TechEd 2006
Topics related to sessions, labs, and other goings-on from Tech·Ed 2006.
If anyone has been following this technology closely, there have been a lot of complaints by some of the security vendors regarding PatchGuard. I first heard about this technology at TechEd 2006 in a lot of the Vista sessions. The recent controversy caused me to do a little more research in to this technology and the issues surrounding it. The official name for this technology is called Kernel Patch Protection (KPP) and it's purpose is to increase the security and stability of the Windows kernel. ......
For those of you who attended Tech·Ed 2006, the recorded sessions will be available on CommNet for on-demand viewing by July 21st. The DVD should be received by August 15 and shipped to the address you provided during registration. The DVD's will contain the PowerPoint presentations and recorded sessions.
One of the new security features coming in Windows Vista and Longhorn is the new BitLocker™ Drive Encryption technology. BitLocker™ is designed to help prevent information loss, whether it is by theft or accidental. Information loss is costly to business on several levels, and the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that intellectual property theft cost enterprises $250 billion in 2004. BitLocker™ Drive Encryption gives you improved data protection on your notebooks, desktops, ......
For those of you who didn't get to go to Tech·Ed this year, Microsoft has made some of the webcasts and breakout sessions available free. It isn't everything that was presented at the conference, but it's what Microsoft considers the best (or most popular) topics. Unfortunately, for those of who did attend, the presentations from all of the breakouts aren't available yet on CommNet...still 3 weeks away.
Link here.
Since last years TechEd everyone has been hearing about .NET 3.0 and the cool features of LINQ, lambda expressions, and all of the other cool new language features. I don't know about you, but I was definitely looking forward to them. We were also hearing about WinFx and “Avalon“ and “Indigo“, InfoCard, Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) and the other new technologies that looked like they would only be part of Vista. Fast-forward a year to this years TechEd and we're still ......
Windows PowerShell (formerly known as “Monad”) is a Microsoft's answer to the power and flexibility of the Unix command shells. It should finally complete the Windows management picture by providing a solid command line shell to administer Windows systems. PowerShell is part of Vista, but fortunately for all of us, it is being released separately and is available for Windows XP as well. PowerShell is a command line shell that is: as interactive and composable as bash/ksh (or any other ......
BitLockerTM Drive Encryption BitLocker allows the entire OS volume to be encrypted as well as any other volumes. In order to do this, a 1.5 GB unencrypted system volume is required. BitLocker requires Trusted Platform Module (TPM) v1.2 or a USB device and USB-capable BIOS and is implemented as a file filter driver that sits just above the volume manager drivers. There are several supported modes for storing the decryption key: TPM locked with signature of boot files TPM locked with user-specified ......
Performance and Scalability Vista makes fewer and larger disk reads for page faults and system cache read-ahead and has removed the 64KB limit. Fewer, faster, and larger disk writes for the system page file and mapped file I/O reduce the page file fragmentation and allow a larger cluster size. The CPU usage has also been improved by providing improvements in the concurrency management within the kernel. Windows Error Reporting (WER) Vista is a more robust and resilient operating system that provides ......
Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM) Before Vista, applications had to do a lot of hard work to recover from errors during the modification of files and registry keys. Windows Vista implements a generalized transaction manager called the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM) which provides “all or nothing” transaction semantics. This means that changes are committed only when the associated transaction is completed and commits. The KTM is extensible through third-party resource managers and coordinates ......
Up until Vista, an application or a driver could prevent the system from entering a sleep mode (standby or hibernate) and was often caused by a bug or an overly aggressive power management policy. The problem with this was that the user might not know the system hasn't entered the appropriate sleep stat and eventually loose data. Vista no longer queries processes when entering sleep states like previous versions of Windows and has reduced the timeout for user-mode notifications to 2 seconds (down ......
Full TechEd 2006 Archive