Then download the Reviewer's Guide!
The Reviewer's Guide is a 276 page document provides a comprehensive look at the the new and improved features that are contained in Longhorn Server Beta 3. This is a massive document, and demonstrates just how much work has gone into the product.
Further to earlier posts, Longhorn B3 does appear to be on MSDN. After a reboot of Vista, I was able to finally get to the MSDN download site, to find Longhorn is available (and can be downloaded using the FTM download manager).
Interestingly - the download speeds from MSDN are around 600KBPS vs just under 200 from the TechNet site. And as mentioned earlier, downloading via Technet is a raw download - and mine aborted half way through!
Lonhorn downloaded in under an hour - now that rocks.
I've been a heavy user of Microsoft's network monitor. Delivered as part of Windows Server and SMS (the latter a fuller version), it's a nice tool for capturing and analysing network traffic. It's not been updated for years - allowing WireShark (Ethereal as it used to be known) to take a lead in terms of functionality.
But MS has been hard at work with Netmon 3, which is now in public beta. Network Monitor 3 is a total re-write of capture engine, parser engine, and user interface. It runs on Windows XP and Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn; and is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
One of the coolest new features is display while capturing - you can see the packets as they are captured. Neat!
To get this, go to http://connect.Microsoft.com, logon using your MS Passport ID. Then click on Available Connections and select Network Monitor 3.0. The download is just 3mb!
Thanks to Nick Portlock for pointing out this cool beta.
Technorati Tags: network monitor - microsoft - tool
Microsoft has released Beta 2 for Windows Vista, Windows Longhorn Server, and Office 2007. WOW - all three at once. It's going to be a bugfest weekend of software installation!!
Well it might be - if I can get the software downloaded. The betas for Vista and Longhorn are being provisioned from Microsoft's new Connect site. Right now, I'm downloading Longhorn server and the download is saturating my 2mbs adsl pipe! It was no problem to et on and the download has been very steady. But there are big (6 GB for both).
Office 2007, however, has been harder to get. First, you must register (again on yet another site). This took me around an hour due to over loaded servers, lots of retries, etc. Once this is completed, you are required to download (yet another) download manager called SmartSource. When this runs it asks for the email address you registerd with and prompty fails in my case. So after 2 hours, I've got the keys, but no Office.
Why does the Office 2007 team has to reinvent the wheel and use yet another 3rd party tool that breaks the first time they use it? Especially when Connect works. So far as I can tell, Connect is standing up very well to the strain. Well done to the Windows beta team!
Being quoted on TechEd Bloggers home page is not quite like getting Slash-dotted, but still fun. The bit cited on the TechEd Bloggers site is not quite the full story. The build is pretty stable, and works reasonably well - this bodes well. As a consumer OS, it'll sell well (if only because any OEM version of Windows sells well). It looks pretty too.
The bit of my earlier post cited by the TechEd Bloggers site related to the "move things around because we can" problem. Here are just two examples. First, in XP, you could right click the desktop background, select properties to open up the desktop properties. There was a single tabbed dialog box with all the options. But in Vista this is all changed. Your right click on the desktop brings up a Personalise (SIC) option. This is a menu listing the individual tabs in XP's dialog box and a bit more. Clicking some of those just brings up a (single tabbed!!!) dialog box which looks much like one tab in XPs's dialog. Clicking others brings up new windows. All very confusing and to me just adds more complexity to the process. At a very minimum lose the tab in the XP-cloned dialogs. A singe dialog needs both a window title and a tab why? Oh - and by the way, the window title and tab title are not really consistent in terms of what they display anyway!
The second example is the Desktop icons. In Win2k, the default desktop had a bunch of icons (the computer, IE, etc) in a particular order. In XP this changed to nothing being displayed, but you could change to a default order by clicking down into desktop properties. In Vista, this is done a different way, and the default order displayed are different. I like the ability to display the control panel - but why did the order have to change?
Compatibility is not quite there, but that's to be expected. I'm certain this is going to get better as Vista drives towards release. Also, the UI has butchered my beloved Turnpike. Turnpike looks so awful under Vista, I'm actually considering finding a new mail and news client. After using the product for something like 10 years, I'm reluctant. I'd really like a "compatibility mode for shell extensions that looked cool in XP" feature.
Another thing that jumps out is how much bigger Vista is than XP. Vista now comes on a DVD, roughly 6 times the size XP, if I have my maths right. The Windows folder alone is just a tad under 7GB! And after a day's running, the background memory usage is 1.3GB. I'm struggling to understand this apparant bloat. While there is some really great eye-candy and the stabilty is good, Vista is going to represent a wholesale replacement of my home network. While it all works fine under XP and Win2k3, several of my machines are just too long in the tooth for Vista. I suspect this may be true of many corporate clients.
But the thing that bugs me the most is UAP. This can not have passed the Jim Alchin's Mom test, and gets me angry every time it kicks in. Trying to delete windows.old (the folder the 5365 installer created from the previous build of vista on this box) has taken hours to complete. The combination of permissions, and the need to ask for admin priveleges drives me nuts. The think that makes least sense is that Vista doesn't make me enter admin credentials, just to click twice - with a couple of 2-3 second pauses in between. Now what is the point in that?? I really hope Vista RTM will have an easy way to turn this stuff off!!
