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)

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

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!

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

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

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

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

The Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is available for download here (Web Installer). The service pack is also available as ISO image (1.49GB)

 

From the download site:

 

This download installs Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This service pack release addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. These service packs offer Visual Studio users improvements in responsiveness and stability, as well as completes some high-impact scenarios requested by customers. The full list of updates included in this service pack can be found here.

A new list of free e-books on Microsoft technologies has been released on the Microsoft Press blog. Below is the list of available books (including sample code if available).

Programming Windows Phone 7 (Charles Petzold) PDF - Sample Code C# - Sample Code VB.NET
Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner) XPS - PDF
Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions, From the Desktop to the Datacenter (Mitch Tulloch) XPS - PDF
Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 (Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker with the Windows Server Team at Microsoft) XPS - PDF
First Look Microsoft Office 2010 (Katherine Murray) XPS - PDF
Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance (Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, Jerry Honeycutt, Ed Wilson,...)  PDF
Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines) XPS - PDF - Sample Code

 

(original post)

Another MSDN-flash newsletter was send out covering various topics such as Windows Phone 7, PDC10, MVVM Light Toolkit for Silverlight and WPF and much more. If you want to subscribe to the MSDN-Flash newsletter (and all other available Microsoft newsletters), you can do so at the Profile Center.

 

 

Now, about the e-book:

 

The book is called “Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010”, written by Ken Haines, Pascal Paré and Patrice Pelland. For more information about the authors, please check the original post on the Microsoft Press Blog. The book is divided in three parts: part I for developers moving from VS2003, Part II is for developers moving from VS2005 and part III is for developers moving from VS2008. You can provide feedback by filling out the survey on the Microsoft Learning site.

 

 

 

Download the book: PDF (18.2MB) / XPS (30.5MB)
Download the sample code

The new MSDN Flash arrived this morning, and it offered 7 free e-books (actually 6 e-books and some reference cards) on .NET and architecture. For the original article that was posted in the newsletter, click here.

 

The books:

 

- Foundations of programming (Karl Seguin)
- Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition (Microsoft)

- Rob Miles C# Yellow Book 2010 (Rob Miles)

- Threading in C# (Joe Albahari)

- Improving .NET Application Performance and scalability (Microsoft)

- Applying Design Patterns (Anoop Madhusudanan)

 

And some References Cards (RefCardz) from DZone:

 

- Getting Started with WCF 4.0 (Scott Seely)

- Getting Started with Silverlight + Expression Blend (Victor Gaudioso)

- Essential F# (Chance Coble, Ted Neward)

SQL Server 2008 SP 2 is available for download.

 

From the TechNet Flash:

 

Both the Service Pack and Feature Pack updates are now ready for download on the Microsoft Download Center. Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 includes new compatibility features with SQL Server 2008 R2, product improvements based on requests from the SQL Server community, and hotfix solutions provided in SQL Server 2008 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 to 8.

 

• - SQL Server 2008 SP2

• - SQL Server 2008 SP2 Express

• - SQL Server 2008 SP2 Feature Packs

From Scott Guthrie’s blog:

 

Last month we released a beta of the Microsoft Web Farm Framework. The Microsoft Web Farm Framework is a free product we are shipping that enables you to easily provision and mange a farm of web servers.  It enables you to automate the installation and configuration of platform components across the server farm, and enables you to automatically synchronize and deploy ASP.NET applications across them.  It also supports integration with load balancers - and enables you to automate updates across your servers so that your site/application is never down or unavailable to customers (it can automatically pull servers one-at-a-time out of the load balancer rotation, update them, and then inject them back into rotation).

 

Downloads: X86 / X64

 

 

Features:

- One step provisioning of servers added to a farm
- Platform Provisioning using Web PI
- Application Provisioning using Web Deploy
- Policy-based Provisioning
- Installation of additional platform components and content
- Reduced down time with load balancing integration using ARR
- Up-to-date status and trace logs of server farm servers
- Extensible model that allows you to write additional providers

 

 

Resources:

- Microsoft Web Farm Framework web site

- Official post on Scott Guthrie’s blog (includes tutorial)

When cruising the MSDN-forums I found the following free e-book:

 

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2, by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker with the Windows Server Team at Microsoft.

 

Chapter 1    What’s New in Windows Server R2    1
Chapter 2    Installation and Configuration: Adding R2 to Your World    9
Chapter 3    Hyper-V: Scaling and Migrating Virtual Machines    25
Chapter 4    Remote Desktop Services and VDI: Centralizing Desktop and Application Management    47
Chapter 5    Active Directory: Improving and Automating Identity and Access    65
Chapter 6    The File Services Role    91
Chapter 7    IIS 7.5: Improving the Web Application Platform    109
Chapter 8    DirectAccess and Network Policy Server    129
Chapter 9    Other Features and Enhancements    147
Index    163

 

source (original MSDN post)

 

Download the e-book in XPS (28 MB) or PDF (11 MB).

 

 

Erwin Chan has posted the product releases (exams, courses,...) for this month on the born to learn web site.

The products concerned are:

- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009
- Microsoft Dynamics C5
- Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009
- Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step
- Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
- Microsoft Expression Blend
- Microsoft Online Services
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 & 2010
- Windows Server 2003 & 2008
- Windows 7

The SDL Developer Starter Kit offers training content and labs to help you establish a standardized approach to rolling out the SDL in your organization—or enrich your existing development practices.

It consists of 14 content modules (with speaker notes, presenter guides, and sample comprehension questions) plus eight MSDN virtual labs with lab manuals—all created to help you build a customized SDL training program for your development teams. – source

Topics covered:

- Banned APIs
- Buffer Overflows
- Code Analysis
- Compiler Defenses
- Cross-Site Scripting
- Fuzz Testing
- Secure Design Principles
- Secure Implementation Principles
- Secure Verification Principles
- Security Code Review
- Source Code Annotation Language
- SQL Injection
- Threat Modeling Principles
- Threat Modeling Tool Principles

You can download the individual videos or a package containing all videos here. The size of the individual videos varies between 14,8 MB and 38,8 MB. The complete package is 324,9 MB.

Introducing the newest member of the Visual Studio family:

 

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new tool aimed at building data-driven applications, like an inventory system or a basic customer relationship management system incredibly easy.
LightSwitch automatically generates the user interface in Silverlight for a data source and, with no code, you can create, read, update and delete data.

 

Resources:

- Visual Studio LightSwitch Development Center

- Visual Studio LightSwitch Forums

- Jay Schmelzer: Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch (Channel 9 video)

- Jason Zanders blog

- Beth Massi “How do I” videos

- Download Visual Studio LightSwitch

ScottGu introduced Microsoft's WebMatrix which is a small IDE to make web sites (ASP.NET and PHP). It actually includes everything you need: IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). This product is aimed at developers and students who want an easy way to develop web sites. It is emphasized that all the knowledge and skill you gain using Microsoft WebMatrix is applicable to Visual Studio. WebMatrix is a 15MB download (50MB if you don’t have .NET 4 installed) and is quick to install.

Microsoft WebMatrix page
Microsoft WebMatrix Learning page
Scott Guthrie's WebMatrix post
Scott Hanselman's WebMatrix how-to

Microsoft's Managed Extensibility Framework provides a way to build very modular solutions. See it as a plug-in system where you have a shell which dynamically loads parts. A part is a functionality (or a set of functionalities). It is included in Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4. For thos who are still working with Visual Studio 2008/2005, MEF is available as downloadable package (see links below).

 

MEF presents a simple solution for the runtime extensibility problem. Until now, any application that wanted to support a plugin model needed to create its own infrastructure from scratch. Those plugins would often be application-specific and could not be reused across multiple implementations.

- MEF provides a standard way for the host application to expose itself and consume external extensions. Extensions, by their nature, can be reused amongst different applications. However, an extension could still be implemented in a way that is application-specific. Extensions themselves can depend on one another and MEF will make sure they are wired together in the correct order (another thing you won't have to worry about).
- MEF offers a set of discovery approaches for your application to locate and load available extensions.
- MEF allows tagging extensions with additonal metadata which facilitates rich querying and filtering

 source

 

References:

The MEF project site (CodePlex) (includes webcasts)
Practical examples of products and solutions that use MEF
MEF Programming Guide
MEF Architecture

 

The Powershell team released Windows PowerShell 2.0 and WinRM 2.0 for pre-Windows 7 operating systems on Windows Update. This non-security, optional update is designed for Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP2, and Windows XP SP3.

Windows PowerShell 2.0 and WinRM 2.0 are also available as part of  the Windows Management Framework (WMF) Core Package on the  Microsoft Download Center and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).

The WMF Core Package available on the Microsoft Download Center and the Windows Update release contain the same binaries of the products, so you can now download them from either source. Because Windows PowerShell 2.0 is in-place upgrade to Windows PowerShell 1.0, we will no longer be offering Windows PowerShell 1.0 on Windows Update.

Windows PowerShell 2.0 appears as an option in a Windows Update scan only if the computer meets the following conditions.

• The computer has at least Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP1
• The computer does not have a non-RTM (CTP, Beta, RCs etc.) release of Windows PowerShell. (Windows PowerShell 1.0 RTM can be installed.)

as found on the Powershell Team blog.

The TechNet Flash Feed reports:

 

Microsoft today announced the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 to manufacturing. You can expect availability in early May through Microsoft's distribution channels. To get jump on all the SQL Server 2008 R2 enhancements, check out the SQL Server 2008 R2 Digital Tour.

 

Here’s some additional resources:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 Tweetup Video Montage

• Download the SQL Server 2008 R2 Guide

• Download the free SQL Server 2008 R2 e-book

• Download the SQL Server 2008 R2 Resource Kit

 

Full article

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