There is an event next Saturday you might consider watching and listening to.  It’s the first of many Springboard Technology Expert Panel (STEP) events to come.  The STEP program is made up of Microsoft employees, MVPs and MCTs.  This particular event is being delivered live in our west coast offices, but we will simulcast the event via LiveMeeting.  So you’ll be able to listen to the presenters, see the demos, etc.  Attend remotely via Live Meeting . Here is the registration

WARNING – this is a progressive download video. It is not streamed. Therefore the entire 400MB video is downloaded and played if you click the big START button above. What’d you expect for 60 minutes of video? If you want to download the video and play it offline, right mouse click the following URL and then use the SAVE AS function to save it locally to your hard drive. Get it @ http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/videos/SpringboardPerformance.wmv

The astute know the Windows Vista Resource Kit is shipping and in the wild. When I arrived at my house Friday, my copy was sitting on the front door step. I'm surprised UPS didn't charge extra for the weight. The resource kit book is huge. 1500+ pages huge. The microsoft.com/mspress area strangely didn't have a current view and description of the book, table of contents, cd contents, etc. So, you'll need to get that information from other sources on the grid like Barnes and Noble , Amazon and other

Thanks to all of you for coming to the sessions I delivered today in Orlando, Florida. Go Gators. As promised, I have posted the following slide decks: Windows Server code name "Longhorn" Tech Overview Part 1 Windows Server code name "Longhorn" Tech Overview Part 2 Windows Server code name "Longhorn" Network Access Protection (NAP) Windows Deployment Services I had fun today and I hope you found the sessions and demos valuable. For those of you unable to attend, no worries, I'll be capturing a slew

Channel9 has a treat for everyone and it starts next week. Charles Torre of Niner fame will have a bunch of fascinating interviews and videos on the core technologies that make up Windows Vista. For instance, get the low down on Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) from Jon Schwartz (UAC Architect/Developer) and Chris Corio(UAC PM). This will be a "Going Deep" episode that promises to, eh, go deep on how it works, why it is what it is, the problems UAC solves and the context of Windows usability.

The February CTP of Windows " Longhorn " Server is now available at a couple of locations. For those of you that signed up for the technical beta program at connect.microsoft.com, you'll see the download there. Not to be outdone, this release is also available to TechNet Online subscribers download area. For more information on this build, see http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2007/02/21/february-2007-ctp-of-windows-server-longhorn-released.aspx . If you haven't subscribed to the TechNet

Virtual PC 2007 is a great virtual machine execution environment. John Howard, Virtual Machine PM blogs that we have released it to the web and it's currently propagating across the microsoft.com cluster complex. This is the core tool I use for my job and I think you'll find we have added some great new features to this release. What is Virtual PC 2007? Use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same physical computer. Switch between virtual machines with

Lets face it, our new deployment tools rock. However, one significant customer feature request has been missing from the portfolio. Every time I do a deployment tool session around ImageX, BDD, WAIK, etc., the question of multicast support comes up. And the answer until today is we don't have multicast support. Well, we now have multicast support checked into the build tree for Longhorn Server. It will be tightly integrated into the Longhorn Server Windows Deployment Services (WDS) role. We'll release

As you’ll recall, I posted a preliminary version of the Windows Vista Product Guide (also known as “The Book of Windows Vista”) a few weeks ago. It was in .xps form and initial feedback was very good. However, in order to view and print the must have information, you needed to install WinFX . XPS is the XML Paper Specification. Well, we got some good critical feedback and guess what, we listened. Now, you can download this puppy in Microsoft word or XPS format. Careful though, it’s