Microsoft Support & Discussions

Severity Rating: Critical Revision Note: V2.0 (September 13, 2011): Rereleased bulletin to reoffer the updates for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP to address a detection issue. There were no changes to the security update files. Customers who have already successfully updated their systems do not need to take any action. Summary: This security update resolves five privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer…

Severity Rating: Important Revision Note: V2.1 (September 13, 2011): Added an update FAQ to announce a detection change for KB2494089 that corrects an installation issue. This is a detection change only. There were no changes to the security update files. Customers who have already successfully updated their systems do not need to take any action. Summary: This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft XML Editor. The vulnerability could allow information disclosure if a user opened a specially crafted Web Service Discovery (.disco) file with one of the affected software listed in this bulletin. Note that this vulnerability would not allow…

By Paul Thurrott Here’s a collection of live screenshots from Windows 8 build 8102--the developer preview--running on a loaner slate PC. (Part 1 of 2) Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Here’s a collection of live screenshots from Windows 8 build 8102--the developer preview--running on a loaner slate PC. (Part 2 of 2) Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Microsoft announced a developer-preview release of Windows 8 at its first-ever BUILD Conference, ushering in a new era for both PC users and developers. Windows 8 is a "reimagined" version of the world’s most popular software, as Microsoft executives are fond of saying, offering both an iPad-like "touch-first" user experience as well as the traditional Windows desktop. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Microsoft this week provided reviewers with a very temporary loan of a specially made slate PC running the Windows 8 technical preview. And when I say temporary, I mean temporary: We have to give this machine back on Thursday evening before we leave BUILD. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Unexpectedly, Microsoft is making the Windows 8 developer preview available to the public today, starting at 8pm PT today. This includes 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions of the OS, with or without development tools, but not any ARM versions, which are chipset specific. Only clean installs are supported, not upgrades from Windows 7. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott AT&T unveiled its lineup of Windows Phone 7.5 handsets, which will ship to customers in the fourth quarter. As with last year’s initial Windows Phone lineup, AT&T is going with three different devices, from Samsung and HTC. But there’s some great additional news: all of these devices are based on 4G. Source: Win Super Site

Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Skype looks to be inching closer. Microsoft also is making positioning moves in the embedded space and is working with Nitobi on an HTML5 framework for its Windows Phone platform. Source: All About Microsoft

By Paul Thurrott Windows Vista wasn’t the only major product Microsoft plotted the half-decade period spanning 2002 to 2007: After releasing yet another "lipstick on a pig" upgrade in Office 2003, the Office team got its collective act together and really went for it with Office 2007, a revolutionary Office upgrade that started the transition to a completely new UI. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott I’m in Anaheim, California for this week’s BUILD conference, where Microsoft promises to reveal Windows 8 (and Windows Server 8) to the world. It’s going to be a fire hose of information. But let me just frame where my head is at with a simple declaration: My next OS is better than your next OS. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott This will serve as the central clearing house for all the Windows 8 articles, blog posts, screenshot galleries, and other content I create while attending BUILD in Anaheim, California this week. Source: Win Super Site

By Paul Thurrott Cloud computing services from both Microsoft and Google experienced outages in the past several days, leading as expected to predictable and tired Chicken Little commentaries from the tech blogosphere. But these outages don’t mean that the cloud computing model is broken, just that there’s still some maturing that needs to happen. Source: Win Super Site

Asynchronous patterns are becoming more common and more important to moving web programming forward. They can be challenging to work with in JavaScript. To make asynchronous (or async) patterns easier, JavaScript libraries (like jQuery and Dojo) have added an abstraction called promises (or sometimes deferreds). With these libraries, developers can use promises in any browser with good ECMAScript 5 support. In this post, we

Hi all, I have sysprep'd and then captured an image of windows 7 using server 2008 R2 as a deployment server. I have then deployed to another machine but every time I boot the machine I have deployed to it runs the "Preparing system for first use" and reverts all my user accounts and whatever else back to the way they are when deployed. I have removed the unattend file from the deployment server but it still happens when I reimage the PC. What have I done wrong here? Thanks Tim

By Paul Thurrott When you think about "sharing" things online today, you probably think of social networking services like Facebook, Google+, or Twitter, which let you broadcast information to some group of users--friends, family members, the whole world, whatever--in ways that have become increasingly familiar. Wouldn’t it be cool if SharePoint provided this type of functionality, but tied into the incredible content management backend it already supplies, and aimed at the needs of a knowledge worker looking to collaborate with his coworkers? Source: Win Super Site

Microsoft is planning a Hotmail press event in October that may mark the introduction of a new (and maybe HTML5-based) version of its Web-based e-mail service. Source: All About Microsoft

By Paul Thurrott This week, Microsoft explained how its working to improve the boot time of Windows 8, and if what we’re seeing is to be believed, it looks like this process is about to get a lot quicker for everyone. Source: Win Super Site

We know a bit about Windows 8 as we head into Microsoft’s Build conference next week. But we still know surprisingly little about the development tools and technologies which will be stars of the show. Source: All About Microsoft