My name is Ronald Beekelaar. I'm a Microsoft MVP of Virtual Machine Technology, based in Amsterdam. I have my own consultancy firm, and since 2002 I focus on virtualization. At first, this was strictly VMware-oriented, but a few years later this included Microsoft's virtualization products as well.

Since the first public beta of Hyper-V more than a year ago, I have done many presentations about Hyper-V at various events, and talked to a lot of customers about transitioning to Hyper-V. The people I talk to can be divided into two groups: they either have experience with Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server, or they only know the VMware products and are just now looking into Hyper-V. However, for both groups, and despite very different opinions, there are five topics that always come up in discussions. Below is my list of the top-5 things you should know and understand about Hyper-V.

The rumors accumulating over the past few months were true: Microsoft has purchased natural-language search vendor Powerset for an undisclosed amount.

Microsoft announced the deal on July 1. Microsoft is planning to use Powerset’s people and technology to “take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the Internet and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages,” according to a post on the Live Search blog.

Om Malik: A few minutes after she delivered a speech at our Structure 08 conference in San Francisco, I caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat. I think a more appropriate title for her would be Mr. Softie’s Internet Infrastructure Czar. I found her very knowledgeable, engaging and open with her opinions. “We have some new innovations up our sleeve that are going to knock the socks of anything anyone is doing, including our friends down south,” she told me. She didn’t name Google, of course, but we all know who she was talking about.

J.C. Hornbeck: Please note that due to changes to the Release Candidate (RC) version of Microsoft Application Virtualization, Process Monitor users will need to download the latest version of ProcMon (v1.34) available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx . Earlier versions of the tool will continue to work but will no longer capture virtualized registry access.

Tom Di Nardo: So you've heard some folks saying large mailboxes are a good idea. Your users have been screaming for mailboxes with more than 1GB quotas. Your management wants you to be able to recover from outages in minutes, not days. Everyone is telling you to do more with less. Well, with Exchange 2007 you can have your cake and eat it too (so long as you plan for it). Have a look at the rules of the game in the new Planning for Large Mailboxes with Exchange 2007 white paper. This white paper covers the benefits of large mailboxes for both the end user and the administrator, the challenges that large mailboxes bring to an organizations infrastructure, and how Exchange 2007's features can help meet those challenges. Yes, >1GB mailboxes can be delivered to your users without breaking the bank. Check it out here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122250

When it comes to merger and aquisition Exchange 2007 provides provides unique advantages to integrate the email systems. In this post we will discuss how Exchange 2007 simplifies integration of Exchange environment at the two companies and offers additional functionality.

Integration of Exchange between two companies will result in a cross-forest topology with multiple Exchange forests. To simplify such integration Exchange Server 2007 must be installed in each forest. Next the recipients in the two forests must be synchronized, so that the Global Address List (GAL) in each forest contains users from other forest. Finally, Availability service is configured so that users in one forest can view availability data for users in another forest.

Tom Di Nardo: Performance analysis and troubleshooting can be a very complex and daunting area with Exchange Server. Being able to quickly and accurately identify and resolve issues requires a thorough understanding of the most interesting and important performance counters. With the July content refresh we've just released new content detailing these counters and many of the important thresholds to be aware of. The content is broken out by counters that are common across Exchange roles and counters that are specific to each role. A big thanks goes to Mike Lagase, John Rodriguez, and Scot Landry for their help in pulling all of this information together. Check it out here in the Monitoring Without System Center Operations Manager: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=122254

Ross Smith: Many of you have been wondering how continuous replication works in Exchange 2007.  The Continuous Replication Deep Dive whitepaper discusses how log shipping, log inspection, and log replay work within Exchange 2007.  In addition, the paper discusses the mechanics of how scheduled and unscheduled outages are handled in a continuous replication enabled environment.  A big thanks goes to Scott Schnoll, Becky Benfield, Ramon Infante, and Alex Wetmore for helping me put this paper together.  Check it out here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535020(EXCHG.80).aspx.

Preston Gralla: Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all.

As Microsoft prepares to hold its annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston next week, channel partners are hoping Microsoft will finally clarify how they'll fit into its software as a service strategy.

Microsoft's SaaS strategy, which it calls Software Plus Services, involves a melange of on-premise software and Web-hosted applications and gives customers the option of buying services hosted by partners or by Microsoft. At last year's WPC, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said the transition to SaaS would be tough, but that Microsoft was commited to the services path, and partners should follow its lead.

ISVs can now receive a special Hyper-V designation to support the Certified On or Works-With certifications for Windows Server 2008 applications. The designation lets those considering your software that it has passed compliance testing for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Basically to receive the "Certified for" designation, an application needs to pass all the test cases in a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine on a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and four additional test cases that are documented in Chapter 6 of the “Certified for” test specifications and framework.

Microsoft could team up with Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in a new bid to acquire Yahoo's search business, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper claims today that Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo search, with the partner, likely a media company, taking the rest of Yahoo's business. CEO Steve Ballmer called Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock and arranged a meeting set for Monday, but that meeting was cancelled, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Justin Zarb: For those that review connect often you may have already spotted this. But for others that check it out once in a blue moon “I have a recommendation for you”. There is a tool called the “Terminal Services Application Analyzer” which is a Beta tool on connect.

This tool came up in a recent conversation that I was having with Madelinde Walraven (one of our EMEA GTSC App-V Legends! also lovingly nicknamed “Sheila!”) .

We were all discussing the use of some well known Global Objects and how windows checks and also the “create global object” field. As you can see it was a real hum digger of a conversation that would have sent my better half off to sleep! Anyway I spotted it a few nights before on connect and thought that this tool may assist!

I have been hinting for a few months that we had an announcement around the corner, so here it is, we are introducing a new program, Select Plus

I know, I know, another new program, but does'nt Microsoft want to simply and reduce licensing contracts? well the answer is YES we do, but we cannot get to nirvana without a little bit of "change" so bear with us, these changes are for the long term vision...!!

So what is Select Plus about, what's the difference between Select and Select Plus and Enterprise Agreement and Select Plus, what's the advantage to me as a customer?

Microsoft has given its new Office-based software-plus-service bundle a new name — “Equipt” — and a due date (mid-July), company officials said on July 2.

This article continues the series on resource allocation for virtual machines by examining CPU utilization, and talking about some of the challenges associated with obtaining accurate Performance Monitor readings in a virtual server environment.

As someone whose email address is posted in thousands of forum posts, newsgroup discussions, and blogs, I get a lot of spam. Of the spam I receive, a significant number of messages represent phishing attacks. Most of these lures aren’t very clever or convincing, but phishing has become a simple numbers game—hosting phishing sites is cheap, and even if only a few users fall for any given phishing attack, attackers will profit by increasing the volume of phishing campaigns.

Hi, I'm David Ross, Security Software Engineer on the SWI team.  I’m proud to be doing this guest post on the IE blog today to show off some of the collaborative work SWI is doing with the Internet Explorer team.

Today we are releasing some details on a new IE8 feature that makes reflected / “Type-1” Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities much more difficult to exploit from within Internet Explorer 8. Type-1 XSS flaws represent a growing portion of overall reported vulnerabilities and are increasingly being exploited “for fun and profit.”

The number of reported XSS flaws in popular web sites has skyrocketed recently – MITRE has reported that XSS vulnerabilities are now the most frequently reported class of vulnerability. More recently, sites such as XSSed.com have begun to collect and publish tens of thousands of Type-1 XSS vulnerabilities present in sites across the web.

Hi! I’m Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager for Internet Explorer. Last Tuesday, Dean wrote about our principles for delivering a trustworthy browser; today, I’m excited to share with you details on the significant investments we’ve made in Security for Internet Explorer 8. As you might guess from the length of this post, we’ve done a lot of security work for this release. As an end-user, simply upgrade to IE8 to benefit from these security improvements. As a domain administrator, you can use Group Policy and the IEAK to set secure defaults for your network. As web-developer, you can build upon some of these new features to help protect your users and web applications.

As we were planning Internet Explorer 8, our security teams looked closely at the common attacks in the wild and the trends that suggest where attackers will be focusing their attention next. While we were building new Security features, we also worked hard to ensure that powerful new features (like Activities and Web Slices) minimize attack surface and don’t provide attackers with new targets. Out of our planning work, we classified threats into three major categories: Web Application Vulnerabilities, Browser & Add-on Vulnerabilities, and Social Engineering Threats. For each class of threat, we developed a set of layered mitigations to provide defense-in-depth protection against exploits.

Daniel asked about the Linux integration components for Hyper-V. They've now reached RC2 status, according to Mike Sterling, and are available from http://connect.microsoft.com/

Hang on – did you say RC2?

Due to customer feedback from the beta version, we added a couple of additional features.

· Mouse Support: Support for the synthetic mouse device has been added in beta. This new mouse support allows the mouse to move in and out of the window without having to use the CTRL-ALT-LEFTARROW key command to break out.

· Fastpath Boot Support: Support for faster single disk configurations has been added to the RC2 release. Boot devices now take advantage of the storage VSC to provide enhanced performance.

We’ve reached RTM on the hypercall adapter, Linux implementation of VMBus, and the network and storage VSC.

Paul Thurrott: In August, Microsoft will ship Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, the second major milestone of its upcoming Web browser. Whereas Beta 1, released in March, focused primarily on developer features, Beta 2 will be about end users. And while I wish I had some new UI bits to show you today, that will have to wait. Instead, this week, Microsoft is talking about the new and improved security features that it will debut in IE 8 Beta 2. These features constitute the bulk of the work Microsoft is doing around security in IE 8, so this overview will provide an interesting snapshot of what we can expect.