM, the Microsoft Download Manager or any other Download Manager. The transfer may just be handled by your browser, and because its on the Azure CDN, it should go much faster!

Thats about it! Thanks and have a great weekend!

Mike
Subscriptions Support

A Quick Update on the New Download System and beta improvements

Mark Curphey — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 03:51:51 GMT

A quick update on my last post notifying users that we temporarily switched back to the old download system. After a lot of testing this week we think we have identified the issues we were experiencing and will be testing some prototype code this weekend. We don't yet have a date on when we can switch back to the super-fact Azure ECN but it should be soon. There will be additional tweaking we can do to crank the speed up by several magnitudes that all revolves in improved optimization of caching algorithms.

Many users will also have now noticed some updates from a beta refresh deployment that went live yesterday. As well as making the beta option available to several hundred thousand more subscribers there are many UX enhancements and a few UX bugs now fixed.

We are hearing load and clear that many people really miss the product categories in the new experience and we are listening and want to see clearer product definitions. We are digesting the feedback and will make improvements based on feedback so please keep it coming (praise or constructive feedback).

Enjoy the weekend!

Mark

Download System Notification

Mark Curphey — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:21:38 GMT

We are investigating some reported cases of intermitent issues in very specific circumstances with the new download system for MSDN & TechNet so have temporarily switched back all file downloads to the previous system. We don't yet have an ETA on when the files will move back but we will post a notice here when our testing is fuly complete.

MSDN & TechNet Subscriptions 2.0 Experience Preview

Mark Curphey — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:45:57 GMT

Mark Curphey here (@curphey on Twitter and http://www.curphey.com on the web) I am the Group Program Manager for the Subscriptions team here at Microsoft looking after the talented and hard working Program Managers, Developers and Testers that bring you our Subscriptions services. Today we will start to gradually roll out a complete new site experience for MSDN, TechNet, BizSpark and Website Spark subscribers that we have been working on for the last nine months starting today with an option to preview the new experience for some subscribers. We have invested in a lot of energy in behind the scenes infrastructure changes and very visible user experience changes so that you can find and use your software and benefits faster and easier. The significant changes that most users will immediately notice will be the vastly improved web site design and the super fast and reliable new download systems based on Azure.

Over the next few months we will be beta testing the updates and subscribers will start to see an “Opt In” link a the top left hand corner of the browser. Opting in will activate the 2.0 UX, with an option to go back to the 1.0 (current) UX during the beta period at any point. We are releasing incremental builds on a very regular basis so don’t expect all pages to be 100% complete (especially static content) from day one.

Both the 1.0 UX and the 2.0 UX users will start to see products from the 15,000 + product catalog moved to the new Azure download infrastructure. For these products you will be promoted to install a new Azure Download Manager (DLM) and will download your files from the closest Azure node to your logical location around the world. For most users the speed limitation will now be your local Internet connection and not our data center pipes. We expect to retire the current download manger within a short period of time as soon as we are 100% sure we don’t have any kinks in the system. There is no place like production!

There are literally hundreds of improvements to the web site, all framed within a nice new “metro” look and feel, far too many to list but here are a few of my personal favorites.

With so much software available in the product library we know that search is critical to get right and so we have completely re-written the way we do search from the ground up. We have changed the data model enabling us to have much beta meta-data to find what you want. You can now browse the catalog alphabetically. If you know what you want we have a new auto-complete enabled search so typing the first few letters will quickly give you options of what's available and save you time. When you get shown a list of options (maybe you wanted to see all Windows files) we present you with a set of filters for language and architecture with only options for what’s available. If there is no Dutch version of a product we won’t waste your time letting you try and filter for no results!

The product results page is significantly better, especially when your search query returns a lot of results. We’ve de-emphasized a lot of details that weren’t used by the vast majority of users and simplified the language and taxonomies significantly.

If the experience is made available to you we hope you choose to try it and would love your feedback so we know what you like and can improve things you don’t. You can submit comments here, tweet me personally @curphey or send me an email mark dot curphey at microsoft.com. I promise to follow-up with everyone.

Andrew Brenner our User Experience PM will start a series of blog posts soon walking through details of how to use each feature as its rolled out or updated.

Enjoy and thanks again to my team who rock hard each and every day to bring you the service !

-Mark

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight

Mike Kinsman — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 21:17:13 GMT

Hey Everyone,

Just a quick note: we are conducting maintenance on Subscriber Downloads starting 9:30pm tonight (US West Coast time), and lasting until 4:30am tomorrow morning (again, US West Coast Time).

During the outage, customers will see errors when attempting to view or claim any product keys. If you need access to your keys during the downtime, click the handy Export Key List to XML link on your My Product Keys page ahead of time, and you'll download an XML file with your keys included to access offline.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

Thanks,
Mike Kinsman
Subscriptions Support

Who moved My Product Keys?

Andrew Brenner — Tue, 24 May 2011 21:19:00 GMT

We’re working on some big improvements that you’ll be seeing in the coming months, but we don’t want to lose sight of the small things we can do to improve the site right now. The other day I read someone’s feedback about how it didn’t make sense that you had to navigate to Subscriber Downloads in order to get to My Product Keys. I realized that he was right, so we moved My Product Keys to the primary nav.

Are there little things you’d like to see us improve about the MSDN Subscriptions web site? Let us know.

-Andrew

Get up to $3,100 in Annual Windows Azure platform benefits at no extra charge

Mark Curphey — Tue, 17 May 2011 21:51:55 GMT

Just in case you missed Soma’s Happy 1st Birthday, Visual Studio 2010! blog post on April 12th, if you’re an existing Visual Studio Professional, Premium or Ultimate with MSDN subscriber, you get up-to $3,100 in annual Windows Azure platform benefits at no extra charge. These benefits let you try out Windows Azure for an extended period of time at no cost.

The Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate with MSDN Subscription benefit provides developers with an equivalent of two virtual servers that you can use to evaluate your application resource requirements. The Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Subscription benefit provides you with an equivalent of one extra small virtual server.

To activate your Windows Azure platform benefits, please follow these steps:

1. Sign-in to your MSDN subscription benefits page.
2. Click on the Windows Azure Platform link from MyAccount and follow the steps to activate Windows Azure (for limited free access). You'll need your credit card or invoicing to sign up. If you use more than the amount of services included with your MSDN subscription, we'll bill your card or invoice you for these overages. You can visit the Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal to look up your usage at any time.
3. Go to the Windows Azure Developer Portal to access

Want to Participate in Our Research Study ?

Mark Curphey — Tue, 17 May 2011 21:32:54 GMT

In June, we will be conducting a series of focus groups and usability studies in San Jose & Sunnyvale CA, Seattle, and New York. The research will help us better understand customer experience in usability, benefits, and other areas. The feedback you provide will help us determine the next 3 year engineering roadmap. If you are interested in participating, please e-mail v-tyzoel@microsoft.com and provide your name, e-mail address, and phone number so we can reach out to you for additional screening. If you are chosen to participate you will be provided compensation for your time and input. Thank you!

RSS Feed of New Downloads – We Got That

Mark Curphey — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:52:43 GMT

Mark Curphey here again (@curphey on Twitter)

I was in a meeting with a senior person in the company the other day who said “You know what I really want for my MSDN Subscriptions is an RSS feed of the products as they are published”. Guess what, we already have that (and it will be much easier to find when we roll out the new UI). The full link is here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscription-downloads.rss

The MSDN Subscriptions Team Are Listening and Coming to Cities Around the World in May

Mark Curphey — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:54:00 GMT

Mark Curphey here again

In May we will be running some customer research studies in the US (Silicon Valley & New York), China (Beijing) (Shanghai) , India (Bangalore) and Germany (Frankfurt) (Munich). Our Program Managers who will be part of the study and so we would love to have a chance to listen to customers.

If you are a company that has an MSDN Subscription (and particularly if you administer the MSDN benefits in your organization) and are based in one of those locations we would love to hear from. You can mail mark dot curphey at microsoft dot com.

If you are an individual subscriber and would like to meet up for an informal chat over a beer well also have an open bar in each city. Look for dates published on this site soon!

Happy weekend!

Would You Like to Download VM’s ?

Mark Curphey — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:35:01 GMT

Mark Curphey here again (@curphey on Twitter and www.curphey.com on the web)

This Friday post is a very simple set of questions but before I ask them I wanted to set the context. The subscriptions team have been discussing the idea of packaging up specific subscriptions software into a set of virtual machines that subscribers can download and run; for example Windows Server with SQL Server or Team Foundation Server on Windows Server or a Windows 7 Desktop with Office Ultimate 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. There are several levels of subscriptions and the contents of the VM’s would only be software available to your specific level and well need to work out a nice process for you to easily add your keys and activate but we think it’s achievable.

So two simple questions:

Do you want to download virtual machines ?

If yes, what software do you want pre-installed on the VMs ?

Coming Soon to MSDN Subscribers!

Mark Curphey — Mon, 09 May 2011 21:44:13 GMT

Intro

Mark Curphey here (@curphey on Twitter and www.curphey.com on the web). I am the Group Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online Subscriptions team. We develop the Subscriptions web site and the infrastructure that powers your MSDN (and TechNet) subscriptions experience. There is a lot of exciting things that have been happening behind the scenes and we are going to re-birth this blog to start sharing the news so look for regular updates from now on. You will see posts about how features work and about new features we are releasing from the Program Management team, posts from the developers about how we do development, and our architecture and from the test engineers about we test our code. As a teaser I want to share a sneak peak about two things we will start rolling out in beta this summer (starting at the end of June). Small print: The screen shots may not be exactly the same as the final experience, we are an Agile team after all!

There are two big improvements to talk about (and many more in the pipe):

New Web Experience for Subscribers
Super Fast Downloads from the Azure ECN

New Web Experience for Subscribers

The subscriber portal has had a complete face-lift including the downloads experience, the help content, program comparison and buy experiences.

Most subscribers will probably first notice a new My Account page where you can learn about all the benefits you have available to you as a subscriber and understand what you have used and what you might want to activate. We know from research in speaking to customers they want a simple place to understand and navigate to all of their benefits like their Azure hours or Technical Support Incidents but in the past have often found it hard to track those benefits.

From the My Accounts page you can also easily find common tasks like activating specific benefits and updating your profile.

We have invested a lot of time in helping subscribers find the right software easily.

In the header you will see a new search experience that has auto-complete to help you get to popular downloads fast.

The products A-Z helps you sort through high level groups of software in the same way as you experience on the Microsoft download center.

The new downloads experience has a set of dynamically generated filters to allow you to easily filter through versions, architectures and languages. No more manually sorting and scanning hundreds of versions of Windows or Office when you just want Windows 7 Ultimate and Office 2010 Ultimate but if you want to find a specific version from the entire catalog it’s all still there and searchable.

There is lots more of course and well release some more screen shots in the coming weeks. We built a full sketch flow prototype and have done extensive user testing and well cover how we do our user testing in a future post.

Super Fast Downloads from the Azure ECN

We currently serve files from three data centers around the world and have been working hard to move our downloads infrastructure to the Azure Edge Content Network (ECN). The Azure ECN has a large number of nodes all over the world and so if you live in New York for instance you would pull files from a node that will be both closer and faster than you get them today. When you use the Azure ECN you will also be promoted to install a new modern download client to enable you to pause and resume. At this point the gallery erupts with happiness at no more File transfer Manager! We know, we are cheering here as well! Its hard to predict just how much faster this new system will be as it will depend on where you live but we can confidently say that it will be orders of magnitude faster for most users and we will be able to scale much better at launch events.

We have internal previews now running of both the web experience and Azure downloads and plan to roll them out to subscribers as a beta some time in July. The final release is currently tracking to September.

Look for more updates in the coming weeks. We have been thinking about a series of short videos from the product managers about how to do tasks that some people find tough or may not fully understand. If you have hot topics or want to hear from us about anything from how we build software to suggesting features we would love to hear from you!

-Mark

Some Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Activation resources

SubscriptionsBlogger2 — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:31:00 GMT

We know that product activation can be a very complicated thing to figure out for developers, where environements are constantly torn down and rebuilt, and activations are not unlimited.

I was just alerted of a few more resources that you may find useful:

Product Activation in Development Environments for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Volume Activation: http://www.technet.com/volumeactivation

Converting KMS Clients to MAK - required since Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 install automatically as KMS clients. A MAK can be installed during or any time after operating system installation.

And as always, if you are wiping and rebuilding more often than 30 days, you may want to consider not activating at all since many products allow usage for 30 days prior to activating.

Wave 2 of Windows 7 Client and Windows Server 2008 R2 - NOW LIVE ON MSDN SUBSCRIBER DOWNLOADS!

SubscriptionsBlogger2 — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:01:00 GMT

Here you go!

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM - some follow up

SubscriptionsBlogger2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:59:00 GMT

We see that everyone seems to be getting their bits and keys ok for Windows 7. Demand has been phenomenal, and WWW traffic overall today very high, so speeds may be a bit slower than you are used to.

There have been several follow up questions I thought I would address:

Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM will be released in a few weeks (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian). At the same time, Windows 7 Client in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese will be releasing.

Academic Alliance Administrators that have a Subscriptions account also have access to the bits and keys today. I believe the files have to be picked up and moved over to other AA systems though separate from the MSDN Subscriptions site. I think it is safe to assume they are working on that now.

Product Keys

There were eight product keys made available today. Different Subscriptions programs and levels have access to different keys potentially.

Released today:

OEM key for Windows 7 Starter
Retail keys for Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, Home Basic, and Home Premium
KMS and/or MAK keys for Windows 7 Enterprise. See Volume Activation Operations Guide

Hope that helps

Windows 7 RTM bit now live on Subscriber Downloads

SubscriptionsBlogger2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:53:00 GMT

Enjoy!

https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx?pv=36:350

and alternate download location (through Akamai):

https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/securedownloads/bb608344.aspx

8PM Update

Early this evening, due to continued high demand for Windows 7 RTM bits, we made some changes to move traffic for the Enterprise and Ultimate bits over to Akamai. Some of you have noticed the Download links grayed out, but maybe did not notice the statement under the file name: "Please click Details for download information." In the file details are links to the Akamai downloads and a link to the Product Keys list page, to get the bits and keys.

Windows 7 RTM - coming soon

SubscriptionsBlogger2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:46:00 GMT

Reposting for higher visibility:

We have had almost 100 unposted comments asking what time we will post Windows 7 RTM. Rather than posting them all, I'll just say that we will make some announcements when it is made available for download. You can also monitor the Subscriptions RSS feed for notification when the bits are made available.

Thanks,

Mike