Windows Phone 8 “Apollo”: Windows 8 kernel, more form factors

By tim, on February 2nd, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem is vulnerable to leaks, as demonstrated today by reports of a video said to have been made for Nokia, which arrived in the hands of a smartphone review website. The leaked information was corroborated by Windows journalist Paul Thurrott who has received advance information independently from Microsoft, but under non-disclosure:

Thanks

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One of the best features of Office 365 vs BPOS: setting passwords not to expire

By tim, on January 31st, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Should passwords expire? Most of the best practice guides I have seen say that they should, but there are downsides. The more often passwords expire, the more likely users are to forget them and contact support, or write them down, which is insecure. Further, it is all friction that means users get less work

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What would you like to see in Microsoft Office 15?

By tim, on January 30th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Today brings the news that Microsoft Office 15 is now in Technical Preview (also known as private beta).

There is little news about what is in it other than this:

With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office,

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Fixing a Small Business Server 2008 broken by updates

By tim, on January 27th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

I had a call last night from a small business whose email no longer worked. They had applied updates to the server but Exchange had failed to restart.

Looking at the services it was easy to see why. All the Exchange services and certain others including the IIS web server were set to disabled:

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Nokia results: hope for Windows Phone?

By tim, on January 26th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

It is almost one year since Nokia’s dramatic announcement that it would transition its smartphone range to Windows Phone. Today the company released its results for the fourth quarter and for the full year 2011, the first since the release of the the Lumia range of Windows Phone devices. How it is doing?

This

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Why Microsoft is scrapping the MIX conference

By tim, on January 24th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft is scrapping its MIX conference, according to General Manager Tim O’Brien:

we have decided to merge MIX, our spring web conference for developers and designers, into our next major developer conference, which we will host sometime in the coming year. I know a number of folks were wondering about MIX, given the time

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Microsoft LocalDB: another option for local databases

By tim, on January 24th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on March 7th 2012. In Microsoft’s world “launches” do not always coincide with the availability of release code, which may come before or after, but they are usually not far apart.

The big news in SQL Server 2012 is in new BI (Business Intelligence) features and the ability

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Microsoft financials: Windows under stress, Server and Office making up

By tim, on January 19th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

If we are really in the post-PC era, then one of two things will happen. Either Microsoft will make a big success of non-PC products, or it will start delivering shocking financial results. Neither is yet true. Here are the results just announced, broken down into a simple table.

Quarter ending December 31st 2011

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Meet Resilient File System (ReFS), a new file system for Windows

By tim, on January 17th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has announced the Resilient File System (ReFS), a replacement for the NTFS file system which has been used since the first release of Windows NT in 1993.

The new file system increases limits in NTFS as follows:

NTFS ReFS Max file size 2^64 -1 2^64-1 bytes Max volume size 2^40 bytes 2^78

…continue reading Meet Resilient File System (ReFS), a new file system for Windows

OEMs are still breaking Windows: can Microsoft fix this with Windows 8?

By tim, on January 16th, 2012 Follow tim on Twitter

Mark Russinovich works for Microsoft and has deep knowledge of Windows internals; he created the original Sysinternals tools which are invaluable for troubleshooting.

His account of troubleshooting a new PC purchased by a member of his family is both amusing and depressing, though I admire his honesty:

My mom recently purchased a new PC,

…continue reading OEMs are still breaking Windows: can Microsoft fix this with Windows 8?

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