Neil Hutson - Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 for developers

So if you ever wanted IE8 to be integrated into your Vista Install Image, how could you do this?

In this really quick 8 minute screencast, Matt Hester shows how you can do this pretty quickly on EDGE.

Click on the image to see the screencast.

Slipstreaming Internet Explorer 8 into Windows Vista

Eric White on the team has just released his PowerTools PowerShell cmdlets for OpenXML onto Codeplex.

The PowerTools for Open XML is sample source code and guidance for developers showing how to build PowerShell cmdlets that can create and modify Open XML documents. Also included are a number of examples of PowerShell scripts that use the cmdlets.

For me, one of the cool uses is the ability to run the cmdlets from the command line remove all the comments from a word document or powerpoint file. Imagine there are also many other possibilities, such as combining this with Sharepoint workflows to do this same thing automatically for any external presentations that hit a certain folder...

You can download the samples and documentation at the following location ( http://www.codeplex.com/PowerTools)

I normally keep my blog pretty much on track with Technical Stuff, but this video caught my eye as something pretty funny and very typical of other scenarios in the IT Industry.

Take a look

And yes, it is flash...

Wenming has just created a cool demo which shows how Microsoft Excel can be configured in a Windows HPC Server cluster so that different parts of the calculation can be executed on different nodes and the results brought back to the user ( in this can via a file share ).

A screen cast of the demo in action can be found here ( Microsoft Excel-Compute cluster server ADAPTER Demo)

The bits are golden.. There are some great discussions on the EDGE site around Hyper-V from all the product teams members including Mike Neil, John Howard, Ben Armstrong and Byron Surace.

Go take a look. The bits will be available at high Noon on July 8th.

One of the last interviews at TechED was with Mark Minasi . He is one of the externals which has an amazing 8 session at TechED US this year. As you can see he is pretty animated.

He talks a lot about DNS, IPV6, Command lines and his passion for Server Core...

Pretty cool perspective on the industry ( well from a mainframe guy ).

So what does it feel like being a TechED presenter and a celebrity? Do people turn up because they want to listen to the presenters or the content. Here is an view into what it is like for most presenters at TechED. They have already spent 2 weeks getting their demos working ( I know I have been following them ) and this is their big day.

Who Are These Guys?

What do you get in the bag at TechED this year? Did they get a party pass? Check it out at EDGE.

Seems that the notepad is the biggest hit :-(

At TechED, Bob Muglia got a answer some tuff questions from a leading analyst.

There are some key questions around Dynamic IT ( what happened to the vision ), Virtualization and being late to market, VMWare's advanced capabilities and what is the next big bets ( a soft ball ).

See how he did?

Joey and Adam are at TechED this week to give people a behind the scenes look at the event and speak to the best presenters about their favorite topics for EDGE.

In the first clip they show you all the equipment it takes to make a keynote run smoothly behind the stage. Its a pretty big setup with a number of redundant machines just in case the inevitable happens.

Lets see who they speak to.... Stay tuned to the site.

Edge on site at TechEd IT Pro 2008

At the local "RailsConf" conference for Ruby on Rails developers in Portland, Oregan,  John Lam, who built Microsoft IronRuby talked about how Ruby developers could build apps for Microsoft's Silverlight without having to use JavaScript.

In essence, using the new model, Ruby developers would not have to go through a Ruby JavaScript utility to get this to work, but rather instead get support through a the Ruby language and plug-in's to Silverlight.

There is some interest in the community ( 1 ) about this and it certainly caught people by surprise.

At TechED this week we announced Windows Embedded Standard 2009, our Windows-compatible, componentized embedded OS, the successor to Windows XP Embedded. This release is focused on connected, service-oriented devices, helping device makers build the devices faster and with more capabilities. A few key facts:

1. Built on the trusted, secure Windows XP kernel – now with SP3.
2. Additional embedded features (write filters, custom shell, etc.).
3. 12000+ components to choose from for customized OS images.
4. New functionality: NETFx 3.5, Silverlight, IE7, WMP 11, RDP 6.1.
5. 10 years of professional support, starting at RTM in September 2008.
6. Smooth upgrade path from XP Embedded.
7. Toolkit Replacement Program: Buy the XP Embedded toolset (Windows Embedded Studio) today, get the WES 2009 toolkit for free when it RTMs.

More information at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/products/westandard/default.mspx.

From a hardware and software perspective the virtualization industry has made leaps and bounds over the last year with the support of hardware chipset technologies from AMD and Intel to support hypervisors which are coming on strong from Microsoft and VMWare.

However the biggest challenge still seems to be, will an Application Vendor take a support call when the application has a problem in a virtualized environment. A year ago there was a report called "Virtualization Industry Challenges", which walked through these problems, but around application support there is still quite a bit of work to do. Microsoft actually is one of the best at supporting the virtual environments, but clearly there are other problems. Some major vendors are so hostile to virtualization that they created their own hypervisor to allow their products inside VMs.

With the release of Hyper-V pretty soon, I am hopeful that a number of the larger application vendors will change the policy and pick up their phone to these calls. We will see.

If anybody says that demos do not make a great presentation, there wrong. Through my career at Microsoft, a great, simple demo have always helped crystallize the message that I was conveying.

Today at TechED Developer 2008 Bill Gates provided one of his final appearances at Microsoft and my team was proud to be part of the development of one of the demos. Zach on the team has been working pretty hard over the last couple of months putting this together with a joint team across the business, and in the end its simple, gets the message over very well and worked a treat.

The demo basically shows

SQL Server 2008 supports all types of data efficiently (unstructured and structured)

• Spatial – calculations and visualization (interactive)
• FileStream – docs/media files stored efficiently in NTFS
• Date/Time and Time zone – precise temporal data support

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) new cloud storage that supports unpredictable user-load

• Supports unpredictable user load
• Agility - Easy to set up with low provisioning

SLA – high availability

• Microsoft Sync Framework and built-in sync support
• Built in sync – sync data between SSDS, SQL Server and mobile

To get more details, go to the following link. Great job Zach and team.

Keith posted an interesting article about Vista security.

He talked about the positive stories around Vista Security and the fact that even through we have millions of desktops to protect, Vista is a highly secure platform.  See “Vista's Despised UAC Nails Rootkits, Tests Find” by John E. Dunn.  This of course got picked up on Neowin.

Here is his sceencast which shows off User Access Control. Go to the following location to see the full post.