.:blog.iainmcdonald

Windows Server 2008 is called SP1. Adventures in doing things right?

2008-02-16T01:58:57Z

I had a bunch of people internally ask me why Windows Server shows it's version as Windows Server 2008 SP1 (for brevity - WS08). I will explain it, but I wanted to use the Writer feature that allows me to insert pictures. Who says anything beyond notepad is a waste of time. Actually, that's me usually...

The history here goes back to problems we had form the split we had when we broke Windows XP from Windows Server 2003 (WS03) way back in 2000.

At the time we had Windows 2000 (Win2k) out in the market & it was being very well received. Especially on the client side which was doing well with corporate desktops. At the same time in the consumer side, we had Windows ME. I never worked on WinME, I have never installed it, & I know nothing about it except what people have told me. <I removed what i really think. If you meet me, feel free to ask>.

Mid 2000, we had a combined release on the rails but the pressure to do a client release for consumer got high. So we forked WinXP from what was to become WS03. On one side, I think we did exactly the right thing. We met the dates required from OEMs for WinXP & closed down the server release in exactly the right way. I believe the longevity of WS03 in market was because we did a load of right things in the end game. I sill think what we knew when we released WinXP in august 2001 it was a great product. It's just that the world changed 2 weeks later...

One aside here - in WS03 we created the Security Development Lifecycle & ran the first one in early 2002. For WinXP we did it for SP2. I've always believe WinXP sp2 was equivalent to a full release of Windows. I really had nothing to do with SP2 - Todd Wanke who had worked for me on WS03 ran it & his main dude on SP2, Mark Harris, came to work for me after that on WS03 R2. None of this security stuff was fun when we first did it. I have always believed it was a 10 year job & 6 years on, i still think so. It is a cultural change that had to go very deep.

Anyway, back to the story. This meant that WinXP & WS03 were totally divergent codebases. They had to have separate patches, GDRs, Service packs blah blah blah. The matrix of releases became a nightmare.

After WS03, I took my sabbatical & moved to Server. We looked at what was happening, realized we had some stuff that we wanted earlier than Longhorn was going to be released & decided to do WS03 R2. That was a different type of release because we had a rule that if you were changing something in the core (ie in what had already shipped), it had to come in via a service pack - you can't go changing stuff willy nilly. So changes fro WS03 that required core changes were made in advance in WS03 SP1.

At the same time other people wanted to get the client out earlier than server. ...again. So the folks doing Vista closed the client release down. My guys ran server as a project kinda on the side until Vista released. After that, Alex Hinrichs along with the servicing folks drove the WS08 release out.

This means the that the Service Packs are shared, that patches get released at the same time, etc etc. I believe it is incredibly simplified for customers. The other thing is the servicing stack is now smart enough to not download stuff you don't need. This means if you have a Vista system & the service pack has fixes to Active directory, the Vista system does not get the directory update downloaded to them. Vice versa - if there was ever the need for a fix to media player (shock horror, who ever heard of the need to fix security issues there), you don't get it on server unless you install the Desktop Experience pack.

So, it's called SP1 - in retrospect i should just say its called that so you don't have to wait for SP1 for it to be right like people have before. The first Service Pack for WS08 will be called SP2.

Finally, I am looking forward to the launch in LA on Feb 27. It'll be awesome. http://www.heroeshappenhere.com

Whoo! Windows Server 2008 is released

2008-02-04T17:17:00Z

There will be a bunch of news & posts around this today. We came in super early & the finals sign offs for the release off this morning. Steve Ballmer gave a talk to the financial communities

Today is a fun day for us - not one that comes along every day.

For me, I've done a load of releases but this is one of the few I've done where I wrote the original 'vision' document & actually follwed all the way through to release.

Congratulations specifically to my guys, Alex Hinrichs, Tom Hazel, Ken Hiatt, Brian McNeill, Klaas Langhout, & loads of others.

Finally, congrats to the folks who have been also working on Vista SP1. Sidd Lathia, John Gray & Nishitha Sannala secifically.

Onto our ship parties & launch

/iainmc
General Manager
Windows Server Group
Redmon, WA

Teched Africa for me!

2007-10-17T20:28:00Z

As a late breaking thing, I am doing the Keynote for Teched Africa at Sun City, which is near Johannesberg, South Africa. It's a very quick trip - a total of 48 travel for 80 hours on the ground...

I've never been there before & wish I could spend more time there, but my schedule doesn't really allow for it.

I will be talking on "Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business" - similar to what I did at Tech-ed Japan. Without the need for Japanese translation...

I get in 3 hours before the kickoff for the Rugby World Cup final where South Africa is playing England. My allegiances always run with Australia being #1 & whoever is playing England as #2. So in this case I am a Springbok supporter...

If, for some reason, you read my blog & are attending come up & say hi.

p.s. It's ok to play Sun City now.

Heh heh - Windows Server blog one of the ugliest pages on the Internet...

2007-08-30T02:42:00Z

Today the Register called the Windows Server blog a 'a candidate for ugliest pages on the internet' - I feel this is a challenge.

I think this is obviously a challenge i can, as a designer of some of the worst UI known to man, exceed.

Dates & navel gazing...

2007-08-29T21:38:00Z

You may have seen a bunch of noise today around dates & Windows Server 2008. Seeing it is my group's job to shepherd the release out the door, I thought I would enter the fray. This is kinda the non story of the year because our launch date is exactly the same as it was before – it’s not like people who have got the product before then…

My bottom line is no one will remember if something shipped a month late vs. if the quality is not up to scratch. I don't think this is a worry for this release. Regardless of anything else, we'll take as much time as we're allowed to, to get a release out. If we get the opportunity to wait a month & see if the feedback spikes with people running systems in production over Christmas, I'll take it every time. It's not like anyone actually deploys over Christmas - in fact every time I have that discussion with people in our IT group they laugh at me. That, however, may be their normal reaction to my brilliant ideas….

Beta 3 has been the quietest beta I have ever been involved with. Ever. Less issues coming in, less problems coming up, no really weird thing that just surprise us. Yes, every beta has bugs & we’ve gotten a bunch - but there just are less than I have ever seen with the sorts of deployments & real world scenarios we know are going on. In fact the biggest issue was the fact that the local Administrator password was set to <blank>. That was horrible experience & luckily the overwhelming negative feedback got us to turn the people who needed to and we fixed that a while ago with the CTP.

I counted the "ship-it" things in my office today (see the postscript) & I guess I have been involved with around 40 prerelease releases (betas, release candidate, etc )- I don't really count ctps because we used to do them all the time before marketing put a name on them - if I were to, I'd have to triple this number.

I have a story about how in Windows 2000 I said a bad word to a bunch of Aussie press who were over here while saying basically it doesn’t matter if it is late vs. if it is not up to scratch. The bad word eventually got printed in a story in the Sydney Morning Herald & my mother wasn’t exactly happy. There is a much longer version to be told over a Hendricks & Tonic – has to have a slice of cucumber, thanks.

So, how do i actually know people are using it? In the WS08 Server Manager, betas are configured, by default, to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) – this means we get some data – roles installed, uptime, etc from each machine. Below is a screen shot of where this is enabled in the server manager (full disclosure – the screenshot was this Mondays build on my laptop).

Seeing I am the Privacy lead for the Server & Tools Business I now will link the Privacy Policy so people don’t think we’re doing bad stuff with this data. Actually, it doesn’t matter people - will think we’re using it to work out the kinks in the "sharks with laser beams" project. You can opt out of the CEIP & the default for shipping products is off. However, it does give us some info on what’s happening to the system, & we have been able to make decisions to make the system better. Between the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) & the IIS Go Live program there are over 5,000 servers in production on Beta 3. Good example is this little website called Microsoft.com – here is the Netcraft link - it is the #10 site on the net. We look at the data coming back – crashes, uptime, bugs, newsgroup discussion every week in our review meeting (Alex also runs a daily Ship room where things are looked at in excruciating detail). I wish we’d had this stuff in previous releases – it is so much better & deeper than anything we’ve ever seen before.

Some time. I'll talk about the problems we've been having putting laser beams on sharks. Oh, dang...

/iain

p.s. When Microsoft releases a product, you get a little sticky badge for your Ship It award. The Ship-it was a big slab of Lucite that could be very bad if you dropped it on your foot (its the one on the right)- the new improved version is a piece of glass attached to a piece of metal - i preferred the old ones. I took a photo of my 2 (they gave me a 3^rd – in the background) – because I don’t stick all of them on, I guess my count is out of whack in their database.

If you can't read it, here are the releases I really was involved in (sometimes you get one for being peripherally involved):

· MS Mail 3.2 (April 17, 1993)

· MS Mail 3.5 (June 14, 1995)

· Exchange Server 4.0 (March 13, 1996)

· Exchange Server 5.0 (February 27, 1997)

· Exchange Server 5.5 (November 5, 1997)

· Windows 2000 (December 15, 1999)

· Windows XP (August 24, 2001)

· Windows Server 2003 (March 26, 2003)

· Windows Server 2003 R2 (December 6, 2005)

Lost in translation? Lost in Yokohama

2007-08-20T11:10:00Z

I’m sitting here in Yokohama, Japan in the middle of rehearsals for my keynote of Tech-Ed Japan. Honestly, getting the big room is both easier and harder than you’d expect. It’s easier because you have a bunch of demos that other people have to do so your total time on stage is shorter. It's harder because it's the big room. I was trying to work out the number of seats - I figured there are around 3000 on the main floor & there are 2 balconys.

I think I have done Tech-Ed’s over the years in at least 13 countries – but that was more when it first stated than the last couple of years. I have done the main Keynote in Australia and New Zealand before, but they are much smaller shows than here in Japan. And they didn’t want me in Aussie this year because they had some Aussie group who do animation composition on Windows (this is something Sun has focused on for ages). Maybe it was because of the grief they got last year when we showed off some Vista stuff before we were meant to.

In Japan, I also have the weirdness of translation as you go along. First of all, I had to write out my talk a couple of weeks ago. That would be weird except for the fact I need to stay on message with BobMu’s Orlando Tech-Ed Keynote & there was a transcription for that. In the end I kept about 50% of that & had to build a bunch more in. From the stage, I see 4 screens. A timer, an English copy, a Japanese copy of the slides and the script.

Anyone who knows me or has seen me talk knows I am a *little* less scripted than that, normally. For translation, they have a system kinda like the United nations where someone translates as you go along & it goes to headphones in the seats – the trick is to leave enough gaps between sentences so they can catch up. Generally, you don’t want to have the sentences go on too long. The demos are in Japanese so there will be switching between langs. The translator gets to translate those to English.

When I did WinHEC over here in June, they used that system & it worked out to be really pretty easy method. Except for the writing the talk out in advance, of course (shout out to Sean McGrane for doing most of the WinHEC talk). In China for WinHEC, they got you to talk got a while & had a translator that would stand up & repeat what you’d say – that ended up ok, but you really have to make sure you don’t get on a rant - it also meant you covered a load less ground than in japan. Apparently one guy in WinHEC China read a script & got the translator to translate every sentence as he went along. That would drive me crazy. I get to meet my translators in a little while.

For the Keynote, we also have another 9 systems on stage for demos. This includes a big NEC NX7700 which will demo Hot replace & Hot add in WS08. Shout out to my cool demos buds Moriya-san, Saito-san, Asano-san and Kondo-san are doing & they get the hard work. Also my main man, Makoto (or Ishizaka-san) has been helping me out & being my minder here.

The conference is in Yokohama – it’s about another 30 mins on the train from Tokyo – really its kinda the suburbs. Tokyo didn't really stop from there to here. There is a huge amusement park right beside the hotel & luckily I don’t get the view of the big ol’ Ferris wheel. It’s beside a river & the view from my room is pretty industrial. I like the view, actually – it’s kinda like a friends old view of the industrial/port part of south of downtown Seattle. I think where the convention center & the hotels (Intercontinental –where I am at & Pan Pacific next door) must have been built in the early 90s as a land reclaim because it’s obviously new & planned. Under the Pan Pacific is a big US themed mall. It’s weird – it’s kinda like going to the supermall in Auburn near Seattle. For all my stone throwing on American Imperialism, I was thankful they has a Starbucks just now because I needed a shot or 3. I understand someone from the US talking about a US imperialism when they are in that country talking in English is strange.

As I said Yokohama is a little further out. Narita, the airport that serves Tokyo is about a 60 minute train ride from the central Tokyo station. You can get what they call an airport limousine – which is a bus to get either in or out. I prefer the train which runs very efficiently & is comfortable. Also, JR East is the train company – running on Windows Server…

They are playing the naming video before I go on (here for those who have not seen it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZbSa8xj1c8 )– they love Harleys over here and got a Road King from Harley-Davidson Japan – I get to ride it onto the stage at the start of my talk. Of course, I won’t ride it on – we can’t even run it on stage. They have a slidey thing it is sitting on, I just sit on it & some dudes are going to push it out behind me. They also want me to wear my Leather Jacket (which I brought over, all 2 cows worth of leather) I hope I don’t have to wear ti too long because it weighs about 50 lbs & is hot – it is about 95 degrees here today. I did the ride the bike on stage thing with Brian Valentine back in 2000 where we rode onto the stage at the Georgia Dome for the Microsoft Global Summit. He was, as per usual, in a pink tutu. I don’t know why he loved to wear that thing so much but it was doing stuff like that that made the sales folks love him so much. We had a party later that night & Brian sat on the bike & had people take pictures with him in his getup. He did a sales challenge – the people who sold the most win2k that year would get the bike. I can’t remember who won it, but I burnt my leg on the damn thing when I went to pick it up for the Georgia Dome…

The thing that is tough right now is my voice is super croaky. It has not been the same since I went to Japan & China in June. Talking at Blackhat in Las Vegas certainly didn’t help (or more precisely, the party) – I have been telling people I have Vegas accent. I have been on a steady diet of tea with lemon & honey. I am also going to get an early night tonight – after our 8.30 rehearsal.

p.s. Last time I was here in Japan, I stayed in the Lost in Translation hotel – it was cool. We had a great Shabu-shabu dinner – I can’t understand why no one does that in the US – especially with the millions of Sushi & Teriyaki places in Seattle.

p.p.s. the Lost in Translation Hotel is the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku

I am talking at Blackhat in Vegas

2007-07-09T21:24:00Z

http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-07/bh-usa-07-speakers.html#McDonald

I kinda hate the session description. it looks like a way of sending people to sleep. I asked for it to be changed to this:

Are you waiting for ways to hack the next Microsoft Server? The guy who runs the project is going to talk about the methods we've gone to lead hackers to a futile & fundamentally aggravating experience.

We'll talk about our base belief that nothing should be turn on, exposed or open. When you do open an interface, new techniques are there to protect from exposing the thing that were not meant to be exposed. Fun, eh!

I also put my special Blackhat bio up there:

Iain McDonald has infected the world with more insecure software than everyone else at Blackhat, combined. He has been at Microsoft for 16 years, starting in his native Australia & has bounced around avoiding work wherever possible. He was Project Manager for Windows 2000, Project Director for Windows XP & Server 2003. Atonement for previous sins has been somewhat provided by his participation in the original SDL stuff in Windows Server 2003. He now owns vision, planning, & delivery of future releases of Windows Server. He spent his 20s as a good for nothing professional musician after dropping out of the University of New South Wales. He never worked on Windows Millenium. Lost got lame after Season 2, wants a Fender controller for Guitar Hero 2 & often inflicts massive damage in Halo 3. Hendricks Gin & Tonic with a slice of cucumber – just wave the tonic nearby, thanks.

Hmmm, sometimes your words sound different than you meant...

2007-07-09T08:53:00Z

Mary Jo Foley posted a story http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=551 from an interview I did with her at WinHEC. It was verbatim, so I can't really blame anyone else for misconstruing or editing what I said.

However, I will say something that didn't come across from what I said. I am incredibly proud of the outcome of the Windows 2000. I think it did change the industry hugely & was the wedge that moved Windows Server to being the system that now ships as the largest percentage of servers.

I was criticising the way the release was run. Oddly, I believe I am uniquely qualified to criticise the Project Manager for Windows 2000 - seeing that was my job...

There were a couple of other things I see now that we did really wrong. The big one is security. I was 1999 & the web 1.0 was going strong. We wanted to make the best server for the internet – or what we thought it was in 1999. This lead us to the dumb idea of opening a bunch of ports & turning in a bunch of services that we should have left closed & off. This was fixed partially in Windows Server 2003. I think it is fixed in a big way in Windows server 2008 – especially on x64. Layers of security is the only way to do it. If you really want to know about what we’ve done for the Security Development Lifecycle, see Mike Howards’ Blog.

hmmm - Powershell as the only ui for a Server...

2007-05-19T01:17:00Z

Last week at WinHEC I mused that Powershell could one day be the default command shell for Windows Server & maybe be the only shell for Server Core. Betanews picked up that http://www.betanews.com/article/Why_Cant_PowerShell_Be_the_Windows_Command_Prompt/1179385810 although everyone who has seen the article have doubted i wouldn't say "i would like to do that" - maybe i would say "oath" or "&$*# yeah" or something...

In his blog Jeffrey Snover got what I meant - we woudln't pull cmd.exe - just the one that would start up with be ps. You could spawn cmd from the or change a reg key to start cmd by default. The stuff that gets interesting for me is whether the .net frame work would always be in memory or if it would only come in when a relevant command was invoked. The other thing there would be (in the vein of the least number of services/things in memory) could we set a timer to dump the dependencies that have been called after we use them?

I read Powershell in Action by Bruce Payette (the second is the amazon link - it was cheaper there) on the plane this week. I am now cemented in my opinion of 2 things:

they have done something very hard with powershell - make something hard quite easy. It surprised me how much it likes getting out of the way.
Is the thing Jeffrey loved from the article - that is to say i wonder if it wil be a big inflection point for Server Administration. I had a long-ish chat with Paul Thurrott about this on tuesday at the Dodgers game. He thinks the uptake will be slower than I do.

Check out the Script Center site - it is a community site based around sharing scripts.

/iain

p.s. I was listening to El Kilo by Orishas - it is such a great cd - love those guys even thoguh i have no comprehension of spanish. If you haven't heard of them - Cuban rap group based in France. The do an awesome mix of hip hop & cuban music - or as someone called them salsa-hop - i i don't think that is a good marketing term (i would be all over hip-sa or dsomething). Probably the most musical rap group i have heard. Check out the song Distinto.

Weird how people get stuff wrong

2007-05-17T23:29:00Z

One of the aussies sent me this http://apcmag.com/6121/windows_server_gets_vista_version_itis

In the article it is said that Vista would be the last 32 bit release. That comment was regarding Server. We in server don't speak for client &, as far as i know, no one in the client world has even considered this. On the server side, this is kinda moot because you can't even buy an x86 server today.

Our boss Bob Muglia announced in November last year at IT Forum in Barcelona that the release after Longhorn would be 64 bit only.

The funny thing is even though we will have 64 bit only versions, we have the WOW layer (windows on windows) which means all the 64 bit versions have a full copy of the 32bit version of windows (except drivers, of course). I think somewhere on the line we should make the 32 bit stuff just installable rather than everywhere. - it'd be a nice optimization

I'm back from WinHEC - my session was ok - for me i thought it was not as good as i would have liked. But i had a good night last night having dinner & drinks with a bunch of folks. It was the first time i spent time with Mark Russinovich - super smart guy who gave a great talk yesterday at WinHEC. Plus, we got to hang out at the roof bar at the Standard Hotel in Downtown LA - its a fun spot & it was great to sit outside.

Cat's out of the bag - Windows Server 2008

2007-05-15T20:42:00Z

Today Bill Gates announced the real name for Longhorn Server – Windows Server 2008. I suppose people are going to call us boring for keeping the naming convention from previous releases. It’s a server, what da ya expect? We did a naminig video while we were doing the other one - check it out.

I am writing this during Billg’s keynote (yes, I am bad) they showed a video of some of the new mobile Vista PC’s & they had a bunch on the stage. I want one of the new ACER/BMW laptop – it was cool. For those who were there – what was the story with the proto machine? The rest of the machines looked really good – that one looked like it was made of cardboard.

The first demo was of Windows Rally (I admit this is the first time I heard that name) – create a network & add stuff. Having reset my net a couple of weeks ago this was amazingly simple - not the experience i had. I want a wifi enabled camera – in fact my ebay crazy wife is going to demand on when she sees it. So much for the camera we bought 3 months ago. The guys who did the demo were really good – at little too good, me thinks – At times I was wondering if I had landed in the Home Shopping Channel. However, the Media Center extender setup of streaming media was so simple & easy I think I am getting one.

Bill gave props out to the Home Server - that was awesome. Congratulations to Charlie Kindel – he was the first guy on the Home Server bus. Having put a beta in place in my home I can say that this is a great tool for making my home network run great. Way to go, Tig!

Last demo was of this little thing called Windows Server. Ian Hameroff did a great job showing off Network Protection Services, Sharepoint & Rights Management. The cool thing is when the roles work together to make great new scenarios The best part of the demo for customers is showing the policy enforcement of a USB device. Having seen companies who stick epoxy in the USB ports of their machines knowing they can enforce policy.

I do have to say that the Longhorn name going away is a little sad to me – it’s the end of the naming that I started the week after we shipped Windows 2000 in December 1999. At the time we had the Neptune & Odyssey projects that had to become one. Brian Valentine told me to take a week off & come back with a new project name. I went to Whistler with some friends (hey dave, hey rob!) & it was when I was learning to jump on my snowboard – also before I used a helmet which is dumb. I was in the terrain park on whistler – I lined up a jump & had a thought on the way onto the jump. “What will we call the next release” has nothing to do with that & thinking often is not the best idea when going for a jump. I blew the jump bad & landed on my head. This is not an experience to have - wear your helmets, kids. Lying on the ground for 10 minutes made me realize next release would be called Whistler. At least I stopped thinking… (now is the time where Jack Mayo will say i stopped thinking until 2005).

The idea that Blackcomb wasn’t much further but it’s much better kinda fell by the wayside & grew soon afterwards. Joe Belfiore decided to create a little release in the middle & named it after the bar between the mountains – Longhorn. so much for the cool names.

After Bill, Craig Mundie did a keynote, but I had to bail to meet up with some folks.

P.S. I saw the room I am talking - its kinda on the large side...

Speaking this week at Microsoft RDP Confrence & WinHEC

2007-05-14T21:16:00Z

Today I am doing an Industry panel at the RDP confrence & directly after I get ot do the second keynote of the day. I think they put me on at 2pm so i can wake people up.

Tonight i am going down to LA for the WinHEC Confrence - I am doing some press meetings & talking at 11am on Wednesday. If you are there, come by & say hello! I am goign to write some blog entries about my experiences. In June, I am also doing the WinHEC's in Tokyo & Beijing.

Tomorrow i am going to the Dodgers game - that should be cool. We have a party wednesday at universal studios. So it will be a full couple of days.

Stuff I think is cool In Longhorn Server #1- Server Core.

2007-04-28T22:51:00Z

I am starting up a series of things I think people would be interested in getting ready for with Longhorn Server. The first is one that a number of people seem to like – Server Core My next ones are about Read Only Domain Controller & Bitlocker on server. That builds a nice scenario, me thinks. However, I should talk about that later.

Anyway, Server Core. A better way of looking at this is seeing the videos Andrew Mason & I did a while ago here is the channel9 one & here is the Port25 one. Also, there is a Server Core Blog written by Andrew http://blogs.technet.com/server_core/

Server Core is an installation option for Windows Server “Longhorn” – it allows you to install a server & some roles (Active Directory, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS - formally ADAM), DNS, DHCP, File, & Virtualization). It also supports a bunch of system features -WINS, Clustering, etc. All this on a system with no local user interface aside from a command prompt. This stemmed from a couple of years ago looking at how we could have a minimal install option for server. There were four drivers for this:

1) Smaller attack surface On the list of things I am not very proud, we of we shipped a number of components on server in Windows 2000 we never needed to. The worst case is every server had IIS installed & turned on. Worse still super obscure features like internet printing was turned on – on every system. We hit a Buffer Overflow in IPP in August 2000 & every Windows 2000 Server had to be patched. This was Code Red. Oddly since then – in probably over 1000 customer meetings I have only found 2 customers who ever put this into production.This approach was emblematic of the dumb things we did in enabling windows for the internet – all I can say is it was 1999 & we were drinking the internet cool-aid. Irrational exuberance, etc. Today we’d never do something like this because we have scars of this & we changed the way we do things with the advent of the Security Development Lifecycle which we developed in Windows Server 2003. The correct response is to have nothing turned on & let the administrator turn on what they need. I was going to mention here that we called this the "Tommy" approach after the Who song, but i am sure someone will be offended.

2) No need for UI - There are many roles that never need you to look at UI on a specific server – in fact, in a data center, the administration is done remotely & really the workloads don’t have dependencies on ui things.

3) Sort out dependencies – when you have a system like Windows which you develop over many years you sometimes get muddled dependency mapping – being able to get the absolute list is a killer thing for us.

4) Smaller Footprint – less stuff, means less resources needed. We don’t say system requirements until much later in a project – we still have some debug stuff around in various places & this is the time for performance teams to make the huge steps they usually do, so it’s not really a good idea to make promises until we know what we’re really going to be able to do.

The thing this really allows us to do – both in the standard install & server core is to just put on a system what is needed for a specific role. Nothing else is in on the system. For completeness, there is a servicing cache where some binaries sit if a role not installed may be updated prior to installation, but that is not in an executable format. This thing exists so that needed updates are present before installation of another components & generally is there as a security mitigation.

The biggest downside for this release about Server Core is the .net framework does not run on it. We are working out how to do this work in the next release & believe me, we really want it. We’re also working with app vendors & things like Anti-virus vendors to get some coverage. Not finalized yet, but we’re working on it. If you are an App vendor, check out the SDK - we have Server core things int here now.

I expect (& recommend) most people run their production systems on Server Core – it makes sense. I also want to make sure I get Andrew Cushman (Microsoft’s Director of Security Outreach) enough to make sure Server Core is specifically talked about in future security bulletins. We’ll leave that at that for the moment…

p.s. Now I dissed Internet Printing, all the internet printing crazies will come out & tell me I am wrong.

p.p.s. Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi – I wrote this while watching Australias great batting performance in the Cricket World Cup Final. Sri Lanka have a big job ahead of them.

Beta 3 - signed off

2007-04-26T01:26:00Z

This afternoon we signed off Longhorn server Beta 3. i did a channel9 (http://channel9.msdn.com) video on the sign off which should be out really soon. its a great release & i have to give props out to all involved in making this. thanks!

I think a number of people will be surprised that we shipped it

check it out - http://www.microsoft.com/getbeta3

Also, I did a video - I am sure it is going to be shown loads of places. the flying in a biplane was interesting - here are some links:

· Yahoo Video: http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=449416

· YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlGPraug9AY

· EyesSpot: http://eyespot.com/search?word=GetBeta3.wmv&t=1177605677390

· Motionbox: http://www.motionbox.com/video/player/069dd4be181f8c#1

· MetaCafe: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/544550/its_raining_beta_3/

· AOL Video: http://uncutvideo.aol.com/tags/microsoft/13243c7e5203151e8c4cf5e739607b4d?index=0

Dave Lowe stopped me posting earlier because he has a big ol' post he is putting up on the win server blog - http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/

p.s. i removed the direct links because you want to go to the http://www.microsoft.com/getbeta3 because that will give you a product id...

Like that CTP? There is more where that came from...

2007-04-19T04:42:00Z

Last week, we posted another trial build of Windows Server "Longhorn" - so far there are about 3000 people who have downloaded it & we're pretty happy with the way it looks. There are more builds coming out in the near future. Personally, I would like to give props out to Alex Hinrichs who is the prime mover for this release. It is unfair to ever call one person out, but that's life.

One thing I have spent a load of time working on over the last couple of years is the end game of a release. By end game I mean final Beta to Release*. Being a Server guy so I spend very little time worrying about whether we can make back to school or Christmas selling season. Betsy [for the moment it will just be Betsy - as in Madonna, Prince or Nene] says i steal all her jokes & has said that the joke that there are not many people who wake up on christmas morning wanting a new Windows Server is possibly the lamest of all time. Of course if the only jokes I tell are hers, whose joke is that?

But I digress, we really thnk the end game of Windows Server 2003 was the best we did. We kinda mirrored that for the releases of WS03 SP1 & kinda for WS03 R2. We're running that playbook again. I would also hope that the regularity of releases we've shown with WS03, R2 & now Longhorn will show we're pretty serious about this regular release thing.

The end game of Windows Server is sort of like landing a 747 - you uneed a load more run way & frankly you need to spend a lot more time just waiting for something to go wrong after the systems are in production. Generally we like have somewhere around 150 servers in microsoft in production & around 5 times that at other companies before we release - usually those servers go into production 3-4-5 months earlier & we're just sniffing around. Admittedly we could probably do the base parts of the system a little sooner but where is the fun in that - the Directory takes time, NPS will take a little time, TS gateway will take some time. Every day of the week (& old battle scars warm up here) I would take a slip of a week to fix a bad bug over shipping the wrong thing.

I am going to pop back in regularly & talk about some of my favourite features of Longhorn Server, things customers are talking about, embarrass team members, etc. If you are at WinHEC LA, Tokyo, or Beijing, pop by & say hello - I will be talking about Longhorn at all of them.

/i
* admittedly in WS03 we drank some funny drinks & called the last beta RC1.