From the press release:
“NASA and Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., released an interactive, 3-D photographic collection of internal and external views of the International Space Station and a model of the next Mars rover on Thursday, May 7.
NASA and Microsoft's Live Labs team developed the online experience with hundreds of photographs and a photo imaging technology called Photosynth. Using a click-and-drag interface, viewers can zoom in to see details of the space station's modules and solar arrays or zoom out for a more global view of the complex.”
More info from the Silveright Team here.
You can check it out by clicking the picture below.
The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) have been updated for the Windows 7 RC build. I’ve been using a combination of the RSAT and the Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Beta console on my Windows 7 machine to manage my Hyper-V lab machines and its been working very well so far.
The main download page is here.
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x86): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x64): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x86): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 RC (x64): http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/F/C/1FC27A82-15D9-4D93-B3BC-24204175F9DF/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu
RSAT Client is available to all customers as part of the supplemental Microsoft Software License Terms to Windows 7 licenses.
Once you’ve installed the update, you can manage what tools you want enabled via the Control Panel under Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off:
This is the list of Windows Server administration tools which are included in RSAT Client for Win7 RC:
Server Administration Tools:
Role Administration Tools:
Feature Administration Tools:
The E7 blog has an interesting article on SSD performance and optimizations made in Windows 7 to take advantage of them. The E7 post also links to an in depth AnandTech article that goes into more detail on SSD’s and has some benchmark comparisons between various drives. I’m definitely planning to get an SSD drive when I get my new laptop in a couple months. I’ll likely be getting one of the large workstation class laptops like the Dell M6400 or the Lenovo W700. The only thing that might make me wait longer is if we get a release schedule from Intel on their Clarksdale mobile processors which are basically mobile Nehalems for laptops. I’m leaning toward the M6400 since it has dual internal hard drive bays and supports up to 16GB of RAM which is insane for a laptop. With the two drive bays I figure I’ll run an 80GB SSD for the OS and get a large 7200 RPM SATA for the other bay. I’ll go with 8GB of RAM initially for budget purposes and expand next year when the prices come down. I’ll be dual booting (or booting from VHD) between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. With the OS and Apps on an SSD that setup should really fly.
A new scenario that may be interesting (and demo a good chunk of our virtualization and VDI capability would be to set up a full Windows Server 2008 R2 / VMM 2008 R2 infrastructure on this machine. Basically run 2 – 3 VMs for the infrastructure to present a Windows 7 VDI client virtual machine. Then from the physical OS use Remote Desktop Services to access the Windows 7 VM. With Aero remoting I should get a near desktop like experience.
Back to SSDs, in addition to desktop/laptop scenarios, I’m hearing more and more about them in enterprise storage scenarios. A lot of the big vendors have really evolved their architectures over the last five years to take advantage of and virtualize different tiers of disk architectures and SSD are getting slotted in as the next tier closest to the cache in a lot of cases. From a virtualization perspective this will be interesting as I think SSD’s will be an enabler for somewhat better density and a lot better performance. Since I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with Hyper-V and Citrix’s Provisioning Server, I’m especially interested in seeing how VDI performance on pooled (shared virtual disk) scenarios is improved using Windows 7 VMs and SSDs on the Provisioning Server.
There was a lot of buzz last week with Facebook’s Open Stream API announcement. There were many demos of applications leveraging the new API, one good one is Seesmic Desktop which I’ve been using as my Twitter client and now has Facebook integration. It's an Adobe AIR based application. On the home front, Microsoft took part in the Facebook event and showed off some very slick Silverlight and WPF clients leveraging the Facebook API. Both were technology demonstrations created in 72 hours by two teams of 3 developers. This post over on Team Silverlight has the details and a bunch of screenshots. In their Twitter stream they say that they will be publishing the source code for these very soon. Below is a TechCrunch video showing them in action.
Robert has a good post up for folks wanting to run Windows Server 2008 R2 on their laptops. A lot of us do that so that we can run Hyper-V for demos or development purposes. If you enable the Desktop Experience feature along with Wireless LAN and a few other things, you effectively get a Windows 7-like desktop and the ability to run Hyper-V.
One of the challenges of this setup is that for some of the hardware in your laptop, Windows Server 2008 R2 may not detect drivers for it whereas if you were running Windows 7, the hardware would be detected and appropriate drivers downloaded from Windows Update. Robert’s post describes installing Windows 7 into another partition on the laptop and letting Windows Update detect and download the drivers into the Windows 7 install. Then you can boot into Windows Server 2008 R2, go into device manager and search the DriverStore on the Windows 7 partition to find the drivers.
If you know specifically all the hardware in your notebook, either via the Vendor’s website or by taking a screenshot of Device Manager before you upgrade, another way to approach this without doing a separate install of Windows 7 is to search the Microsoft Update Catalog. This KB article talks about how to do that but basically you can search the catalog and download the driver packages directly without Windows Update having to detect your hardware. In my example, I have a Dell D820 with an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120 display adapter. Sometimes Windows Server 2008 and R2 don’t detect this. Since I know exactly what card I have, I can go to the catalog, search for that adapter, and find then download the Windows 7 driver and install that. The screenshot below shows what the catalog looks like. You can search and add multiple drivers to the download basket then download them all.
Bottom line, if you don’t know all the hardware in your machine, use Robert’s method of installing Windows 7 in another partition to identify all the hardware and use the drivers you download there. If you know your hardware, give the update catalog a try.