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)

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).

TechNet Flash Feed posts:

As noted in the Windows Blog, Microsoft today revealed two new desktop virtualization features that will be included in the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and an updated Remote Desktop client for Windows 7 SP1.

For Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Microsoft announced Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

Dynamic memory is an enhancement to Hyper-V in R2 and allows IT administrators to pool all the memory available on a physical host and dynamically distribute it to virtual machines running on that host as necessary. Get a deeper look at Dynamic Memory.

RemoteFX is the latest addition to Microsoft’s desktop virtualization stack and functions independently of any graphics stack and supports any screen content, including rich content like Silverlight or Flash. RemoteFX works on a wide array of target devices, including both thick and thin client hosts and a wide variety of network configurations. Get more information on RemoteFX here.

The Remote Desktop client in Windows 7 SP1 will take advantage of RemoteFX.