Chk Your Dsks

Introducing the MSDN WDK Wiki

cfsbloggers — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:20:00 GMT

Ever wanted to add your own content to the WDK documentation? Now you can, thanks to the new MSDN Wiki.

Starting in March 2007, the WDK documentation on the MSDN Library features MSDN Wiki functionality. The Wiki enables you to post and edit community content on individual documentation pages. Anyone with a Microsoft Passport account or Windows Live™ ID can post new blocks and edit existing blocks of community content. To see how content evolves, you can view version history for each content block.

The purpose of the MSDN Wiki is to extend and improve existing documentation on the MSDN Library. Community Content is not for questions; use MSDN forums or newsgroups for this purpose. The Wiki is also not designed for reporting bugs in the documentation. To report WDK documentation bugs, use the feedback link in the kit version of the documentation, or send an e-mail message with the topic name in the subject line to ddksurv1@microsoft.com.

We encourage you to get involved with Community Content right away. This is a great way to show your expertise to the community. The MSDN Wiki supports browsing and editing in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Other wikified content on MSDN includes Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework 2.0, and .NET 3.0 Class Library documentation.

To get started, go to http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com or see the MSDN Wiki blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/msdnwiki/.

You can find the MSDN Wiki frequently asked questions at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/communitymsdnwikifaq.aspx.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all English posts to the MSDN Wiki at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/Community-Edits(d=rss).aspx.

MSDN Webcast: The Revolutionary Windows Vista Transactional NTFS (TxF) Infrastructure

cfsbloggers — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 01:11:00 GMT

Date: Tuesday, May 30, 2006
10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Click for registration

Do you want to improve application reliability and data consistency, and reduce the amount of code you write? Do you want the ability to guarantee that the data in your files is consistent in the event of system failure? The Transactional NTFS (TxF) infrastructure in Windows Vista enables you to roll back operations made on the file system and registry. Using TxF, you can create a group of work that may include updates to files, the registry, and other traditional transactional storage resources. This group of work can then either be completed as a whole or reversed so that no durable changes are made. This webcast provides you with an overview of TxF features and walks you through a simple application.

Presenter: Dana Groff, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Dana is the program manager (PM) in Core File Services team at Microsoft, focusing on transaction technologies. As the PM for Transactional NTFS (TxF), the Kernel Transaction Manager, and Common Log File system, he coordinated building this new kernel transaction infrastructure for Longhorn with Microsoft’s existing user-mode transaction infrastructure. Dana is a veteran of the software industry having worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), IBM, Sybase, and many more much smaller companies in addition to having more than 22 years in industry, developing, online transaction processing (OLTP), and database middleware.

MSDN Webcast: Using the Common Log File System (CLFS) in Your Applications

cfsbloggers — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:04:00 GMT

Date:

Tuesday, May 02, 2006
10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

The Common Log File System (CLFS) makes its debut in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2. CLFS is a new set of Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) and Microsoft Win32 application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide an efficient and robust logging subsystem. This webcast introduces you to basic CLFS features and concepts such as archival, the management layer, write accuracy, and error detection. Join us to find out how CLFS enables you to do away with fragile and performance-sapping logging code in your applications. We also walk through a simple logging application, using the basic APIs to create a log, allocate file space for the log, set up log buffering areas, and then append to or read from the log.

Presenter: Dana Groff, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Click here for details.

What's new in SMB in Windows Vista

cfsbloggers — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:30:00 GMT

[We've had several customers ask us about SMB 2.0. Many thanks to Navjot Virk and Prashanth Prahalad providing this post. --Jill]

Vista comes with a major revision of the SMB protocol identified as SMB 2.0. The existing SMB 1.0 protocol was built to support file-serving solutions a couple of decades ago and was based on the assumptions existing then. For the past decade or so, there have been some minor changes and tweaks to the protocol to support some new functionality.

With Vista, there was an opportunity to address some of the drawbacks of the existing protocol, build on the experiences of version 1, and also address some of the key requirements for the next generation of file servers. These are some of the key enhancements in SMB 2.0:

SMB 2.0 supports an arbitrary, extensible way of compounding operations to reduce round trips. This makes the protocol less chatty as compared to SMB 1.0. Chattiness of SMB 1.0 has often been a major pain point.
SMB 2.0 supports much larger buffer sizes compared to SMB 1.0.
SMB 2.0 greatly grows the restrictive constants in the protocol, so we never need to worry about the protocol itself being the limiting factor for scalability. This includes increasing the number of concurrent open file handles on the server, and the number of shares that a server can share out, among other things.
SMB 2.0 supports durable handles that can withstand short network glitches.
SMB2.0 has support for symbolic links.

All these enhancements in SMB 2.0 will result in better performance and security over LAN and WAN. We do not have performance comparison numbers that we can post just yet but we will post them here in near future.

So, where does this leave the existing Windows clients/servers? Vistas clients will be compatible with all down-level machines. The protocol revision to be used for remote file operations is decided during the negotiation phase. A Vista client advertises to the server that it can understand the new SMB 2.0 protocol. If the server (Longhorn Server or otherwise) understands SMB 2.0, then SMB 2.0 is chosen for subsequent communication, otherwise they fall back to SMB 1.0. This preserves downward compatibility so that deploying Vista clients or Longhorn servers should be straightforward. The following chart describes what protocol will be used when communicating between different types of client and servers -

Vista Client < - >Vista/Longhorn Server – SMB 2.0
Non-Vista Client < - > Vista/Longhorn Server – SMB 1.0
Vista Client < - > Non-Vista/Non-Longhorn Server – SMB 1.0
Non-Vista Client < - > Non-Vista/Non-Longhorn Server – SMB 1.0

--Navjot and Prashanth

Can VSS deal with memory mapped files?

cfsbloggers — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:50:00 GMT

A developer recently asked us this question: “I seem to recall that VSS cannot handle memory mapped files, am I right? I need to instrument a consistent backup procedure across MSMQ and SQL. I thought of doing both within a shadow copy set but MSMQ engine uses memory mapped files.” The answer: The built-in filesystem consistence for snapshots does not extend to memory-mapped files. If you want a memory-mapped file to be consistent, you must create a writer that puts it into a consistent state during its OnFreeze method.

--Jill

Channel 9 Video on DFS in Windows Server 2003 R2

cfsbloggers — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 01:54:00 GMT

Our very own Shobana Balakrishnan, a program manager on our Windows Longhorn Server team, takes you through the server roadmap and demonstrates Windows Server 2003 R2. Think you know everything about Windows Server? You might be surprised by the innovations this team has shipped and is planning on shipping in Longhorn Server. See the video!

-Jill

Channel 9 Audio on Transactional File System and Registry

cfsbloggers — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:53:00 GMT

An audio recording has been posted featuring Dana Groff, our TxF Program Manager. Here's a blurb from the Channel 9 website:

Transactions have long been the domain of the database but what if you could transact virtually any resource in your application? How would that change the architecture and design of the systems you are building? Well get ready because Windows Vista includes a powerful new transaction capability for the file system, registry and virtually any kind of kernel object. Listen as Ron gets the scoop on the new transaction features of Vista from Dana Groff.

Dana is the Program Manager in Core File Services focusing on transaction technologies. As the PM for Transactional NTFS, the Kernel Transaction Manager, and Common Log File System he coordinated building this new kernel transaction infrastructure for Longhorn with Microsoft’s existing user-mode transaction infrastructure. Dana is a veteran of the software industry having worked for DEC, IBM, Sybase and much smaller companies as well over 21 years in industry developing OLTP and Database middleware.

Channel 9 Video on Transactional NTFS (aka TxF)

cfsbloggers — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:00:00 GMT

We're doing a series of Channel 9 videos to highlight Transactional File System. The first video features Surendra Verma, a Development Manager on the Vista Kernel team. Here's a blurb from their website:

"Surendra Verma, Development Manager on the Vista Kernel team, digs into Vista's new Transactional File System whith Charles Torre. TxF, as it is referred to internally, is a new kernel construct that is part of an updated Vista NTFS. Surendra provides a high level overview of TxF in this video. We will continue to look under the hood in future Going Deep episodes with interviews with developers working on the Kernel Transaction Manager, a key component of TxF, which Surendra touches on during the white board session, which is a Going Deep requirement."

Introduction from another team blogger

cfsbloggers — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 20:10:00 GMT

I’m Prashanth Prahalad and I work with the remote file systems for Vista. I’ve been involved with SMB/CIFS development/testing for little less than 2 years. Vista has some cool new features in the remote file systems with a newer version of the SMB protocol and lot of other enhancements in other areas like CSC (Offline files) and DFS. I’ll be blogging about these, explaining things which happen under the ‘hood’ especially when files are accessed over the network. I would be interested in hearing more from customers especially about performance issues, manageability and deployment scenarios. If there is any questions on these or anything else for that matter on file systems, shoot me a mail :-)

Thanks !

Prashanth

Welcome to our blog!

cfsbloggers — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:04:00 GMT

Hello and welcome to the Windows Core File Services team blog. I'm Jill Zoeller, the Community PM for our group. Part of my job is to help our product team get more involved with customers, and this blog aimed at developers (along with our IT Pro blog) is one of our first community efforts. When I sent a broadcast mail to recruit bloggers, I was delighted to hear from over a dozen people--developers, testers, program managers, consultants, and product managers--who are interested in blogging about our technologies. We should have plenty to talk about, including:

Common Log File System (aka CLFS)
File systems (we own NTFS, FAT, and UDF, for example)
SMB
Volume Shadowcopy Service (VSS)
Virtual Disk Service (VDS)
Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM)
Transactional NTFS (TxF)

I'll ask the bloggers to introduce themselves and their technologies in the coming weeks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

--Jill