News early this week that Microsoft is trying to iron out a bug with NX CPU execution protection technology only spelled bad news. We can confirm that RC2 isn't likely to be released to beta testers until early next week. 2138 is the latest compile internally but doesn't hold the golden rc2 tagging yet.
This only points to 2139/2140 being the RC2 build and going out to testers within a week. Initially Microsoft were aiming for a June RTM for Windows XP SP2 but delays with security center bugs and application compatibility problems have delayed the highly anticipated update until July. Because of this, development of Longhorn is almost at a standstill whilst the main build team focus on XPSP2 instead of Longhorn. Many developers internally are itching to get back to Longhorn development naturally. According to internal sources 2137(xpsp.040520-1754) was the build that the NX problems have come from.
View: Latest XPSP2 Developments @ Neowin.net
News source: In-House
This only points to 2139/2140 being the RC2 build and going out to testers within a week. Initially Microsoft were aiming for a June RTM for Windows XP SP2 but delays with security center bugs and application compatibility problems have delayed the highly anticipated update until July. Because of this, development of Longhorn is almost at a standstill whilst the main build team focus on XPSP2 instead of Longhorn. Many developers internally are itching to get back to Longhorn development naturally. According to internal sources 2137(xpsp.040520-1754) was the build that the NX problems have come from.
View: Latest XPSP2 Developments @ Neowin.net News source: In-House
Ballmer also reinforced the ongoing priority of security-related issues and improvements.
"In order to take advantage of new business opportunities and effectively manage upfront and lifetime IT costs, it's important for customers to look at the entire IT life cycle - from application development to operations and management - and to choose a software platform that provides strong tools, ecosystem partnerships, security and support," Ballmer said. "The tools and technologies Microsoft is delivering today help customers work effectively and efficiently in distributed environments and across disciplines to drive growth and respond to change."
Microsoft Tech*Ed is Microsoft's premier technical training event, offering more than 400 sessions delivered by industry experts. More than 11,000 people are attending Tech*Ed 2004 - an increase of more than 22 percent over Tech*Ed 2003.
Visual Studio 2005 Team System Delivers Powerful Life-Cycle Tools
As businesses look to transform their IT organisations from a cost centre to a catalyst for overall growth, IT professionals seek to continually improve the efficiency and predictability of their infrastructure. Managing the life cycle of software development is a critically important component to overall business success and has become increasingly challenging as software teams become more specialised and geographically distributed. This effort is part of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), an industrywide initiative focused on management of the entire application life cycle.
Unveiled today, Visual Studio 2005 Team System delivers productive, integrated and extensible software life-cycle tools that enable businesses to reduce the complexity of delivering service-oriented solutions. The Visual Studio 2005 Team System contains several tightly integrated design, development and testing tools that foster greater collaboration between architects, developers and IT professionals throughout the IT life cycle. Expanding on Microsoft's proven success in delivering highly productive developer tools, the Visual Studio Team System increases the predictability of the software development process, shortens the development life cycle, and enables IT departments to deliver greater business value.
Visual Studio 2005 Team System creates even more opportunities for the Visual Studio
partner ecosystem. Global systems integrators, service providers and tools vendors all play a vital role in complementing and extending the Microsoft Visual Tools family to customers. Today, Borland Software Corp., Compuware Corp., EDS, Telelogic AB and Unisys Corp. announced their support for Visual Studio 2005 Team System.
Partners can take advantage of the integration benefits of the Visual Studio 2005 Team System, giving customers a broad choice of development tool options. "We believe Microsoft's entry into application life-cycle management is evidence that the industry is maturing, and will even further expand for leaders like Borland that have years of experience in the space and a set of mature products already available to customers," said Dale Fuller, CEO of Borland Software. "Borland looks forward to continuing its long-standing collaborative relationship with Microsoft to deliver high-quality solutions for our mutual customers."
Systems integrators can extend the Visual Studio 2005 Team System and Microsoft's process guidance and prescriptive architectures to gain greater predictability in the development process.
"Visual Studio 2005 Team System offers maximum productivity using integrated tools while lowering risk and project-related costs through increased and continuous visibility into the overall project. This allows EDS to increase business agility for clients through configurable guidance, architectural guidance and life-cycle tools built on Windows Server System," said Stan Alexander, vice president of Technology Strategy & Architecture at EDS.
Facilitating Service Orientation With More Secure Web Services
Microsoft's service-orientation strategy focuses on enabling customers to integrate new and existing systems composed of heterogeneous technologies with Web services. To help developers build interoperable, security-enhanced Web services solutions, Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of Web Services Enhancements 2.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE), a free add-on to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.
Today more than 250,000 developers use WSE to build security-enhanced Web services that help improve business processes within and beyond corporate trust boundaries. Customers such as HP, the Ohio State University Medical Center, EDGAR Online Inc. and Siemens AG are already experiencing the benefits of developing advanced Web services solutions based on WSE 2.0.
The Ohio State University Medical Centre required a solution that allowed authorised users to remotely and more securely monitor, record and replay generated vital-signs data and correlate this data with medications administered in the operating room.
"Microsoft was the only company that offered an implementation of the Web services protocol specifications (WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Policy, WS-SecureConversation) required to make the project a success," said professor Furrukh Khan, director of technology for the Collaborative for Applied Software Technology, Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University. "By using WSE 2.0, we were able to focus on the solution's business logic instead of writing security code. WS-Policy allowed us to simply install digital certificates and write a few hundred lines of XML that describes how the Web services are to use them. Another big enabler was WS-SecureConversation, which gave us the security that was required without sacrificing performance."
WSE 2.0 enables developers to build advanced Web services using the latest protocol specifications. Developers can use WSE to more easily enhance Web services security by incorporating WS-Security (based on the 2004 Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standard), including WS-Policy, WS-Security Policy, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation.
Additional features include extensible transports, support for custom policies, the ability to host Web services independent from IIS, and asynchronous messaging based on the WS-Addressing specification.
To further support integration of systems using security-enhanced Web services, Microsoft also announced the Technology Preview release of the BizTalk Server Adapter for WSE 2.0. Using this adapter, BizTalk Server customers can easily orchestrate new business processes out of security-enhanced, autonomous Web services, creating further levels of business agility using service-orientation design principles.
Using Web Services to Help Information Workers and Developers Harness the Power of Microsoft Office for IT
The Microsoft Office Editions are some of the most widely used applications in enterprises today, but customers typically have to leave the Microsoft Office experience when they want to access many kinds of business data. Developers now have the opportunity to create intelligent business solutions that address today's demanding business requirements while giving information workers the powerful, familiar user interface of the Microsoft Office Editions. In order to enable software developers to more powerfully leverage existing systems and information even when it is stored in multiple disparate back-end systems, Microsoft today released the technical beta of the Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework.
The Information Bridge Framework provides developers with a set of tools and components to quickly and cost-effectively build smart client solutions that connect Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 to multiple enterprise systems via Web services. Information Bridge reduces the costs of solution development for IT professionals and increases flexibility and manageability of Office-based information integration solutions.
In addition, Information Bridge-based solutions empower information workers to easily find, access and work with line-of-business information within the familiar Microsoft Office environment.
The Information Bridge Framework provides the following:
* A client-side component that interprets XML markup, which describes the Information Bridge-based solution behaviour, including its user interface and user actions
* A server-side component that enables Web services to expose the data, views and actions embodied by line-of-business applications
* Information Bridge Metadata Designer, a plug-in for the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development system that creates and manages solution metadata
"We're very excited about the possibilities of the Information Bridge Framework. Not only does it make it easier for our developers to build and manage integrated solutions that connect Office to our enterprise, but it also improves the productivity of our employees by building upon the Microsoft Office user interface," said Ken Meidell, chief information officer at Cascade Designs. "We were able to save money and improve our product development process significantly by building upon Information Bridge and Office."
STV
but july???????
damn
STV
Now, would you like to bet that SP2 will introduce a ton of new bugs, as well as breaking many existing programs?
Wouldn't you sorta stay the same age?
Not exactly a long article...
there ya go mate
this isn't ment to be a troll, just an honest question.
-the Colonel
Exactly. Windows (any version) slows down after time even if you don't do much with it. Error messages and such are more prone to occur the longer you have it installed. So techies like us (and especially hardcore gamers who need every bit of speed) regularly reformat our hard drives to keep Windows in an optimal state.
i like to screw up windows
i go through the system files, try to find out everything about windows.. if i screw it up, i got everything backed up.. and i jus go reformat
Oh yeah, and who the f*ck are you to tell us we're ignorant? Think you can do better? Get your trolling *ss out of here before I b*tch-slap you.
Some companies use the excuse that people might install their programs again down the road, so they leave all the settings laying around for future installations to use. Because, naturally, even though we'd have to reconfigure the damn thing's actual settings, it's important to keep the recently opened files list.
What slows down Windows? A lot of it is MS's own fault, yeah. The Windows environment doesn't do much to encourage keeping software as independent as possible (for efficient removal and management), but at the same time, the developers out there could put a little bit of freakin' effort into working around that and doing some bloody innovating in terms of how software resides on the system. For all the whining people do about how MS should keep their OS barebones, they sure put most of the innovative burden on the Redmond giant.
Actually, that's true.
People rag an RPM a lot for the dependency issues, but it really is a blessing when it comes to software installation management. All a user has to do is issue 'rpm -e packagename' and all traces of the program are gone. I wish microsoft would develop a similar database driven system for software management.
Imagine, put msofficexp.i386.rpm, winzip.i386.rpm, grandtheftauto3.i386.rpm, msvisualstudio.i386.rpm, and PervasiveSQL.i386.rpm all on a network share, issue 'rpm -ivh *.rpm', and have everything installed.
Sure beats babysitting each individual programs installation wizard one at a time
Besides Slammer and Sasser, the internal firewall would have taken care of that as long as you had virus software too. SP2 need's more time to bake. Can anyone tell me why they need it in July, instead of October or even better November?
But seriously, M$ programmers and beta testers should work harder - we've been like waiting around 3 months for that 9 MB Rollup fix (that was a collection of previous patches)?
That's a little too long a wait for the $$$ that Windows costs!
Last edited by 6586 on 26 May 2004 - 20:55
A few months ago I read that Longhorn was supposed to come out in the middle of 2005, now they postponed it to the end of 2006. And that's just Longhorn! I've heard that Blackcomb was supposed to be the real deal here. You know, a "totally written from scratch" O.S. that DOESN'T contain a Registry and other nasty stuff. It was supposed to be a revolution for computers. But now the future looks bleak. I doubt Microsoft will keep the Blackcomb idea. And that's just sad.
Last edited by 51446 on 27 May 2004 - 01:33
You will never get a totally rewritten OS they will always build on the previous one.
Although the first NT OS was built from the ground up but I doubt it will happen again as they would be fools to throw away their previous work and start again.
You know what though as much as they test SP2 it's still going to have problems on some people's machines. So it will be "late and buggy".
win32 will still be in longhorn, they require it for compatability
I thought they based it on OS/2 (the version they were working on before they parted ways with IBM).
As a service pack primarily concerned with security, Microsoft is presumably rushing to help secure the computers of all the casual users out there who can't do the job themselves in an effort to reduce the number of compromised computers out there spreading garbage.
Unfortunately, I think this is a case of bringing the horse to water. Microsoft programmers can work on security until they're blue in the face, but until the average Windows user becomes aware that security is even an issue that must be dealt with, it's all for naught.
Case in point: I have a friend who started using computers in 1996. He has used a computer almost daily since that time—mostly to surf the Internet. At this late date, his skills are still limited to using a web browser, an email client, and an IM client. That's pretty much it. Oh yeah, he can install and use a program from a CD (sometimes) if it contains an autoinstaller and puts a "start" icon on his desktop.
In a recent phone conversation, he started complaing to me about all the weird stuff his computer was doing, so I took him through the process of downloading, installing, and running Spybot S&D. I had to make him do it—and he did—but he bitched and moaned the whole time about what a hassle it was. He flat out didn't want to do it.
Does anybody think this guy is going to acquire and install SP2 on his own initiative? NOT! And unfortunately, this guy is representative of a huge percentage of computer users out there. Nevertheless, I think Microsoft feels compelled to make this service pack available with all due speed to assist those individuals who can and will take advantage of it.
Last edited by 9969 on 26 May 2004 - 21:18
opps wrong reply
opps wrong reply
You're right though. No software company is supposed to charge people for "updates". EVER.
I say let them do this right, they're paying attention to security and quality for the first time ever with SP2 and they want to do this right. So let them do what they want to, and unless you can write a service pack for windows then STFU.
Last edited by 55894 on 26 May 2004 - 21:28
Microsoft staff unhappy over stock benefits cuts.
Last edited by 41522 on 27 May 2004 - 00:48
Sounds like Microsoft found a problem with part of the Service Pack, and is getting it fixed up right. No need in them releasing a pack that causes 1% of the people problems, only to release a patch to fix that problem soon after.
They have done. It's called RC1.
J/K
Im sure the trolls here are the first to complain too when they find any little bug, but they dont have a patience either to wait for a release.
If you are so desperate, get one of the leaked builds or something, I'm using 2126 and it looks quite stable to me.
i dont see why they intergrate that security bullsh*t into sp2 i have no use for it its annoying as hell if u disable the firewall and disable autoupdates and half the people i help (i work for msn ts) dont even have sp1 on theyre pc what makes microsoft think they will upgrade, the firewall is crap, but not as much as security center is
What the heck are you talking about? you can easily disable the firewall and antivirus checking or updates and tell the security center NOT to give you any warnings and it will not.
I doubt it you have used the latest builds. let's leave alone that you work for MS.