Blocked Tabs

Brendan Grant — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:00:22 GMT

A pain point for some users of Windows Home Server has been around third-party add-ins where loading many of them might cause the Home Server Console to take forever to load or worse... not load at all because of a crash within an add-in on startup.

One of the improvements in Power Pack 1 is the inclusion of some code to watch out for tabs that take too long or throw exceptions on load. If either of those occur the Console will stop trying to load it and on next load of the Console offer the user the choice if they want to continue to try to use it:

This new mechanism offers the user to the opportunity to try know that there is an issue rather than just dealing with a completely broken Console or worse... silent failure.

Each time the Console is reloaded the user will be prompted for each add-in that is causing problems, if they click No and the add-in successfully loads then they wont see the prompt until/if it fails again. If they click Yes then they will be prompted again next time the Console loads*.

The absence of an "Always Ignore" was by design so as to make sure the user is aware of any problematic add-ins so they will be more likely remember to uninstall it rather than keep on silently suppressing such errors.

Like the sound of this feature? Remember... it's just one of the new features that can be seen today in the Release Candidate of Power Pack 1.

* 'Console loads' refers to when the actual Console process on the server starts, not when you connect/reconnect via the client connector which will attempt to connect to an already running copy of the Console on the server.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 RC Released

Brendan Grant — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:32:51 GMT

I'm thrilled to announce just minutes ago the powers that be here flipped the switch to release the much anticipated Release Candidate of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 to the to the world!

To quote some of the marketing bits:

Microsoft is pleased to deliver the Release Candidate of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 for public testing, available at http://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver. We are looking forward to feedback from the Windows Home Server community and releasing the final version.
Power Pack 1 provides a range of new enhancements, including support for home computers running Windows Vista x64 editions, backup of home server Shared Folders, improvements to remote access, more efficient power consumption, improved performance and support for the Chinese and Japanese languages.
Power Pack 1 also resolves the data corruption issue experienced by a very small set of customers.

If you decide to test this RC, please ensure you have a complete backup of all of your files. While internal testing so far indicates that we have fixed the data corruption bug in the beta release, the whole point of this release candidate is to validate internal testing. This means there is a risk that our internal tests have not detected all issues.

For those not keen on installing beta bits on their production machine, you can download an Evaluation copy of Windows Home Server from the Connect site and then apply the update package to it.

No matter how you decide to try it, please be sure to take a look at the release notes to see what has changed.

What are you waiting for? Get the RC!

Important Links:

Brendan on Windows Home Server : Power Pack 1

Blocked Tabs

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 RC Released