From the source:

Mitch Tulloch has updated his very popular free ebook on Windows Server 2012 based on the RTM version of the software.

A key feature of this book is the inclusion of sidebars written by members of the Windows Server team, Microsoft Support engineers, Microsoft Consulting Services staff, and others who work at Microsoft. These sidebars provide an insider’s perspective that includes both “under-the-hood” information concerning how features work, and strategies, tips, and best practices from experts who have been working with the platform during product development.

Please see the links below to download one or all of the available formats.

PDF - Introducing Windows Server 2012 RTM Edition - PDF ebook

EPUB – Introducing Windows Server 2012 RTM Edition – ePub format

MOBI – Introducing Windows Server 2012 RTM Edition – MOBI format (for Kindle)

The full version can be bought here:

UK / Europe:

Kindle edition 

Paper edition

US:

Paper edition

Kindle edition (at the time of writing, the book is priced at $0.00)

From the MS Press blog:

Get an excerpt from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Pocket Consultant (ISBN 9780735663763; 592 pages) selected by author William Stanek. Click here for your PDF.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

Chapter 1: Managing SQL Servers

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio is the primary tool you use to manage databases and servers. Other tools available to manage local and remote servers include SQL Server PowerShell, SQL Server Configuration Manager, Database Engine Tuning Advisor, and SQL Server Profiler. You use SQL Server Configuration Manager to manage SQL Server services, networking, and client configurations. Database Engine Tuning Advisor is available to help optimize indexes, indexed views, and partitions, and SQL Server Profiler lets you examine events generated by SQL Server, which can provide helpful details for troubleshooting. In this chapter, you will learn how to use SQL Server Management Studio.

■ Using SQL Server Management Studio

■ Managing SQL Server Groups

■ Managing Servers

■ Using Windows PowerShell for SQL Server Management

■ Starting, Stopping, and Configuring SQL Server Agent

■ Starting, Stopping, and Configuring MSDTC

■ Managing SQL Server Startup

■ Managing Server Activity

Chapter 2: Implementing Policy-Based Management

Policy-Based Management is an extensible and scalable configuration framework that you can use to manage servers, databases, and other objects in your data environments. As an administrator, you need to be very familiar with how Policy-Based Management technology works, and that’s exactly what this chapter is about. If you haven’t worked with Policy-Based Management technology before, one thing you’ll notice immediately is that the technology is fairly advanced and has many features. To help you manage this complex technology, I’ll start with an overview of Policy-Based Management and then explore its components.

■ Introducing Policy-Based Management

■ Working with Policy-Based Management

■ Configuring Central Management Servers

■ Managing Policies Throughout the Enterprise

SOURCE 

From the source:

Friends, the final and complete version of Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012, by Ross Mistry (@RossMistry) and Stacia Misner (@StaciaMisner), is now ready as a free download! You can download the PDF version of this title here (288 pages; 10.8 MB).

We will update this post soon with links to EPUB and MOBI files. We expect these files to be available by March 23. If you prefer a hard copy of the book, you can order it here for $14.99.

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 includes 10 chapters:

PART I   DATABASE ADMINISTRATION (by Ross Mistry)

1.   SQL Server 2012 Editions and Engine Enhancements

2.   High-Availability and Disaster-Recovery Enhancements

3.   Performance and Scalability

4.   Security Enhancements

5.   Programmability and Beyond-Relational Enhancements

 

PART II   BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DEVELOPMENT (by Stacia Misner)

6.   Integration Services

7.   Data Quality Services

8.   Master Data Services

9.   Analysis Services and PowerPivot

10.   Reporting Services

TechDays 2012: session recordings, slides and content online - Katrien's MSDN Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

On Katrien’s MSDN Blog:

During TechDays Belgium 2012 two weeks ago, Scott Guthrie announced the Beta release of ASP.NE MVC 4 slated for that same week. Since February 16th you can now download ASP.NET MVC4 Beta.
Interesting to note is the availability of a Go-Live license with this release. In other words, if you feel like using these bits on production you now can!

A few important updates and features are part of the Beta:

• - Bundling and Minification, brought to ASP.NET 4.5 and now also integrated into ASP.NET MVC 4. This allows you to build faster applications by minimizing the number of requests to the server (bundling requests).
  
• - Web API integration into ASP.NET: new support for creating HTTP REST services, has built-in support for content negotiation with support for JSON, XML and Form URL-encoded formats
  
• - ASP.NET Mobile support through custom view engines for mobile sit.es and jQuery Mobile integration.
  
• - Async and WebSockets: when using ASP.NET MVC 4 with .NET 4.5 and VS 11 you’ll also be able to take advantage of the new async and WebSocket support built-into .NET 4.5.
  
• - Single Page Applications: new in the beta is support for building better end-to-end experience for building applications with client-side interactions using JavaScript (Upshot, History.js) and the MVVM pattern (knockout.js). On the server side the ASP.NET NET Web API is used, mainly an abstract class DataController. Note this is a new project template type in experimental phase.
  
• For more information on creating Single Page Applications with ASP.NET MVC 4 I recommend you watch the fantastic session Steve Sanderson did during TechDays: Building rich Single Page Applications (SPAs) for desktop, mobile, and tablet with ASP.NET MVC 4. Worth watching until the end where Steve even shows an offline capable implementation using HTML5 application cache and offline storage. These latter ones however are not yet part of the beta.

Resources

• Download ASP.NET MVC 4
• Watch Scott Guthrie’s session going through ASP.NET MVC 4
• Watch Steven Sanderson’s session on Single Page Applications
• Read Scott Guthrie’s series on ASP.NET Web API
• Learning: new Intro to ASP.NET MV4 tutorial
• Learning: ASP.NET Web API Samples

From time to time I get a fun question. One of them was this: Please provide a list with powers of 2 accompanied by their binary representation, for let’s say up to 50.

First version:

   1:  int temp=1;

   2:   

   3:  for(int i = 1; i<=50; i++)

   4:  {

   5:      Console.WriteLine(i+": Dec: "+temp+" - Bin: "+Convert.ToString(temp,2));

   6:      temp = temp*2;

   7:  }

This gives the following result:

Here we bump into the maximum of information that can be held by an integer. So for going up to 50, it suffices to change the type of the decimal number to long:

   1:  long temp=1;

   2:   

   3:  for(int i = 1; i<=50; i++)

   4:  {

   5:      Console.WriteLine(i+": Dec: "+temp+" - Bin: "+Convert.ToString(temp,2));

   6:      temp = temp*2;

   7:  }

So, I could answer the question. But the same problem occurs when you come to the limit of the long-data type (which is at 64).

Double, float or decimal are not supported by the Convert.ToString(…) implementation where you can define the toBase-parameter.

Cihan Biyikoglu (SQL Azure) explains on his blog the new pricing model for SQL Azure and provides us with some useful links such as a price calculator, more pricing details,…

The article: The New Pricing Model for SQL Azure Explained!

Another interesting post on Eric Lipper’s blog. In this post, he explains his understanding of the concept of “late binding” (with a couple of small samples).

Read the full article here.

Found one of these in my mailbox today. And found some interesting stuff!

Live Webcast: Entity Framework, LINQ, and WCF Data Services for Oracle Database

On Thur., Feb. 9, at 9 a.m. PT, Oracle will host a live webcast on using Microsoft Entity Framework, LINQ, and WCF Data Services with Oracle Database. Led by an Oracle product manager, this session features step-by-step demonstrations that build an Entity Data Model (EDM) from an Oracle schema, query that EDM using LINQ, perform DML on the EDM, and generate an Oracle schema using Model First.

Register here

Release 1.2.11 of log4net has these changes (source):

General:

log4net 1.2.11 is not only a bug fix release, it also adds support for Microsoft® .NET 4.0 as well as the client profiles of .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0. … The binary distributions no longer contain assemblies built for the Compact Framework 1.0 or the Shared Source CLI - you can build those yourself using the source distribution.

NOTE: The signature of ILoggerFactory.CreateLogger has changed!

Some of the bug fixes:

- Visual Studio 2010 .NET 4.0 Application does not copy log4net lib to bin directory

- RemoteFileAppender Tests fail on Windows 7

- log4net doesn't log when running a .Net 4.0 Windows application built in Release mode

- EventLogAppender's ActivateOptions throws SecurityException on Vista/Win2k3 and later when not run as administrator

Some of the improvements:

- support .NET 2.0 connectionStrings configuration section

- IPAddressConverter improvement for .NET 2 or .NET 3

- Add Cc and Bcc support to SmtpAppender

Some new features:

- add the ability to roll files based on universal time (UTC).

- Support ASP.Net related PatternConverters to allow items from the HttpContext.Current.Session, Cache, Request, etc. to be captured.

- Build for Compact Framework 2.0

- Added ExceptionEvaluator

- Add TimeEvaluator

- New property ReplyTo address for the SmtpAppender required

- Buildable with VS 2008 and .NET FW 3.5

• - Support .NET 4.0 including Client Profile

Previous articles:

- Logging: Log4Net Part I

- Logging: Log4Net Part II

- Logging: Log4Net Part III

- Logging: What/When to log?

- Logging: Log4Net Custom AdoNetAdapter and RollingFileAppender with XML

Links:

- Log4net web site

- Download Log4net

See Steve Ballmer’s pre-event keynote, photos and more from this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

All links to presentations, video’s, articles, blogs, photos can be found at the official Microsoft News Center page for CES

As many of you, I too have this huge pile of books somewhere in the house correctly named by Homer J. Simpson as “the to-read-pile”. One of the books that’s been on there quite a while is “Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat: How to Win in the Information Age” by Archibald Putt (a pseudonym).

The books handles the topic on how to be successful in a hierarchy of companies (or departments) whose core business is technology. Sometimes, you read a Dilbert-cartoon and laugh going “it’s funny cause it’s true”. I’ve had that with this book all the time. I’ve read its 170 pages in two days and had to agree for many times with the author’s description of the reality we live in. When it seems that management takes weird decisions, absurd conclusions,… this books explains why they have. I absolutely recommend this book for everyone who is in the technology-business.

Interested in the book?

United States (in $) / United Kingdom & Europe (in £)

Found the MSDN newsletter in my mailbox this morning. First topic that caught my eye: Visual Studio 11 Dev Preview! Another one? Indeed!!! So here is some more information on the new kid on the block.

What's New in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Training Kit

.NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview

Recently I got a question of how in .NET it was possible to read from the Windows Regional and Language Settings. Rather than messing around with the Windows registry, the best way to get this information is to use the RegionInfo-object in the System.Globalization namespace.

The code:

First of all, don’t forget to add the correct using statement:

   1:  using System.Globalization;

After that it’s just declaring the RegionInfo object and reading the settings you’d like (for the example, i’m reading all the settings):

   1:  RegionInfo local = RegionInfo.CurrentRegion;

   2:   

   3:  Console.WriteLine("CurrentEnglishName: "+local.CurrencyEnglishName);

   4:  Console.WriteLine("CurrencyNativeName: " + local.CurrencyNativeName);

   5:  Console.WriteLine("CurrencySymbol: " + local.CurrencySymbol);

   6:  Console.WriteLine("DisplayName: " + local.DisplayName);

   7:  Console.WriteLine("EnglishName: " + local.EnglishName);

   8:  Console.WriteLine("GeoId: " + local.GeoId);

   9:  Console.WriteLine("IsMetric: " + local.IsMetric);

  10:  Console.WriteLine("ISOCurrencySymbol: " + local.ISOCurrencySymbol);

  11:  Console.WriteLine("Name: " + local.Name);

  12:  Console.WriteLine("NativeName: " + local.NativeName);

  13:  Console.WriteLine("ThreeLetterISORegionName: " + local.ThreeLetterISORegionName);

  14:  Console.WriteLine("ThreeLetterWindowsRegionName: " + local.ThreeLetterWindowsRegionName);

  15:  Console.WriteLine("TwoLetterISORegionName: " + local.TwoLetterISORegionName);

  16:  Console.WriteLine("ToString: " + local.ToString());

NOTE: Notice that the ToString() method is also implemented for this class. So calling RegionInfo.CurrentRegion.ToString() will give you the TwoLetterISORegionName.

On Hosam Kamel’s blog there is an interesting post on a tool that helps you finding your way in an SLN-file (Visual Studio Solution file).

“Tools for SLN File” is a tool that makes it easier for developers to compare, merge or filter the Solution (.Sln) Files generated by Visual Studio. (source)

Benefits and Features

Using the SLNTools provides the following advantages:

• - Make it easier to compare SLN files versus a 'generic' file comparer. For more information on the compare function see SLNTools Compare.
• - Make it easier to merge SLN files versus a 'generic' file merger. For more information on the merge function see SLNTools Merge.
• - Make it possible to create filters for a SLN file. The way it work is that when the filter file is opened, a temporary solution is created dynamically. The created solution file contain only the projects that are specified in the filter, and all the dependencies of those projects. This make it possible to have a mega-solution that contain all the projects needed to build the complete system but still have the possibility to work efficiently on a subset of the system. As you might know, Visual Studio is a lot faster when you have a solution with 10-20 projects instead of one with 200+ projects (opening the solution, building, etc). For more information on the filter function see SLNTools Filter.

For downloading the tools or viewing the full article, please visit the original blog post.

I’ve added an example in the MSDN Samples repository which explains how to read values from the Windows Registry.

Description:

The example is a simple Console-application that shows you how to select the correct RegistryHive, and afterwards navigate to the correct key and read the value. Keep in mind that reading from the Windows registry always returns an object of type 'object' so you'll need to cast this value to something that makes more sense. This means that you'll be expected to know what you're going to read (integer, binary, string,...). And last but not least, don't forget to add the Microsoft.Win32 using statement!

The available RegistryHives you can read from (and their corresponding names in the Registry Editor (Start => Run => regedit.exe):

• - ClassesRoot (in RegEdit: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT)
• - CurrentConfig (in RegEdit:HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG)
• - CurrentUser (in RegEdit:HKEY_CURRENT_USER)
• - DynData (Windows' own hive with dynamic data. Some configuration information in Windows must be stored in RAM because it requires fast modification and retrieval that cannot wait for the registry to send it to the hard disk. You can find all this data in the HKEY_DYN_DATA registry key. The information in this key is newly created every time Windows starts. Not visible in RegEdit)
• - LocalMachine (in RegEdit:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE)
• - PerformanceData (Is used to access performance counters but is not visible in Regedit)
• - Users (in RegEdit:HKEY_USERS)

You can find the example here.

Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 ( Web Installer)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (ISO – 1.5GB!)

SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (for x86, x64 and IA64)

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (for x86, x64 and IA64)

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 3 (for x86, x64 and IA64)

Microsoft Office 2007

The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1 – SP1 Language Pack

The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 – SP2 Language Pack
The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 3 – SP3 Language Pack

Recently, Microsoft released the new SIR (Security Intelligence Report). This 168-page document provides an overview of all the threats that are out there:

With a collection of data from Internet services and over 600 million computers worldwide, the Security Intelligence Report (SIR) exposes the threat landscape of exploits, vulnerabilities, and malware. Awareness of threats is a preventive step to help you protect your organization, software, and people.

If you’re only interested in the thread-trends in your region, you can go to the Regional Threat Assessment site and select your region.

- The SIR web site
- SIR Volume 11 (PDF)

There are a bunch of new SDL resources available on the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle page. For every step in the software development process (Requirements, Design, Implementation, Verification, Release) there are tools and/or training videos available. For a video giving an overview of the SDL tools, click here.

Source

Requirements

Templates:

- SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System 2008

- MSF-Agile + SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System 2010

- MSF-Agile + SDL Process Template for Visual Studio Team System 2008

Videos:

• Introduction to the SDL Process Template for VSTS
• How to set up the SDL Process Template
• How to improve your check-in process
• How to change default work items
• How to use the SDL Process Template documentation and reporting

Design

SDL Threat Modeling Tool

For more information on the treat modeling tool, click here.

Implementation

FxCop 

FxCop analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. For more information, click here. Watch the video here.

Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library

This is specifically designed to help mitigate the potential of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks in web-based applications. Watch the video here.

Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET

CAT.NET is a binary code analysis tool that helps identify common variants of certain prevailing vulnerabilities that can give rise to common attack vectors such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection, and XPath Injection. Watch the video here.

Verification

BinScope Binary Analyzer

BinScope Binary Analyzer is a verification tool that analyzes binaries to ensure that they have been built in compliance with the SDL requirements and recommendations. Watch the video here.

SDL MiniFuzz File Fuzzer

MiniFuzz is a basic testing tool designed to help detect code flaws that may expose security vulnerabilities in file-handling code. Watch the video here.

AppVerifier

Application Verifier is a runtime verification tool for native code that assists in finding subtle programming errors that can be difficult to identify with normal application testing. For more information, click here.

SDL Regex Fuzzer

SDL Regex Fuzzer is a verification tool to help test regular expressions for potential denial of service vulnerabilities. Watch the video here.

Attack Surface Analyzer Beta

Attack Surface Analyzer is a tool that highlights the changes in system state, runtime parameters and securable objects on the Windows operating system.

Release

The release resources are the same templates and videos as the ones in the Requirements section.

On the Windows 8-team blog there are many posts on how the team worked on this product. They don’t explain how they did it, but they also explain why. One of the topics here is the redesign of the start-menu. Steven Sinofsky talks about the history and evolution of the Start menu and how user feedback has been an important source of information in the development of this part of Windows.

- Evolving the start menu

- Designing the start screen

If you want your WCF service to use certificate-based (X.509) certification to authenticate the users accessing your service, you’ll need to provide the right configuration on both the client and the server side. The keyword here is configuration. When I first started searching for a solution I knew it had to be done in the configuration file, but, as usual, I kind of underestimated the amount of configuring that had to be done.

Especially when you’re looking at the generated configuration file provided by Visual Studio, it’s easy to get lost in all the possible security settings. I once attended a course given by Juval Löwy (IDesign) on WCF where he applauded the fact that the WCF-team had made everything configurable and at the same time warned us for the complexity that came with it.

The solution: There is a easy-to-follow example where you can learn how certificate-based authentication for WCF can be done at Mitch Denny’s blog - Using Certificate-based Authentication and Protection with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

He starts out by creating a simple WCF service (with 1 HelloWorld-method) and afterwards adding the authentication configuration.

The first post I did about this was the announcement of it's beta release. The final version has been available for a while now, so here we go :)

What is Visual Studio LightSwitch?

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is a simplified self-service development tool that enables you to build business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and cloud. What can your business do with LightSwitch? Watch this brief introduction to find out.

Links & resources:

Visual Studio LightSwitch page
MSDN LightSwitch Development Center
Visual Studio LightSwitch Technical White Paper Series

LightSwitch videos:

Overview with Jason Zander
Build Custom Business Apps. Coding Optional.

Introductory videos

Creating Your First Business Application
Data, Queries and Code in LightSwitch 2011
Controlling Access to Your Business Application
Publishing Your LightSwitch Application

Advanced videos

Understanding the LightSwitch Architecture
Deploying Your Application to the Cloud
Advanced LightSwitch Customization
Advanced LightSwitch Extensions

Extension videos

DevExpress LightSwitch Extensions
Infragistics LightSwitch Extensions
RSSBus LightSwitch Extensions

Recently I’ve been working on a project with a friend of mine. One of the things we were playing with was Team Foundation Server 2010. So we set it up and I connected to it using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. Collaborating was not an issue. Sharing documents, using source control,… everything worked fine. Now I wanted to work on some of my ideas. I wanted to start a new project in Visual Studio, but the only option that was available to me was the “Start new team project” issue:

When clicking here, I got the following error (which is ok since my rights on that TFS server have been revoked):

The weird thing here is that I have a fully working version of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate installed, but I only get the Team Explorer functionality. You can verify this by checking the installed components of Visual Studio in the “About”-window (Help –> About Microsoft Visual Studio).

To get back to the “normal” mode in Visual Studio (meaning: being able to create new projects and working with VS2010 normally) you need to reset your preferences by doing Tools > Import/Export settings > Import. Here you can choose to reset everything or to import a certain configuration. I chose to import a predefined configuration without backing up my current configuration (wasn’t much use to me anyhow):

I selected the Visual C# Development Settings and pressed “Next”. There I chose to reset all settings and clicked the “Finish” button:

Now that my configuration settings have been restored, I have the regular view in my Visual Studio and I can create projects again!

In Microsoft Outlook you can automatically add your country’s national holidays.

In the “Tools” menu, select “Options”

In the “Preferences” tab on the Options-screen there is a “Calendar”-section. Click on “Calendar Options”

In the “Calendar options”-section of the Calendar Options (I swear, I’m not making this up) press the “Add Holidays…”-button.

Now a list appears with all the countries for which national holidays are known in Outlook. Select the countries of which you want the holiday information imported in Outlook and click “OK”.

Something I found that might come in handy:

The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library driven by developers' needs. Our goal is to provide typical code samples for all Microsoft development technologies, and reduce developers' efforts in solving typical programming tasks.

Codeplex page

Download (from Codeplex)

Request a code sample

For a full list of downloads (sorted by technology), please check the Codeplex download page. There are samples available for C++, ASP.NET, Silverlight, Azure, Office, Windows, WPF, Windows Security, and many more…