Coming soon

re: Coming soon

csolallo — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:04:20 GMT

woo-hoo1!1 looking forward to the new version of RDC.

re: Coming soon

JT — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:04:41 GMT

2 Q's:

1. How can I take part in the beta test?

2. Will Office 2008 be offered as part of MSDN?

re: Coming soon

JT — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:11:30 GMT

2 Q's:

1. How can I take part in the beta test?

2. Will Office 2008 be offered as part of MSDN?

Thanks in advance!

re: Coming soon

SteveB_UK — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:18:37 GMT

This is more like it!

You know people (or I) won't settle until they (I) hear a bit more about Messenger improvements....!

Can you not at least give us a fair idea on when your going to update it and if there are going to be any significant improvements on it? Do you have any developers specifically assigned to it? Will it be a month, 2, 3, 6? next year?

Keep it coming Craig! Keep it coming! I still think your being a bit shy and held back!

btw do you think you will one day do a Remote Desktop Client that can connect to other Mac's on my network? or even a remote network? If not do you think it would be feasible? I think a lot of users would love MS for that...

re: Coming soon

Sagi — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:31:31 GMT

Nice... and thanks.

re: Coming soon

sirus — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:54:23 GMT

I'm waiting for that Beta and for the final release. I always use RDC over my little LAN because of I'm lazy and i don't want to walk a bit. :D

re: Coming soon

Ric — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:48:02 GMT

Any chance the new RDC client will work properly with non US Mac & Windows keyboard layouts?

Currently, it's very awkward getting '\' characters for example. I typically resort to copy and paste from a crib sheet file I keep open.

re: Coming soon

Gunnar — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:53:26 GMT

UB RDP, really appreciate that!

I hope it's fast ;-)

re: Coming soon

Harvey Dent — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:03:46 GMT

What´s a Remote Desktop Client? Is it any good? Who should care? When is the new MSN Live Messenger coming? I love MS products for the mac except Office and Messenger, thank you Craig.

re: Coming soon

James Arscott — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:56:33 GMT

UB RDC Beta!!! best news so far today, it will make my job so much easier. i assume it will support multiple connections without having to use some hack like RDC Menu does?

I am holding out for the news about new entourage features / beta next :)

re: Coming soon

Michael Pitt — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:33:10 GMT

Excellent news!!!!!!!

Hopefully it won't be single instance anymore!!!

re: Coming soon

SB — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:02:24 GMT

What about an Excel convertor? That is the one I really need...

Will the new RDC offer multiple logins this time?

re: Coming soon

Mark Johnston — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:36:45 GMT

CoRD (http://cord.sourceforge.net/) is also a good substitute for RDC too. I am hoping that the new RDC is closer to functionality of Remote Desktops in Server 2003. I like the multiple saver connections/sessions in it.

re: Coming soon

Jeremy Matthews — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:35:38 GMT

Ahhh...real information!

Thanks....feel like we mac office users have been wandering the desert in search of water....finally had a quick drink.

Of course, more Entourage info would REALLY help to quench our thirst!

-j

re: Coming soon

Gary — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:36:41 GMT

This is encouraging news. :-) I already use the old version a lot on my Intel iMac and have no problem with it running under Rosetta. Still - if it gets even zippier, then I won't complain. ;-)

What I am really hoping comes with the new version has already been mentioned - (a) being able to handle multiple sessions in some intelligent manner and (b) handling the path separator character - '\' - on my UK keyboard.

RDC Menu helps, but it's not an ideal solution.

re: Coming soon

Adam S — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:18:43 GMT

Yes! My wife and I have been anxiously awaiting a new release of RDC. We've been using CoRD, which is great, but not nearly as fast. I'm hoping to see this sooner rather than later!

re: Coming soon

Leo — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:45:29 GMT

Great NEWS!!!

re: Coming soon

Adam — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:54:12 GMT

when and what features does windows live messenger for mac 7

re: Coming soon

nadyne — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:59:16 GMT

SteveB_UK - If you want to connect to multiple Macs on your network, you should try Apple Remote Desktop. There are some other less expensive solutions around, but I can't speak to their usefulness/effectiveness/etc. Personally, I use ARD all the time to connect to my various Macs (both at home and at work), but it's a bit heavyweight (and expensive) if your needs aren't very extensive.

Harvey Dent - Remote Desktop Connection is an application for connecting from your Mac to a Windows box and work with the files and applications on that Windows computer. You can learn more about the current version of it at the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient

RDC v2 public beta coming

go ahead, mac my day — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:11:29 GMT

Over on Mac Mojo , the new boss has made an announcement near and dear to my heart. We announced at WWDC

Non US keyboards

John Lockwood — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:15:46 GMT

Mac to PC software like Microsoft RDC, Timbuktu, and also emulation products like Parallels and VirtualPC all fail identically to properly support non US keyboards.

As mentioned above the most common and most annoying symptom is the inability to type the backslash \ symbol on a non US keyboard when a Mac is controlling Windows. The backslash is of course used all the time to enter file paths.

BootCamp also initially suffered this problem but Apple DID fix it (unlike Netopia, Connectix, Microsoft, etc. etc. etc.). I reported this bug EIGHT YEARS AGO to Netopia (authors of Timbuktu and a couple of times since and they still have not fixed it.

There is ONE program which does not have this problem (if one does not count BootCamp), which is VNC. VNC was originally designed in Cambridge England (not Cambridge Massachusetts) and as such by people who realise there is life outside the USA and that you will NOT fall of the edge of the world when you leave the USA. All the rest are written by Americans who obviously still believe the world is flat, except Apple who always have to think different :).

Note: Apple Remote Desktop uses VNC to control a PC and hence it also works properly.

I have zero confidence Microsoft will fix this issue in RDC but if they do then they will have gone a long way to improving their battered reputation in my books.

re: Coming soon

Robert Lacroix — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:57:26 GMT

That sounds great. Hopefully this new RDC will allow Vista connectivity and multiple connections without using different copies of the binary.

re: Coming soon

Colin — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:27:04 GMT

I'd like to second StevenB_UK's comment on Messenger. Any news or improvements in the pipeline? Windows Live Messenger is miles infront of Messenger for Mac.

re: Coming soon

Kurt Tappe — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:06:25 GMT

Even more than RDC becoming universal I hope the new version fixes the bug in v1.0.3 where RDC doesn't recognize the time zone of the server. All of our 125 RDC users have to readjust their time zones at the start of every session or Outlook thinks they are in Greenwich. Please tell me this bug is fixed?

Mac Remote Desktop Client Coming Soon

Terminal Services Team Blog — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:11:25 GMT

Many of you have asked about a revised version of the Mac Remote Desktop Connection client. The Mac team

Mac Remote Desktop Client Coming Soon

Noticias externas — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:25:01 GMT

Many of you have asked about a revised version of the Mac Remote Desktop Connection client. The Mac team

re: Coming soon

Chris — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:52:32 GMT

Yay. Let me add myself to the group that would love multiple connections. I've tried CoRD and it just doesn't cut it. Way too flaky (not that RDC is great these days).

I can't wait to replace RDC1-7 on my mac with a single Universal Binary RDC.

Oh, and please make copy/paste more reliable. Especially for SQL Server results -> Mac office Excel.

Thanks for the hard work.

re: Coming soon

wasserja — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:06:44 GMT

I'm glad to hear about this. I've been using CoRD, but it doesn't seem to want to work with Windows Vista. RDC on my Mac hasn't been behaving well the last couple of weeks either.

re: Coming soon

Jon Smith — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 03:08:16 GMT

About. Freakin. Time. Unfortunately the MacBU seems to suffer from Microsoft's well documented cases of major time lapses between releases. I've been using CoRD instead and haven't looked back RDC for months.

re: Coming soon

William M. Smith — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:36:05 GMT

Thanks for releasing a public beta and be sure to let us know how to send you feedback! And make it simple to send you feedback. Looking forward to playing with the software and seeing the new features.

re: Coming soon

AS — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:14:56 GMT

Thank you.

re: Coming soon

Peter Walker — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:59:17 GMT

I'm very happy with this announcement. RDC is an excellent product (and even better being free).

Thank you Mac BU for keeping going with this.

re: Coming soon

Don Atkins — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:04:04 GMT

Please add smart card support to RDC as well.

re: Coming soon

Anon — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:52:51 GMT

Use CoRD instead, a wery well done OSX application....

http://cord.sourceforge.net/

re: Coming soon

DAddYE — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:56:57 GMT

When arrive a new version of MSN Messenger???

Is not possible that a society like microsoft don't upgrade their Messenger program for other OS

WE WANT A NEW VERSION !!!

re: Coming soon

Andre R — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:05:34 GMT

Smart card support? And would you like some fries with that too?

I'll second the Messenger thing though. Keep up the good work.

re: Coming soon

Ariadne — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:45:31 GMT

I'm about to buy a Mac for the first time, and want to run Office on it. Any vague clues as to when Office 2008 for Mac will ship in the UK? (Ie is it a waste of money to buy Office 2004 in the next few weeks? Is there an option to upgrade from Offie 2004 when 2008 is released?

Thanks.

re: Coming soon

TjL — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:47:43 GMT

Will RDC support REAL resizing (not the crap "Well you can shrink the window but Windows will still be in the original size)?

re: Coming soon

jack — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:28:40 GMT

Craig,

I have serious issues with the conflict of interest between Mac and Microsoft and maybe in one of your posts in either of your blogs you may want to address this. The issue is simple Microsoft is the ruler of the business tools and Mac is the king of the OS. So this means that for many of us you are the gatekeeper, the one in charge of letting us have the best of both worlds.

We all know that entourage is a mediocre mail client for those of us that use it for business. It lacks full exchange integration, its not full featured, and has no way to add old pst. Excel is also in the light side of the range, I am no rocket scientist and a couple of the financial models sent to me don’t work in mac Excel. Basically the tools your BU has created in the past should be re-named Microsoft Office Light.

Hope that this is not strategy coming down from the Parent Company, that has your hands tied, and I really hope you will help improve the quality and robustness of the product. If you will not be able to change things with the release of the next office please rename the versions. Office Home, Office Light+, Office Play and a little work. Don’t dare put the word Professional to refer to your product.

Best regards,

A frustrated Mac user, running parallels, XP, and MS office in his beautiful iMac.

re: Coming soon

vszakats — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:58:11 GMT

You can use RDC Menu to keep multiple sessions open without any extra tricks.

Testing request

ostiguy — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:12:13 GMT

I don't have too many complaints about the current RDC, but here they are:

1. Poor detection of lack of network connectivity. If I break a vpn connection, the RDC session will not close anywhere as quickly as the Windows RDP client would. Often, in fact, I need to force quite RDC to open a session because...

2. The one session at a time limit. I actually can work around this fairly well, until I need to force quit as seen in 1, and get angry.

re: Coming soon

Jomy Muttathil — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:14:09 GMT

Please distribute RDC in a .dmg file, .zip file or an installer pkg.

Please do NOT use Stuffit!

re: Coming soon

JT — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:59:05 GMT

Will Office 2008 ship with MSDN? Office 2004 is a key piece of software missing from the MSDN subscription. What gives?

re: Coming soon

DaveE — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:15:51 GMT

UB is cool, but I'm really looking for Vista connection improvements. I've only found 1 way to make it work and it's that wide-open, let-anyone-connect method; that's not a solution.

Any more details on the release?

Mac Mojo

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 23:49:38 GMT

Pessoal, no final deste mês deve ser disponibilizada a nova versão do RDC para Mac. Alívio para quem

re: Coming soon

doughlaundry — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:54:04 GMT

CoRD? Hey...thanks for the tip. That's been the first USEFUL information I've had from this blog.

If I were a wit, I'd say something like "oh, the irony".

Meanwhile, our company is looking at Live Communication Server and they asked me to try out Messenger for the Macintosh client. Comments range from "ew... is THAT it?" to "it's another Entourage!, tough luck". But then, these people have to use Windows all day so it's swings and roundabouts.

Actually, Messenger is not that bad because there's not a lot in there, as far as I can see. Maybe other posters can tell me?

*edit*

Er, I'm hoping there's a way to browse a corporate contacts list though... hand typing contacts is verrr dull.

re: Coming soon

rmeyer52 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:33:31 GMT

Thanks for the update on Office 2008. I think we are all excited and want it now but I can also say that we would prefer the team to get it right with as few problems and more features as possible.

In an era of transparency telling us where you are is great but software has become more complicated with a lot more lines of code and as such can easily become a setback if released too early.

re: Coming soon

TF — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:21:24 GMT

I agree, .zip or .dmg would be a lot better than a format that requires Stuffit. It has been a while since Mac OS shipped with Stuffit pre-installed.

A .pkg based installer would be nice as well, for RDC, Office, the file converters, etc.

re: Coming soon

BobR — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:08:17 GMT

Holy sh*t! I am so excited I am going to wet myself. Its been only two years since Apple made developer machines and OS X Intel available to the MacBU and they have now announced that they *will be* producing an actual *beta* UB App. Since RDC is essentially a little homegrown Microsoft FUD wrapped in GUI on top a TCP/IP stack I can see why it took them so long. Congrats! While I go change my pants I'll swing by my PC and check to see if I have any meeting requests since Exchange still blows for the Mac. Good to see those pressing issues at the MacBU have been worked on by top coders in the last two years.

Did the real Office team print you out any certificates for shipping something, or will that wait till your first app actual ships out of beta? Man, those hard ass grownups (i.e. "Dad" right David!) can be real sticklers can't they? Kudos for the excellent work!

re: Coming soon

Gavin — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:44:36 GMT

Love the blog, great idea, there is life in MacBU after all :-).

Super to hear about RDC.

About Office 2008 please don't make it look weird it should blend delightfully in with the rest of Mac applications.

A importer for Outlook PST and Outlook Express is badly needed.

re: Coming soon

Mikey — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 04:49:43 GMT

Wow. Tough crowd.

While it would be nice for us to see a daily update of every programming change MS completed today and every feature they will add tomorrow, real businesses do not work that way. Make your (well reasoned) point but cut these guys a little break.

re: Coming soon

Richard Ashwell — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 06:45:45 GMT

I know I mentioned this in the last thread but I saw several comments in this one regarding MacBU software getting into the MSDN Universal subscription. I want to second, or third, or nth the sentiment and ask again why is MacBU left out of this program. Part of the transparency/testing of beta, and release candidates would I feel alleviate the apprehension somewhat that you are getting in this "improving" blog where people want more info on progress.

No more secrets :) Actually keep some secrets but celebrate progress drop an alpha out there, you know the one you are probably running on your Mac book right now. Sure there would be an OMG moment or too, maybe even some light screeming about feature x not appearing in entourage or something, but then as you answer the screams with comments on the plan to improve, you are in a dialog. Is this the type of communication you are looking for or is this blog more of a status update type of thing?

Richard

re: Coming soon

JoeBlow — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:28:45 GMT

The newest (unreleased) version of Cord let's you connect local drives and printers. It has been working realiably for me for about a month - and I connect to bunch of 2003 servers as well as XP and 2k machines.

Please, make sure you release a real **Beta** and not an Alpha called **Beta**, I hate it when companies do that.

re: Coming soon

Scott — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:24:19 GMT

it's about time. glad to see a new remote desktop client for an intel mac

re: Coming soon

bcj — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 14:32:42 GMT

For Vista RDC capable client today on OS X, check out http://desktopecho.com/tsclientx/ requires X11 and use RDPv5 for protocol.

re: Coming soon

Bryan O'Malley — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:32:56 GMT

This is good news!

Like most of the other comments above, I'll chime in with a plead for multiple connections. It's very difficult to work without that feature.

Looking forward to more Microsoft support of the Mac platform...

re: Coming soon

Angus Fox — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:25:09 GMT

Never mind MSDN, please put the Mac BU software in the Partner Action Pack. I want to be a Microsoft MAC partner! And why were you guys not at WPC. I looked.. and the three or four other partners I saw using MacBook Pros looked too..... (Its OK we have VMware fusion and Vista Unity. Its pretty decent - Outlook in a VM is faster than Entourage via Rosetta. Ouch).

re: Coming soon

Eric Veilleux — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:21:35 GMT

Merci Microsoft !

re: Coming soon

Sethro — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:50:53 GMT

Please make sure that Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is released as a public beta, I and many people that I know would kill for a chance to try out a pre-release version.

re: Coming soon

Stephen Harbage — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:07:55 GMT

Hi Craig, I just wanted to ask if you could please reply to rmk's message from the last post: http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2007/07/11/the-story-so-far.aspx#comments

I have to admit, he is spot on about the compatibility issues and would seriously like to see a full reply to his post with some of the technical questions about quicktime for multimedia, excel cross linked graphs, references, mathematical equations etc and these things not showing up in the 'compatibility checker'.

PLEASE can you talk to the engineers in the retrospective programs about getting these fundamental problems fixed as a priority and apologise for the heart ache they cause and promise to make the next version of office fully 100% compatible no mater how many graphs, graphics or equations etc people use? Please Craig.

re: Coming soon

outz — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 03:15:15 GMT

counting down the days!

re: Coming soon

john — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:02:19 GMT

Where's the Update guys?

re: Coming soon

James Arscott — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:35:47 GMT

please don't make us wait until friday! :)

re: Coming soon

Daniel Bahl — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:20:05 GMT

Uh! Guess what day is it today..

UB RDP day :-)

I have been waiting the hole day (GMT+2)

I hope you guys release it before it's bedtime for me :-)

re: Coming soon

nadyne — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:57:35 GMT

Just popping in to apologise for the delay in approving comments. The guy who usually does this is on vacation. We didn't want to set the blog to auto-approve comments because of the amount of comment spam we get -- at least 10 spam comments per day!

re: Coming soon

Jake — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:14:31 GMT

A quick note of praise for actually allowing all the harsh comments we've had on this blog.

It would be easy to just make this a one-way conversation, but you don't.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bash you some more for taking so bloody long to get Office 2008 out and not giving us any crumb of info on what we can expect. ;)

re: Coming soon

Christopher Price — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:15:36 GMT

Would love to see some support for Windows Home Server as well. RDC'ing into client computers with a Mac, requires rebooting into Windows to use IE7.

(Windows Home Server allows you to RDC into all the systems in your home, but you have to be running IE7 and the ActiveX RDC client currently).

re: Coming soon

outz — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 04:35:43 GMT

remember guys... the 'week of the 30th' doesn't mean the 30th.

re: Coming soon

Jeff — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 04:40:11 GMT

Here's to hoping for Session Directory support in the Mac RDC...

re: Coming soon

Jay Weiss — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:20:24 GMT

Thanks for the updated RDC. I use RDC on my MacBook Pro and it is stable, but slower than I'd like. I have tried other solutions, but lets face it, I'd rather have a Microsoft application.

Several things I hope are in the new version:

1) Multiple Connections.

2) Encryption (most of the time I'm not using a VPN).

3) Selectable local volumes mapped as remote drives.

4) Selectable local printers mapped to the remote system.

Please keep up the good work.

P.S. - how about a Mac version of Windows Media Player which supports DRM? (Flip4Mac sucks)

re: Coming soon

SB — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:05:01 GMT

Heh, I guess week of the 30th means August 3. Hopefully the format convertor will include Excel support...very much needed.

re: Coming soon

James Arscott — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:13:38 GMT

its out :) yey!

re: Coming soon

Matthew — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:13:01 GMT

Yay! The new RDC 2.0 Beta client is now up for download:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/MISC/RDC2.0_Public_Beta_download.xml

re: Coming soon

Chris Mahoney — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:10:29 GMT

Excellent. It's a UA, it supports Vista and multiple sessions, and has an "improved user experience" (whatever that means - I haven't had a chance to download and see for myself yet). They state that it currently only works with US keyboards.

I'm going to third? fourth? the request for Office 2008 on MSDN. The Windows version is on there, and Mac Virtual PC is too, but no Mac Office. Why not?

re: Coming soon

Folletto Malefico — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:27:27 GMT

It's sad to see that I had to read the 'news' of new Microsoft Mac release somewhere else... shouldn't be this blog a 'fast lane'? :(

re: Coming soon

petieg — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:40:39 GMT

What? No console support? How are we supposed to support Win2k3 servers then ;-) Looks pretty good, change the icon for god's sake though!

re: Coming soon

Adam — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:00:29 GMT

I tried it out and it's a mixed bag.

One very nice feature is clipboard integration - harrah for that.

One major oversight is not supporting multiple connections. It's as if one of the major criticisms of RDP on mac wasn't even heard - boo!

-adam

Its here

Dave Scott — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:17:23 GMT

Well, downloaded it and tried it out. Seems ok, but multiple sessions -- hmm -- when I tried to launch app a second time / open a saved connection, got stuck in an endless loop of application locking up / sending a report to Microsoft. Had to force quit the "report sending app" to get out of this loop

Reading more closely, seems like multiple sessions maybe to different machines, not multiple sessions to one machine. (Something that I need to do all the time)

Am very heavy user of RDC / RDESKTOP .. so wil be "thrashing" RDC Beta today -- am working from a remote office.

Agree about CoRD - its nice, but somewhat slower (though the screen scaling is a very nice option) and a tad flakely. RDESKTOP is very nice, mulitple conenctions etc -- just no scrolling

Come and get it! RDC for Mac v2 beta

Mac Mojo — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:21:31 GMT

RDC v2 beta is here!

Come and get it! RDC for Mac v2 beta

Noticias externas — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:55:09 GMT

Today's the day! As Craig (our fearless leader) announced a couple of weeks ago, we have now made

re: Coming soon

Richard Walker — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 09:20:04 GMT

The beta seems much better overall, however I have two complaints:

1) on my UK keyboard, it it still impossible to get a backslash, and some of the keymappings are incorrect (e.g. #)

3) the beta comes as a package which uses Apple's Installer. Why? the old RDP client came as a bundle which was a proper Mac-style drag-and-drop install!

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 Beta Available Now

Terminal Services Team Blog — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 06:37:47 GMT

Greetings from the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft! We appreciate the interest many of you have

re: Coming soon

Paul — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:18:53 GMT

I'm glad to see the new version. As a person who's reported bugs in the 1.0.3 client (confirmed by both MS and Apple devs via my Higher-Ed volume sales reps) and 10.4.x for printing, I'm glad to see this problem appears to be fixed. I'll have to do more detailed testing on the exact combination that always caused problems before to see if I can duplicate it in this.

As for CoRD, I've been using that in the place of the RDP103 client. I've hesitated from using RDesktop (which I've succesfully compiled and installed on many systems before stumbling across CoRD), precisely because of the entire X-Windows requirement. As beta as CoRD might be, it seems to work quite nicely for the most part. I suspect this new Mac RDP client will work just as well. I haven't yet deployed either to the general user population, but have limited their use to tech personnel with Macs who have need of connecting to our various 2003TS systems.

Yes, there are features still missing, as compared to the current RDP client on XP. And yes, it's still missing features when connecting to a 2008 system as compared to Vista. But frankly, I much would rather opt for a stable, solid, reliable, production quality 1.0.4, than a feature-filled buggy v2. We've all complained endlessly about features and bloat, and if I had to choose between more features (some useful, some not) and just plain rock solid limited featured, I'd opt for the latter.

Yes, the features mentioned above such as multiple connections (in a nice way - not multiple .RDP files), and seamless windows, and TS-SSL/VPN are all useful. I don't think anyone would call those features useless or bloat. But even at the risk/cost of letting these features go (or be delayed until v2.1), I'd love to see v2 of this client be rock solid stable, updated frequently (as needed), and go from there. Rather than trying to come out with a full-featured perfected everyone-happy client, take baby steps, and have each step be good, reliable, and worthy of your team's reputation, the MacOSX ease of use, and usefulness and responsiveness of MS to the Mac world.

Thank you for writing the v2 client. I look forward to its production solid stable status, and will be deploying it once it reaches that state and tested with known problematic configurations.