This is shaping up to be a pretty good week. Maybe Thursday Bush will announce that the U.S. is finally joining the Kyoto accord, and Friday everyone's favorite Iranian -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- will discover that those 3000 new centrifuges he bought are much better used for making delicious milkshakes than enriching uranium hexafluoride. (Hey, I can dream, can't I?) At least one more good thing is coming this week -- on Saturday we're having our community Vista launch event. If you're anywhere near...

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This week I'm back on Dell's campus, delivering a class about software development for Vista. In another couple hours I'll be heading out to the Round Rock 1 building to pick up all the freshly-printed courseware. The front of the building is all dressed up in honor of the big Vista launch: It's a great time to be in IT

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The blessed creators of PowerShell have smiled upon us and now provided the release version of their rich shell interface for Vista. In honor of this momentus occasion I have decided to also bring a gift to the table. I took a couple of hours and updated the great introductory walkthrough document for PowerShell done by Ryan Paul so it's consistent with the release version. Ryan comes from a strong background in Linux, with lots of experience using great shells. His write-up is the perfect thing...

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Some have wondered why Vista took so long to get to us. What's the big deal about it anyway? Well, it's much more than a pretty face and the fancy new communication features of WCF. Okay, so that was all it was going to be originally. A marginal upgrade. A hop between Whistler and Blackcomb, and its code-name told it all: Longhorn is just a small bar nestled between those two giant mountains. But when Blaster and other embarassing attacks surfaced in the 2003 timeframe, the original plans to make...

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I was asked to be one of the folks answering questions at the big Phoenix "Ready for a New Day" launch event. Definitely a fun experience, and pretty well attended. A common question that came up is what level of hardware runs well with Vista? The answer I had given to everyone is to have 1.5 gigs of RAM, and a nice DirectX 9 video card if you want the cool Aero effects. Over the past couple days I got to experience what it's like when you don't have enough RAM. I originally had two sticks of DDR...

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(This was actually meant to be a comment to Alex's post. Surprisingly trying to submit my very simple response below didn't work!!! I tried everything I could think of, removing the dollar signs and other punctuation, etc. Makes me wonder how many legitimate comments I miss out on in my posts.) With that, here's Alex's words: Unless you don't like science (defined here as knowledge derived through observation and experimentation) and would prefer to live in the Dark Ages, it should be clear that...

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I want to go on record as saying that I have great respect for Michael King, born 78 years ago today. We all know him a little better by the name Martin Luther King, Jr. Various blemishes aside, largely he used his talent to benefit others, and held strong to his goals of freedom and equality. I greatly respect that. His tenacity is evidenced in the setting where he first heard he had won the Nobel peace prize: after being admitted to the hospital while suffering extreme fatigue during his efforts....

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Today we dug into the new Group Policy features found in Vista. There's 800 new policies altogether, so wow is there lots to see! Plus there's a new XML-based format used to store the information, the ADMX files by which you create the "Central Store" on the domain controller. So lots of neat new things there. After having fun implementing policy around the classroom, we dug into PowerShell in the afternoon. That's truly a significant feature, one that will change the landscape of network administration....

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I was invited to teach a class I wrote about Vista to the good folks at Dell, and so far it's been a very fun experience. A great group here, very passionate about the technology. The first day talks lots about installation and software deployment, and in one of the labs we set up some WinPE discs and created some WIM files from the students' machines. Then for deployment we set up Windows Deployment Services (WDS), which installs a copy of Vista over the network using a simple PXE boot. We had the...

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