David Strome's Blog : Windows 7

More Windows 7 Info

dstrome — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:06:27 GMT

Be sure to read the release notes to learn about known issues with the current beta release. In particular, be sure that you read about the issue that impacts MP3 files that are be accessed by the Windows 7 installation, either on the local computer or on your network. View the MP3 knowledge base article to download the fix to correct that issue. It’s strongly recommended that you install the fix, or perform one of the workarounds specified in the release notes, before you allow Windows 7 to access MP3s or corruption of the MP3 files could occur.

You can visit the Microsoft TechNet Windows 7 forums to talk to others about Windows 7 and receive support offered by Microsoft MVPs and subject matter experts. Visit the Windows 7 tab on the Springboard Series website for lots of information on how Windows 7 can help you in your organization.

Windows 7 Beta Released

dstrome — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:33:14 GMT

Microsoft released Windows 7 Beta today. Head on over to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx to download your copy. You can choose 32 or 64 bit in English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi. You might need to try a few times – looks like the servers are getting lots of traffic so the site’s slower than usual. Keep trying! Only the first 2.5 million people can download a copy. If you have TechNet or MSDN subscriptions, head over to those sites and download a copy there. They’re probably not as busy right now.

Keep in mind that this is beta software so all the typical disclaimers apply. The beta will expire on August 1, 2009. Visit the Windows 7 Beta FAQ for more information.

Windows PowerShell v2.0 CTP3 and Windows Remote Management 2.0 CTP3

dstrome — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:50:20 GMT

The Windows PowerShell and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) teams recently released updates to their products. Windows PowerShell v2.0 has many new features and improvements over v1.0. The most notable is the integrated scripting environment (ISE). The ISE is a new graphical PowerShell host that, in my opinion, makes Windows PowerShell much more usable for scripting and also for novice command line users. The things I find the most useful about the ISE are:

Intelligent formatting – the ISE colors the various command line components – cmdlet names, parameter names and values, etc like in C# and other languages. This makes it much easier to read your scripts
Tabbed runspaces – You can open new tabs which are each their own isolated runspace. This can be useful if you want to isolate your environments for testing or if you want to use WinRM to connect to remote runspaces.
Tabbed scripts within runspaces – Not only can you have multiple tabbed runspaces but within each runspace you can have multiple scripts open in their own tabs.
Interactive command window – While you are working on your script in the script window, you can try out commands in the command window without having to worry about accidentally changing your script. Or, if you just want to use the ISE as an interactive Windows PowerShell host, you can minimize the script window and just use the command window. I find myself using this over the original text-based console. There’s more screen real estate and the ISE also accepts unicode characters unlike the text-based window.
Dedicated output window – Any output that is displayed is sent to the output window.
Lots of other stuff – The ISE gives you lots of additional features that aren’t available in the text-based console – easy cut and paste, F1 help, a debugger, and more.

WinRM also shipped at the same time as Windows PowerShell. WinRM is a transport protocol that you can use with Windows PowerShell to allow a local Windows PowerShell session to communicate and run cmdlets on a remote Windows PowerShell host. Very useful if you need to manage multiple remote computers.

Give Windows PowerShell v2.0 CTP3 and WinRM 2.0 CTP3 a try by downloading them from the following locations:

PowerShell - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=135123
WinRM - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=135126

Be aware, however, that Windows PowerShell v2.0 isn’t supported with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You must continue to use Windows PowerShell v1.0 to manage your Exchange 2007 server.

You can visit the Windows PowerShell blog here - http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/

The CTP3 versions of both Windows PowerShell and WinRM are included in the Windows 7 Beta release that comes out on Friday 1/9/2009. You can find out how you can get Windows 7 by visiting the Windows Team Blog.