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As noted on the Openness@Microsoft blog this morning by Anandeep Pannu, Senior Program Manager for the Open Source Technical Center:
Today, Microsoft and partners NetApp and Citrix are excited to announce the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V. This collaboration, announced at BSDCAN 2012, will help more customers adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing. Microsoft is committed to supporting multiple platforms with its server virtualization solution so that more organizations can take advantage of server consolidation cost-savings and build foundations for private, public and hybrid cloud computing.
This release, which includes 8,500 lines of code released under the BSD license, is the result of collaboration between Microsoft, NetApp, and Citrix to enable FreeBSD to run as a first-class guest on Windows Server Hyper-V. My colleague Peter Galli had a blog post this spring about the announcement of this goal, and it’s great to see this work come to fruition so quickly! For further background, check out the interview with Joe CaraDonna, Technical Director of Core Operating Systems at NetApp, in which he described how this project would “round out the FreeBSD virtualization story and make the FreeBSD operating system a more compelling offering.”
FreeBSD is the latest in a growing list of open-source operating systems and open-source cloud projects that work with Hyper-V, including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, Cs2C, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. This wide range of options makes it easier for customers to take advantage of server virtualization, enabling a variety of cloud computing and hybrid computing scenarios.
For more information about today’s announcement, see the blog post on Openness@Microsoft as well as the documentation and downloads available from the freebsdonhyper-v project on Github. The FreeBSD drivers are being prepared for inclusion in the FreeBSD core, and there will soon be available ISO images with preinstalled drivers for the latest releases of FreeBSD (based on community feedback).
Congratulations to all involved in reaching this important milestone! We’re looking forward to more good news from the FreeBSD on Hyper-V team going forward.
Doug MahughSenior Technical EvangelistMicrosoft Open Technologies, Inc.
by Peter Galli on January 19, 2009 02:00pm
As Microsoft continues the drive for interoperability between different implementations on various platforms, the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team is, for the first time, participating as a code contributor to an Apache project: the Stonehenge incubator project.
Microsoft first talked about Stonehenge at ApacheCon 2008, which was held in New Orleans last November. Since then, it has been approved as an incubator project within Apache Software Foundation, and WSO2 and Microsoft have already contributed code for a web-services based sample application, known as StockTrader, to this effort.
That code can be found here, along with the contributions from WSO2.
Stonehenge has attracted some very prominent committers so far, Kamajit Bath, a Principal Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team and the lead for Microsoft's participation in Stonehenge, says in a recent blog post.
"I hope that the momentum will be sustained, and I am looking forward to seeing code contributions from other folks and seeing the StockTrader sample application enhanced with new features. I also hope that new sample applications will be developed to cover other areas of the WS-* standards that are not best represented by the StockTrader application. I look forward to participating in this discussion with the Stonehenge community," he says.
There are three Microsoft committers on the Stonehenge incubator project: Greg Leake, who wrote the original StockTrader application; Drew Baird, who worked to get it ready for contribution to Stonehenge; and Mike Champion, who will play an active role in this effort.
In a recent blog post, Champion says Microsoft have heard from customers that they want sample applications based on real-world scenarios and challenges, as these will help them realize the potential of these technologies that have been developed and standardized for the last 8 years or so.
The initial response from the Apache community has also been quite favorable, and "I have a personal commitment to invest in helping make Stonehenge a success, and look forward to digging in," he says.
Champion also notes that Stonehenge is being championed by Paul Fremantle, co-founder and CTO of WSO2, "which has been a great partner in helping to improve and demonstrate the interoperability of the WS-* standards across platforms."
He cites, as an example of this, TechEd 2008, where Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 and Greg Leake of Microsoft demonstrated how separate WSO2 and Microsoft components implementing a mutlti-tier stock trading application can interoperate and be substituted for one another, he says in the blog.
StockTrader is also just the starting point for the broader goals of Stonehenge, which aims to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.
Stonehenge can also help wire up the ‘last mile' between the standardized web services infrastructure that is now implemented across key platforms, and a new generation of service oriented applications that will span them, he says.
Existing WS-* interoperability work such of the sort done by WS-I and in our "plugfests" will continue to solidify the platform-level interoperability. The new work, exemplified by Apache Stonehenge, should attract a wider community of users who can exploit the hard standardization and platform interoperability work without having to wallow in as many nasty details as in the past.
For Bath, projects like Stonehenge are important in enhancing interoperability between different software implementations. While standards organizations do a great job and the roll out of various WS-* standards is a testimonial to the fact that they can work efficiently, interoperability work doesn't stop at the end of the standardization process but, rather, that is where it really starts, he says.
by Peter Galli on August 21, 2009 06:00am
Today, the DPE Interop team at Microsoft released a new open source project that bridges PHP and .NET using REST.
Specifically, the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services was made available, which makes it easier for PHP developers to take advantage of the ADO.NET Data Services, a set of features recently added to the .NET Framework.
The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an open source project funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. It is available on CodePlex today.
These services, which were previously referred to by the codename Project Astoria, expose a wide range of data sources through a RESTful service interface.
There is full support for ADO.NET Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as well as in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010, which includes direct support for both creating and consuming data services directly from the development environment.
Read more about all this on the Interoperability blog, and watch the Channel 9 video interview with Claudio Caldato, Senior Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy team, and Pablo Castro, software architect of ADO.NET Data Services.
This is yet another example of Microsoft's continued commitment to openness and interoperability as well as of its embrace of Web standards in its technologies.
by admin on April 19, 2006 05:42pm
Running Command Line Applications on Windows XP/2000 from a Linux Box:
Question:
-----Original Message----- From: swagner@******** Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 2:35 PM To: Port25 Feedback Subject: (Port25) : You guys should look into _____ Importance: High
Can you recommend anything for running command line applications on a Windows XP/2000 box from within a program that runs on Linux? For example I want a script to run on a Linux server that will connect to a Windows server, on our network, and run certain commands.
Answer:
One way to do this would be to install an SSH daemon on the Windows machine and run commands via the ssh client on the Linux machine. Simply search the web for information on setting up the Cygwin SSH daemon as a service in Windows (there are docs about this everywhere). You can then run commands with ssh, somewhat like:
ssh administrator@<hostname> 'touch /cygdrive/c/blar'
That will create a file in C:\ called "blar". You can also access Windows commands if you alter the path in the cygwin environment or use the full path to the command:
ssh administrator@<hostname> '/cygdrive/c/windows/system32/net.exe view'
by Jean Paoli on November 07, 2008 01:21am
Interoperability has always been a focus area at Microsoft. Being a platform company, Microsoft has engaged in interoperability at many levels - product features, participation in standardization bodies, publishing many technologies under open licenses and working closely with customers, governments and partners to understand the heterogeneous IT landscape and discuss practical interoperability solutions.
Earlier this year, these activities were formalized under the Interoperability Principles for all of our high-volume products.
I am the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, and I have worked across the company on many interop initiatives. I am happy to see many interop projects now coming out of Microsoft and, personally, having many of them based on XML makes me doubly happy.
My team has built several bridging technologies and solutions for many of our products to enable interoperability. These are being run as open source projects and released under a broad BSD license so that our customers and partners can use them in many open and broad scenarios.
Interoperability has been getting enhanced attention at a lot of conferences lately and Microsoft has also upped its participation at many open source conferences such as OSCON, the Eclipse Conference and ApacheCon.
At Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference last month, the interoperability story was part of almost every announcement and keynote address. As Sam Ramji writes in his latest blog, Microsoft is also participating at ApacheCon and highlighting the interoperability work we are doing. These are indeed exciting times!
On the interoperability front, my team has been working with the WSO2 since the TechEd 2007 Conference to demonstrate interoperability using our StockTrader reference application.
This week, the WSO2 proposed a new Apache incubation project, known as Stonehenge, to further this work. The aim of this project is to set up sample applications to demonstrate interoperability with multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. We look forward to working with WS02 on the scope of this project, and having discussions with the community.
I also want to highlight some open source interoperability projects that my team has been working on with third parties, companies and members of the community at large, which may be very relevant to the readers of this blog.
Eclipse Tools for Silverlight
Eclipse4sl allows Java developers to develop code for the Silverlight platform within the Eclipse development environment, and contains both an advanced project system for creating Silverlight applications and media experiences as well as a compiler for packaging Silverlight applications for deployment.
Interoperability with the Azure Services platform
Announced at PDC recently, the Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. Microsoft .NET Services is a key component of the Azure Services Platform that offers a set of Microsoft-hosted, highly scalable, developer-oriented services that provide the key building blocks, like, Access Control, Service Bus, and Workflow service.
The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability and in that spirit, we have built two cross-platform SDKs for .NET services - for Java and Ruby.
Information Cards Interoperability
Windows CardSpace is Microsoft implementation of Information Cards on the Windows platform. Information cards are a core part of Identity Metasystem and help both site owners and visitors to manage, control, and exchange digital identities more safely and consistently.
We have also built four open source projects that help Web developers support information cards on diverse platforms:
OpenXML-ODF translators
The goal of this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on ODF (OpenDocument) standard and Office Open XML standard. The translator is based on XSLT transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing, and is available on Sourceforge under a BSD-like license.
OpenXML-UOF translators
The goal of this project is to provide translators to allow for interoperability between applications based on UOF (Uniform Office Format) standard and Office Open XML standard.
UOF is an emerging standard, which is being developed by the Chinese Office Software Work Group (COSWG), led by the China Electronics Standard Institute (CESI), the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), major suppliers of Chinese office software suites, and other academic institutions.The translator is based on XSLT transformations between two XML formats, along with some pre- and post-processing. It is available at SourceForge under a BSD-like license
I would like to hear your comments and feedback on these projects and also welcome open engagement on what Microsoft should be doing for interoperability. Tell us what other interoperability scenarios we should be looking to address.
I also want to thank the multiple third party companies and the community members we cooperate with, as well as the members of my team: Vijay Rajagopalan, Sumit Chawla, Kamaljit Bath, Claudio Caldato, Jean-Christophe Cimetiere and many others for working on these projects and building technical solutions for interoperability with key Microsoft products and technologies.
Microsoft announced today that, with immediate effect, it will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V running CentOS, a popular Linux distribution for hosters.
"This development enables our hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows and Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V; reducing cost and complexity, while betting on an enterprise class virtualization platform. I want to thank the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center for the work they have done with the community to make this possible," Sandy Gupta, a general manager in Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, said in a blog post.
Gupta will also be delivering a keynote address at the opening day of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco today. During the keynote he, along with his colleague Fabio Cunha, will demonstrate the cross-platform architecture of Microsoft’s Private Cloud.
"We will show implementation that supports multiple hypervisors and delivers a platform for the transformation of a heterogeneous IT infrastructure into an automated mixed source Cloud infrastructure. Fabio will show demos of various cross-platform capabilities of System Center Operations Manager, System Center Orchestrator, and also how customers can use a single pane of glass to deploy patches and updates across Windows and Linux Servers," Gupta said.
You can read the full blog post here.
For those of you who love .Net and have an interest in Web standards and Interoperability at Microsoft, then listening to the interview with Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, with .NET Rocks!, is a must.
.NET Rocks! is an internet audio talk show for those interested in developing on the .Net platform, and the interview with Paoli is part of a six-part series titled, "Ignite Your Coding: Web Development Series."
In the interview, Paoli draws upon his experience as a co-creator of the XML 1.0 standard to discuss XML, web standards, and the role of interoperability within Microsoft.
The interview, which can be found here, is hosted by Richard Campbell , Microsoft Regional Director and Carl Franklin, MSDN Regional Director for Connecticut.
Enjoy!
Great news for our CodePlex community: CodePlex now supports Git!
Git has been one of the top rated requests from the CodePlex community for some time, and giving CodePlex users what they ask for and supporting their open source efforts has always been important to us.
And the goodness continues, as the CodePlex team has a long list of improvements planned.
So, why Git? CodePlex already has Mercurial for distributed version control and TFS (which also supports subversion clients) for centralized version control. The short answer is that the CodePlex community voted, loud and clear, that Git support was critical.
With the addition of Git, CodePlex now has three options when it comes to Open Source project hosting. Projects can now select between TFS, Mercurial, and Git.
Each developer has their own preferences, and for some, centralized version control makes more sense to them. For others, DVCS is the only way to go. We’re equally committed to supporting both these technologies for users.
You can get started today by creating a new project or contribute to an existing project by creating a fork.
For help on getting started with Git on CodePlex, see the help documentation here. If you would like to switch your project to use Git, please contact CodePlex Support with your project information.
For more information on this news, read the CodePlex blog.
by Peter Galli on April 22, 2009 01:37pm
Microsoft is sponsoring research at the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) to develop an open source Network File System client for Windows. This will enable Windows to better interoperate with this emerging Internet storage protocol for fast file sharing.
NFS is a commonly used protocol for sharing files among networked computers and storage hardware, particularly with UNIX and Linux-based software. NFSv4 is the latest version of this software and adds support for parallel access to file servers, object-storage, and storage area network infrastructures.
Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business and a University of Michigan alumnus, expressed excitement about the project, saying that NFSv4.1 is an important standard for accessing parallel file systems in the high-performance computing market, where access to vast amounts of data is critical in areas like scientific or technical computing systems.
"We believe that customers want to be able to choose the technologies that best meet their needs and that also interoperate with existing systems. Ultimately, CITI's work will help change the way customers can combine their systems by enabling computers running Windows to directly and easily access NFS file shares on servers running Linux, Solaris, and AIX operating systems."
CITI, which is a research unit in the College of Engineering, developed the open source Linux-based reference implementation of NFSv4 that is already included in all Linux distributions. However, Peter Honeyman, a research professor in the division of Computer Science and Engineering and principal investigator of this project, notes that Windows is a critical component in the University's research cyber-infrastructure, responsible for the control of instruments in laboratories across the university, in medicine, engineering, geosciences, bioinformatics, and many other disciplines.
"So this project is especially important in helping university scientists and engineers fill a gap in the storage fabric. This partnership also shows how the university can serve as a living laboratory for the development of interoperable enterprise scale systems that meet the needs of industry and academia," he said.
I am pleased to announce another open source milestone as we continue to deliver on our commitment to Interoperability: today, the Facebook C# SDK was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery.
This project is a set of libraries that enables developers of all Microsoft platforms, as well as Mono, to build applications that integrate with Facebook. The project contains core libraries for authentication and calling Facebook APIs. Additionally, the project contains platform specific helpers such as extension methods for ASP.NET MVC.
The Facebook C# libraries give app developers a stable, small-footprint SDK that enables quick app integration into Facebook. This has allowed mobile and web app developers to quickly create Facebook apps that meet the needs of their customers.
The Facebook C# SDK has had 10 major releases, and has been downloaded more than 115,000 times, proving to be one of the most popular community-driven open source projects in the .Net ecosystem.
The project, which already has a significant user base, was hosted on CodePlex.com but has moved to github, with developer discussions supported on Stack Overflow.
Nathan Totten, Jim Zimmerman and Prabir Shrestha developed the Facebook C# SDK and contributed the project to the Outercurve Foundation, which currently has three galleries and 21 projects, each of which was contributed with funding and resources to support the project and/or gallery for a period of three years.
Of the 225 developers who currently contribute to Outercurve projects, fewer than 45% are employed by Microsoft.
by jcannon on June 06, 2008 12:35pm
Abstract: Secure remote access to UNIX and Linux systems is generally accomplished through SSH. The most frequent implementation of that protocol is OpenSSH, originally written for the OpenBSD project but now ported to a wide variety of platforms. This paper will show how to use OpenSSH with the Kerberos portion of Active Directory to automate authentication.
Download OpenSSH on Linux using Windows/Kerberos for Authentication
Note: This paper represents testing and documentation in a lab environment. User Account Control (UAC) is an essential security component to Windows and Microsoft does not recommend turning off UAC in production environments.
by hjanssen on July 20, 2009 03:24pm
Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I am simply going to start this blog with the following line.
Microsoft just submitted source code for the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components to the Linux Kernel Community Under GPL v2.
Well, there's a conversation starter! Are you still all sitting in your chairs???
Let me summarize:
Fallen off your chair yet?
Microsoft developed the Linux device drivers to enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. My team and I were responsible for testing and validating the driver components that were contributed for this first release.
Now, my team and I will be responsible for further developing this code going forward. (Yes, that does mean that I have gone back to leverage my very early roots as a Kernel programmer. Let the world be warned!!!!). Haiyang Zhang has been working on this code with me, and he will continue to work with me on this going forward.
When I joined Microsoft three years ago, the primary reason was to put my money where my mouth was. You see complaining about something is easy, but it becomes a little more complicated when somebody offers you the opportunity to be part of helping change what you have complained about.
So, three years after taking the job that made me put my money where my mouth was (and still often is!), I for one am EXTREMELY happy to see one of the most significant fruits of our work here in the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). But I have to say, even I would have been hard-pressed to think three years ago that we would consider contributing to the Linux Kernel.
As you know, two years ago Microsoft announced a partnership with Novell, and Tom Hanrahan ran the lab on a day to day basis till about 9 months ago. Since then I have had the pleasure of running the technical side of the execution of that lab under Tom Hanrahan for the OSTC. One of the primary tasks for that lab is to make sure Windows runs well on top of XEN and Linux runs well on top of Hyper-V, and we do this in very close cooperation with Novell.
We do most of this work as an extension to Mike Neil's Hyper-V team.
As part of this, we were asked to help develop and maintain a crucial part of this work called the Linux Integration Components. This code is designed so that Linux can run in an "enlightened mode" on top of Hyper-V (enlightened mode is roughly the Hyper-V equivalent of "paravirtualized mode" for the Xen hypervisor). Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. It is this device driver code that we are releasing today, directly to the Linux Kernel.
We're not talking a few hundred lines of code here; we're talking about roughly 20,000 lines of code.
Is this a Dump and Run from Microsoft? Absolutely not! We plan to enhance the functionality of this code, and we will continue to work with the Linux Community to support the drivers and to ensure continued interoperability.
As you can imagine, this was the result of a lot of hard work: Hiyang Zhang, who has been co-writing this code; Hashir Abdi, who has been testing all this stuff; as well as Vijay Tewari and Mike Sterling from the Hyper-V team who have been taking care of the Hyper-V side.
And last, but certainly not least, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has been helping me to make all this code land in the right area in the kernel. He has patiently worked to help me correct my obvious mistakes and to get the code contributed into the kernel.
So where are we today? Well, Greg Kroah-Hartman will make the code visible to the outside world today. (For those who want to get a head start, the code will sit under <your kernel tree>/drivers/staging/hv). After it becomes visible, I will write a few more blogs this week that should help you to understand, build and run them.
The titles I am thinking for these blogs are:
Where do the Linux ICs reside in the kernel tree and how do I build them?
And
How do I install, configure and run the Linux IC's?
I had almost forgotten how wrapped up you can be once you start writing code again. So I have not gotten much sleep this past week, but it has been a joy to get back into coding again!
Today Microsoft Open Sourced the reference designs to the .Net Gadgeteer, a rapid prototyping, education/hobbyist kit built on the .NET Micro Framework.
The .Net Gadgeteer team has spent the past few months redesigning and re-implementing the kit to ensure that the architecture will work with the widest variety of processors and support the most diverse set of modules.
The .NET Gadgeteer is based on a set of pluggable modules that remove the need to create specific connections for each electronic component - you only need to plug the modules in. This greatly speeds up the process of building experimental devices and also removes the need for any electronics background to bring your ideas to reality.
In addition to making the hardware development easy, .NET Gadgeteer includes a set of libraries that provide a high level, high productivity development environment so that you can create the intelligence of the device in just a few lines of code.
These libraries are built on the .Net Micro Framework which provides a deep integration with the powerful Microsoft development tools. Now you can develop embedded logic in Visual Studio using C# then deploy the application to the device and debug that application using the rich debugging capabilites of the IDE.
The reference implementation includes the software libraries, which are licensed under Apache 2.0, as well as the designs and specifications for the hardware, which are licensed under the Creative Commons.
Program Unit Manager Colin Miller tells me that the .Net Gadgeteer platform has generated a great deal of enthusiasm among hobbyists and educators as it enables people with a wide range of electronics and programming skills to create an almost limitless array of devices. (Watch this video for more background).
“Our goal is to encourage and support third parties to build kits and modules that all work together to create a rich ecosystem for the user community. This software is still in beta form and we encourage your input on it. We will also aggressively encourage and support vendors interested in evaluating the potential of the platform,” he says.
by jcannon on November 27, 2007 06:41pm
For those who've been participating on Port 25 since the beginning, you may have noticed two recurring themes. One, Microsoft has a focus on generativity - or the ability for technology to be extensible to others, be they community or commercial developers. Windows, Office - the Live APIs - are all examples of the ability for technology to serve a purpose, and allow others to build new purposes simultaneously. The other is a focus on supporting and growing business partners. Over the past two years, we've talked to great partners like Centrify, BitRock, Quest and Mindtouch. In fact, the latter re-enforces the former.
Today is no different - we're glad to have Mindtouch return with a guest blog from Aaron Fulkerson, Mindtouch Co-Founder, with an update on their .net-based open source, cross-platform wiki solution. Take it away, Aaron.
Since we last talked MindTouch has managed to propel itself into the pole position of our space. Specifically, MindTouch's Deki Wiki is the most popular commercially supported wiki there is. Our rate of adoption outpaces our most well-known competitor by a factor of 30x.Our software is currently being downloaded and installed more than 700 times a day and growing.
Why? How? Well, first of all, we've listened intently to our community of users and it has grown to an active and vibrant group of a couple thousand who have translated our application into 7 languages, filed bug reports, written code patches, and developed application extensions. They've also been very active in steering the product road map. Next, we've developed a compelling platform. The only platform in this space in fact. What I mean by "platform" is two fold. Deki Wiki has the most complete API. Deki Wiki's API has 99 REST-based methods and make it very easy to integrate the wiki or to build new applications, learn more here: http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki/API_Reference. Point two, Deki Wiki has a web-service extension model that makes it the most extensible in this space. Finally, what's really set us apart from any other applications in this space is that MindTouch's Deki Wiki facilitates, even for non-technical users, the ability to create and share of application and content mashups. This will become clear in the demo video.
I should mention Deki Wiki is developed in C# on .NET and it is compatible with Mono. Extending it is language agnostic and it's platform independent thanks to the good folks working on Mono at Novell. Watch the demo video, I'm certain you'll be impressed with the power, usefulness, and uniqueness of what MindTouch is building. Then go download and install. It's free, open source, and thanks to the VMware certified image it can be installed in just over 5 minutes.
Thanks for having us Jamie and Port 25.
by jcannon on March 16, 2007 05:02pm
This week, the lab looks at configuring and installing MySQL - an open source relational database management system which is typically used for web applications.
This paper will provide an overview of configuring & installing this software on Windows. MySQL does not have as many features as PostgreSQL, however, and one would expect it to perform substantially better than PostgreSQL on Windows because of its thread-based architecture (PostgreSQL uses a process-based architecture instead).
Attachment: MySQL_Windows.pdf