Tech Help and Discussions

On April 6, I began receiving reports from users who had not installed the Release Candidate (RC) or the beta of IE9 that they were seeing IE 9 show up via Windows Update — something that wasn’t supposed to be happening until late June. View the full article

Microsoft and Toyota announced on April 6 a partnership via which Toyota’s next-generation telematics platform will be built using Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure. View the full article

Novell has released Mono for Android, a collection of development tools to enable programmers to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 to create .Net applications that will run on Android phones and tablets. View the full article

Supersite In Windows 8, the company is providing the ability to automatically configure the color of Aero elements, like the Start Menu, Windows Explorer windows, and the taskbar based on the desktop wallpaper. ... View the full article

A week after Microsoft Senior Vice President of Central Marketing Mich Matthews announced plans to leave, Microsoft announced her replacement will be former Office marketing chief Chris Capossela. View the full article

Windows IT Pro Apple's meteoric rise over the past decade has been matched only by Microsoft's somnolence. And while that may seem a bit simplistic, the fates of the two companies can often be seen in the stark contrast of consumer excitement over their respective product launches and, of course, in their stock prices. But this week, an outside party worked to somewhat rebalance the scales. ... View the full article

Microsoft’s newest storage server family member, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials (”Breckenridge”) RTM’d in late March, along with the rest of the “Colorado” family. View the full article

Supersite The final shipping versions of two "Colorado" servers--Windows Home Server 2011 ("Vail") and Windows Small Business Server 2011 ("Aurora") are now available for download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. ... View the full article

According to an April 4 post on the Silverlight Team Blog, Microsoft will be making a beta of Silverlight 5 available the week of April 11, concurrent with the Mix ‘11 conference. View the full article

Supersite In our latest look at secret new Windows 8 features, we present Internet Explorer Immersive, a special new version of Microsoft's browser aimed at tablets and smaller form factor devices. ... View the full article

Supersite Microsoft's first built-in PDF reader for Windows also comes with a nice other surprise: It's also the first AppX application package we've seen, providing a peek at the future of Windows and Windows Phone apps. ... View the full article

Supersite With today marking the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Windows, I'm taking a stroll down memory lane and looking back at the early years and my complicated relationship with Microsoft's now-dominant OS. ... View the full article

Windows IT Pro I asked about the so-called consumerization of IT, a trend where IT organizations, increasingly, are giving in to the demands of their users and allowing them to bring their own iPhones and other personal devices into work. Generally speaking, there is a range of restrictions that businesses can place on such devices, from total to none. ... View the full article

Windows IT Pro Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from his post on Monday as scheduled, opening to the door for co-founder Larry Page to take the reins. But the transition comes at an awkward time for the company, which is facing antitrust complaints in the EU and, possibly, the US now as well. ... View the full article

Supersite Microsoft's first built-in PDF reader for Windows also comes with a nice other surprise: It's also the first AppX application package we've seen, providing a peek at the future of Windows and Windows Phone apps. ... View the full article

Supersite In the latest episode of the Windows Weekly podcast, Leo and I discuss Microsoft's antitrust complaint against Google, Windows Phone 7 software updates in the wild and how you can get yours now, Windows Phone 7 predicted to beat iPhone by 2015, Paul Allen writes a tell-all book and blasts Bill Gates for greed, Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, and a call for information from IT pros about the consumerization of IT in their businesses. ... View the full article

Supersite Turning my attention to the more pragmatic issues of missing and incomplete features in Windows Phone 7, I present the first app pick that is designed to overcome one of these limitations: The ability to find, download, sync, and enjoy podcasts, over-the-air, from your handset. And this week's pick, BringCast, is a great solution for doing just that. ... View the full article

Supersite In the first of what will be a long series of co-posts unveiling specific new Windows 8 features, Rafael Rivera and I present the new Windows 8 Welcome screen. ... View the full article

I'm a big fan of Aero Shake but my favourite is Aero Peek (gives you the ability to see the application window for a given application when you either alt-tab (and wait) or move the mouse over the task bar thumbnail) and you need Aero Peek to be on (see screen shot) . And the screen shot below is Aero Peek working ... just love it ! :D .

Hi, I have a web app which runs on Windows server 2008 sp2. My app uses an active x control which access dll's such as winmm.dll. When my app is running, Internet explorer crashes and closes down. I get the following error from IE: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Application Name: iexplore.exe Application Version: 8.0.6001.19019 Fault Module Name: WINMM.dll Fault Module Version: 6.0.6002.18005 Exception Code: c0000005 Exception Offset: 00004885 My app works fine on for example other machines (i.e. other operating systems), its just when using it on Windows server 2008 sp2 that Internet explorer crashes. I have looked up that Exception Code: c0000005 means …