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We just published the RC bits for Windows 7!  More details to follow...

2009/04/30 11:55pm PDT - Update: I had fully intended on updating this post with tons of info, but alas, it was not to be.  We had a ton of volume - more downloads were served today than we served during the beta release (up about 145%).  While it wasn't a perfect day, I am really thankful we were able to get the Windows 7 RC bits into the hands of our subscribers well ahead of the general release next week.  I believe we are in very good shape for tomorrow - so here is to an uneventful Friday!

For those of you who only heard about Windows 7 today - you should check out Windows Server 2008 R2 RC.  It is the server product you know and love with the ability turn on all of the really snazzy Windows 7 UI elements.

Some of you may or may not have noticed our February release go out last week.  The release itself is fairly substantial, but not in ways that you’ll immediately notice – so I’ll highlight some of the changes and issues we’ve seen since releasing these bits into production.

The new features include:

1.        “Super-setting” of your benefits for download and product key claiming purposes.  One of the complaints we regularly heard from our users with multiple subscriptions was the fact that to download a file, you first had to select the proper subscription that had permission to the file and then you could download it.  With super-setting, if any of your subscriptions entitle you to a download or a product key, you’ll be able to get what you want, based on the aggregation of your subscriptions.

2.       Added more information to our “manage” page.  Things like the expiration date of your subscription, the level of your subscription, the current status of your subscription, etc.

3.       A complete rewrite of our middle tier.  The original code for our middle tier was written almost four years ago.  Since that time, we’ve had incremental changes patched into the code to handle changes in our partner feeds, changes to the UI and fixes for various bugs.  This rewrite has given us a better platform for future development.

Unfortunately, there have been some bugs that didn’t get caught before we released our code into production.  The vast majority of them fall into two broad buckets:

1.       Users with a mix of expired and active subscriptions are seeing some odd behavior in the various web pages.

2.       Product key claims are not working correctly for users that either have a mix of expired and active subscriptions, or users that have a mix of subscriptions that contain an Academic Alliance subscription.

We believe that we have been able to identify the root cause for these issues and the fixes are currently in our test lab.  At this time, we expect to release the fixes to production early next week (Wednesday the 18^th is our current target). 

Please feel free to sign into the blog and contact me privately if you have any questions.  After signing in, you can navigate here: http://blogs.msdn.com/user/Profile.aspx?UserID=134865 and you will see an “email” link.

Chris Deluca - Dev Lead, MSDN and TechNet Subscriptions

Demand for Windows 7 Beta has been strong so far!   If you have already downloaded the bits, we look forward to hearing what you think.  If you haven't downloaded it yet, try it today!

If you did not get a product key when you first downloaded the bits, you can return to Subscriber Downloads and get one now.  Hope you enjoy the beta!

Today the Subscriptions team is launching new RSS feeds for newly posted items in MSDN, TechNet, and Expression Subscriptions.  These new feeds are always up to date, updated programmatically when new products are added to Subscriber Downloads.  The new feeds are also language specific, now you can sign up for one feed for each language of products you’re interested in, and ignore the rest.

If you have subscribed to the previous RSS feeds, you should see some new items in the feed that say “MSDN Subscriber Downloads RSS has moved - click this item to see the new <language> Downloads.”  Go ahead and click on the items that have the languages you are interested in and then subscribe to those new RSS feeds in your favorite reader.

Note: The old feed will no longer be updated.  You must subscribe to one of the new feeds to continue recieving updates. 

These RSS feeds are also available on the subscriptions homepage and on the downloads page under ‘New MSDN Downloads’ or ‘New TechNet Downloads.’ 

Don’t see these links in your language?  If you visit the MSDN Subscriptions homepage, and you don’t see the RSS links for your language, you can still get an RSS feed.  Just take the English RSS url, and swap out the ‘en-us’ language/locale combination with the one from your homepage.   So if you’re in Norway, you see the homepage as http://msdn.microsoft.com/nb-no/subscriptions/default.aspx. Copy the ‘nb-no’ and paste it over the ‘en-us’ in the English RSS url (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscription-downloads.rss) to create http://msdn.microsoft.com/nb-no/subscription-downloads.rss! 

Try them out!

As I have posted elsewhere, fixes for all of our Subscriptions web site and Windows LiveId sign in issues have been installed into our production system.  If you still have issues signing into Windows LiveId and visiting the Subscriptions web sites, I’d love to hear from you – because you are experiencing a problem that we aren’t aware of.  Please sign into the blog and email me from my profile page with your contact details and I'll get you some help.

Chris Deluca

11:45am :: The downloads, product keys and personalization functionality of the Subscriptions system is currently offline.  The server that contains all of our data related to these functionalities experienced a catastrophic failure this morning. 

Normally we run in a mirrored configuration and would just have failed over, but we removed one of the servers from the mirror to upgrade it to SQL 2008 RTM - Murphy's Law at its sweetest. 

I'll update this thread as more information becomes available.

Chris - Subscriptions Dev Lead