On Tuesday, Microsoft released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2008 for Mac, designed to add stability, security, and performance enhancements to the suite of office applications. The update features suite-wide fixes, as well as improvements to the individual applications that make up Office.

Today we are continuing on with our Two Minute Drill series. Our topic in this post is one that we discuss quite frequently with customers - namely the automation of creating Performance Monitor and Trace Logs. Most administrators are comfortable creating Local and Remote Performance Monitor logs using the Performance Monitor MMC and the GUI tools. However, there are some extremely powerful command line utilities that can be used to configure and capture Performance data. Today we will be discussing the LOGMAN.ExE utility. So without further ado ...

Dr. Sneath speaks with Ian Ellison-Taylor and Kevin Gjerstad about new improvements and features in WPF 3.5 Service Pack 1. Topics of the conversation range from Graphics, Deployment, Performance, Application Model and Tools. And while discussing the current state and the future of WPF a few applications are mentioned including Lawson "Mango" and Yahoo Messenger.

Not only does this video provide you with a great overview of WPF 3.5 SP1, but it is kicking off WPF Week on Channel 9. Each day this week we’ll be publishing a video focused on one area of WPF to give you a detailed look at what’s new.

Related:

• WPF 3.5 SP1 Graphics with David Teitlebaum
• Scott Guthrie: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta
• Soma on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 SP1 Beta
• Greg Schechter: A Series on GPU-based Effects for WPF

Wow, not sure we expected this one. According to a video shot during the roadmap portion of an MWg presentation, Q4 of this year will bring with it the first crop of Windows Mobile 7 devices. This of course makes absolutely no sense given the time line between 6.1 and 7, but we suppose crazier things have happened. The presenter neglects to delve into the specs in depth, but his visual aid speaks for itself.

The final frontier got a bit closer today as Microsoft Corp. officially launched the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope, which is now available at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together imagery from the best ground- and space-based observatories across the world to allow people to easily explore the night sky through their computers. WorldWide Telescope has been eagerly anticipated by the astronomical and educational communities as a compelling astronomical resource for students and lifelong learners, and as a way to make science fun for children.

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. “By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe.”

The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created with the Microsoft high-performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image environments. WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums.

Following popular demand, Kirk Stark from the SharePoint User Assistance team has created a set of useful posters that show the Stsadm command line parameters for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0.

It can be argued that Microsoft's main focus with Windows Vista was security. While sceptics try to claim that there has not been much improvement, Vista does appear to be Microsoft's most secure OS to date.

The ability to continue to provide a full service to your user community in the unlikely event of the loss of a datacentre is an increasingly common requirement. The use of Continuous Replication (CCR and SCR) with Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1 is an obvious choice in providing data availability and site resilience. One advantage to this approach is that the reliance on expensive storage replication solutions is eliminated. In addition, a disaster recovery scenario is managed from within one team rather than several teams. In most cases the messaging team can manage the restoration of service without the intervention from the storage team, or from a remote 3rd party hardware vendor for example. The use of Exchange Server data replication as opposed to storage replication solutions also gives us more options to use PowerShell scripts to assist administrators in simplifying and controlling service and data recovery and application-based replication is generally superior in assessing the health of the data being replicated than hardware or storage-based replication.

Microsoft is making available to testers a first beta release of Service Pack (SP) 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and the accompanying .Net Framework 3.5.

Today’s trivia question: How big is Microsoft’s back-end services infrastructure?

For all those wondering what Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes would do once he retires from Microsoft in September, the uncertainty is over.

Research in Motion (RIM) and Microsoft have struck a deal via which Blackberry users will be able to run Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger on their devices.

James O'Neill: There are 3 things I get asked regularly about Hyper-V. The first is "When can I get it ?". I've covered this before, the product group have committed to ship by August 2nd, and I've thought for a while that they're looking good to beat that. At MMS Bob Muglia said how pleased we were with performance and we're running the main Technet and MSDN sites on Hyper-V already. Question 2 is "Can you compare X with feature Y in VMware ?". And the third is "Will I be able to move my VMs from X to the release version of Hyper-V ?". Where X might be Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Pre-release Hyper-V, or VMWare. So let's go over the basic rules.

Richard Smith: Recently, I have had to create a bigger scratch space (the MDT X: drive) in Windows PE to deal with the injection of a largish driver during a Windows Vista deployment. The driver in question is the NVidia driver for the Lenovo P60 and P61 and because of the limited scratch space under PE 2.0, this was causing an issue at injection time. There is a scratch file change (registry hack) that can be made to Windows PE 2.0 and below to change the scratch file space from the default 32 Mb - however this is unsupported.

The “Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor” and “Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor” counter sets have the same counters. The only difference between the two is the ““Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor” contains counters for only the Root Virtual Processors (VP’s) whereas “Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor” has counter for all other partitions.

The virtual processor counters are very useful because they help you understand how much guest VM’s are running and where they are running. Unfortunately these counters do suffer from a small amount of clock skew in WS08 Hyper-V but this only slightly reduces their usefulness. We hope to remove the clock skew in future releases. The skew shows up in that some” %” counters may exceed 100%. I’ve seen some go as much as 110% depending on the system load. The problem has to do with the fact this counter set uses the clock from the root rather than from the hypervisor as a basis of time. For more on clock skew see (http://blogs.msdn.com/tvoellm/archive/2008/03/20/hyper-v-clocks-lie.aspx).

Virtual Processors (VP) are the unit of execution for a partition and each partition contains one guest virtual machine (VM). For each VP there is a set of counters. Perfmon.exe will let you view the counters separately or as an average for all VP’s called “_Total”. VP counters are prefixed with the name of the partition like this “WS08 Guest 1:” followed by the VP id like this “Hv VP 0”. This makes it easy to identify which VP’s go with which partitions.

Shows you how to make a virtual machine highly available. You will do this by creating a simple two-node cluster and a virtual machine, and then failing over the virtual machine from one node to the other.

Madhur: This is the nice trick I found out this weekend to disable the User Access Control on Vista without making a system restart.

Although I would never recommend disabling UAC, it’s a great security feature, but sometimes programmers might want to disable it otherwise

Debugging becomes pain especially with WinDbg.

The solution is to run the following command to add the appropriate key to the registry:

reg ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

It can be enabled again through:

reg ADD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f

Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned.

Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.

The program is outlined in confidential documents that Microsoft sent to PC makers last month, and which were obtained by IDG News Service. The goal apparently is to limit the hardware capabilities of ULPCs so that they don't eat into the market for mainstream PCs running Windows Vista, something both Microsoft and the PC vendors would want to avoid.

Microsoft on Friday announced it won't be including client PC backup functionality when it releases Small Business Server 2008 to manufacturing in the second half of the year, but will consider adding the feature to future versions.

Chris Almida, a program manager with the Windows Small Business Server team, made the announcement at SBS Migration's IT Pro 2008 Conference in New Orleans, where many of Microsoft's Small Business Specialist partners are gathered this weekend.

Microsoft decided not to include PC client backup in order to ensure that SBS 2008 ships on time, but the vendor is looking at how and when to add the feature, said Joel Sider, senior product manager for the Windows Server Solutions Group, in an email to ChannelWeb.

The good folks at NCMIR - National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research have released a port of the Scalable Adaptive Graphical Environment (SAGE) for Windows for download.  This allows you to create large tiled displays - we even had one running at our SC07 booth.

SAGE is a graphics streaming architecture, originally developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago (http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage/), for supporting high-resolution, scalable and collaborative scientific visualization environments. It is primarily designed to be run as a thin middleware on a high bandwidth-enabled, cluster-driven tile displays. It allows users to treat the high-resolution distributed displays as one contiguous desktop where users can move/resize application windows. SAGE is network centric and the applications running on these displays need not run locally. The applications can be run on remote machines or clusters, and they can stream their pixel frame buffers to SAGE-enabled tile displays.

Microsoft isn’t halting Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3 distribution — so far, at least — in spite of endless-reboot problems reported by AMD-based PC customers, a company spokeswoman said on May 9.

It's April, and Microsoft's top U. S. salesman for online advertising, Keith Lorizio, is visiting clients in New York City. In a midtown office tower, he sits down with Nicholas Utton, the gregarious chief marketing officer at online broker E*Trade (ETFC). Utton is plenty impressed with Microsoft's technology, and he's a big advertiser on the company's MSN Money site. But when it comes to Internet search sites, the largest and most lucrative advertising market online, Utton makes it clear that Microsoft is, as he sees it, way behind front-runner Google. "They're not getting much of our search dollars," he says.

Grand Theft Auto IV, released by the much acclaimed Take Two Interactive, is one of the most successful pieces of software to ever hit the market. Are there things that long-time software giant Microsoft could learn from the one of the most successful software launches in video game history?

Writer Samara Lynn of Channel Web believes there are a few things that Microsoft could learn from GTA IV. First, Lynn believes that Microsoft should be giving more choices when they release operating systems; that doesn’t mean offering 18 configurations at ridiculous price points.

It means leaving existing operating systems available to consumers instead of moving to one platform immediately, as Microsoft did with Vista. Lynn writes, “VARs and technologists who have to support XP are forced to make a decision — keep XP and have to face the fact support will imminently end on it, or forage into the newer territory that is Windows Vista?”

The release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 not only heralded a long-awaited update of the operating system, it also meant the end of two common Windows Vista anti-activation exploits - the Grace Timer exploit and the Paradox OEM BIOS activation crack. But those who think they can escape by not updating to Service Pack 1 would be sadly mistaken.

That's because Microsoft has surreptitiously released an anti-hack detection update via Windows Update. Those who chose to have Windows Vista install updates automatically would have this update installed and running by now. If you chose to manually select updates to be installed, you should find this update listed.

Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 sends some PCs into an endless series of reboots, according to posts to a Microsoft support forum.

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and a prominent Windows blogger, has worked with users to tentatively identify the problem as involving only machines using processors from Advanced Micro Devices.

Messages from frustrated users began accumulating on the XP SP3 support newsgroup Wednesday, just a day after Microsoft released the update to the general public.

Good news for users of Windows Vista. According to figures compiled by PC Tools, the OS has experienced only slightly more vulnerabilities than Windows 2000, which appeared eight years ago when malware was far less common.

Or is that the bad news? Despite having a reputation as the least vulnerable of Microsoft’s operating systems, Vista still managed to record 639 unique vulnerabilities over roughly the last half year, which puts it in a worse position than the ageing Windows 2000, which experienced 586 over the same period.

Brandon LeBlanc:Just to re-cap: Certified for Windows Vista products are products that carry the above logo. This logo represents a group of applications and hardware that have gone through an extensive certification process that means they work great with Windows Vista. We want users who are looking for devices, applications, or PC components to easily be able to identify the ones that will give them the best experience in Windows Vista today. When I go into a store looking for something for my PCs I always "look for the logo".

As of April, we currently have over 5,000 products that are Certified for Windows Vista. Since last July, the amount of Certified for Windows Vista products has almost doubled! As you can see - we've seen quite a bit of growth with new Certified for Windows Vista products entering the market.

Tony Voellm: In the next few posts I’ll be covering Hyper-V performance counters. There have been a lot of changes from Beta -> RC -> post RC. In Beta the counters sets for Hyper-V were not grouped under a common namespace. This made them hard to find. In RC the counters are grouped under the “Hyper-V” namespace. That is each counter set starts with “Hyper-V.” For example “Hypervisor Logical Processors” are now “Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processors.” The prefix causes all the Hyper-V counters to be grouped together.

Post RC you will see some counter sets get renamed and a few like “Hyper-V VMMS Task Manager Summary" have been removed because they did not provide a lot of value. The most notable renaming was “Hyper-V Hypervisor …” rate counters where “/ sec” has been appended to