Save 40% on all Microsoft Press books and 50% on e-books

Sara Peyton, from O’Reilly Media, here. O’Reilly Media is celebrating their new partnership with Microsoft Press!

The gift-giving season is upon us and we want to help you save. From now until the New Year you can purchase Microsoft Press books direct on oreilly.com and save. Select from over 600 print Microsoft Press titles and 200 DRM-free e-books. All e-books are available in four convenient formats, for the price of one: ePub, PDF, MOBI, and Android.

Use code MSINT in the shopping cart to get your savings on every Microsoft Press title, including Windows 7 Plain & Simple and Windows 7 Step by Step.

Links:

Windows 7 Step by Step:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735626676/

Windows Plain & Simple:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735626669/

Microsoft Press Store on oreilly.com:
http://microsoftpress.oreilly.com/

New Book: Windows 7 Resource Kit

Microsoft Press is pleased to announce that Windows 7 Resource Kit by Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, Jerry Honeycutt, Ed Wilson, and the Windows 7 Team at Microsoft, is now available for purchase in bookstores (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735627000; 1760 pages)!

To give you a taste of what you’ll find in the book, here are excerpts of the Introduction and two sample chapters.

—

Introduction

Welcome to the Windows 7 Resource Kit from Microsoft Press! The Windows 7 Resource Kit is a comprehensive technical resource for deploying, maintaining, and troubleshooting Windows 7. The target audience for this resource kit is experienced IT professionals who work in medium-size and large organizations, but anyone who wants to learn how to deploy, configure, support, and troubleshoot Windows 7 in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environments will find this resource kit invaluable.

Within this resource kit, you’ll find in-depth information and task-based guidance on managing all aspects of Windows 7, including automated deployment, desktop management, search and organization, software update management, client protection, networking, remote access, and systematic troubleshooting techniques. You’ll also find numerous sidebars contributed by members of the Windows team at Microsoft that provide deep insight into how Windows 7 works, best practices for managing the platform, and invaluable troubleshooting tips. Finally, the companion media includes the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack and sample Windows PowerShell scripts that you can customize to help you automate various aspects of managing Windows 7 clients in enterprise environments.

Overview of the Book

The six parts of this book cover the following topics:

• Part I—Overview Provides an introduction to the features of Windows 7 and an overview of security enhancements for the platform.
• Part II—Deployment Provides in-depth information and guidance on deploying Windows 7 in enterprise environments, with particular focus on using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 (MDT 2010).
• Part III—Desktop Management Describes how to use Group Policy to manage the desktop environment for users of computers running Windows 7 and how to manage specific features such as disks and file systems, devices and services, printing, search, and Windows Internet Explorer.
• Part IV—Desktop Maintenance Describes how to maintain the health of computers running Windows 7 by using the eventing infrastructure, monitoring performance, managing software updates, managing client protection, and using Remote Assistance.
• Part V—Networking Provides in-depth information concerning core networking, wireless networking, Windows Firewall, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), remote connectivity using virtual private networking (VPN), Remote Desktop, and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
• Part VI—Troubleshooting Describes how to troubleshoot startup, hardware, and networking issues, as well as how to interpret Stop messages.

—

Excerpt from Chapter 22

Chapter 22

• Supporting Users with Remote Assistance
• Understanding Remote Assistance
• Implementing and Managing Remote Assistance
• Summary
• Additional Resources

Remote Assistance (RA) in Windows Vista included improvements in connectivity, performance, usability, and security along with feature enhancements that make it even more useful than Remote Assistance in Windows XP was. The Windows 7 operating system builds on these earlier improvements with Easy Connect, a new feature of Remote Assistance that makes it easier than ever for novice users to request help from expert users and for experts to offer help to novices. With increased Group Policy support, command-line scripting capabilities, session logging, bandwidth optimization, and more, Remote Assistance is now an essential tool for enabling enterprises to support users in Help Desk scenarios. This chapter examines how Remote Assistance works in Windows 7, how to use it to support end users, and how to manage it using Group Policy and scripts.

Understanding Remote Assistance

Supporting end users is an essential function of IT departments and the corporate Help Desk. Unfortunately, conventional technical support provided over the telephone or using chat tools is generally cumbersome and inefficient. As a result, supporting users is often both time-consuming and costly for large enterprises to implement. For example, end users often have difficulty describing the exact nature of the problem they are having. Because of their general inexperience and lack of technical knowledge, end users may try to describe their problem using nontechnical, inexact language. As a result, Help Desk personnel are generally reduced to asking a series of simple questions to try to isolate the problem the user is having. The methodical nature of these questions sometimes causes users to feel as if Help Desk personnel are being condescending, and such misunderstandings can reduce the effectiveness of the support experience and can make users tend to avoid contacting support personnel when future problems arise.

End users also often have difficulty following instructions given to them by Help Desk personnel who are trying to assist them. Well-trained support personnel will try to avoid using technical jargon when communicating with end users, but although using plain language can improve the support experience, it may also mean that resolution steps become long and tiresome. For example, telling a user how to use Disk Cleanup from System Tools in Accessories can require several sentences or more, and this kind of communication can add time to support incidents, making them more costly to the company.

Remote Assistance solves these problems by enabling support personnel to view the user’s desktop in real time. The user seeking assistance can demonstrate the nature of the problem to the support person. This is a quicker and more efficient way to communicate a problem than using words or e-mail. If necessary, the user can also give the support person permission to assume shared interactive control of the user’s computer to show the user how to resolve the problem. The result of using Remote Assistance is faster problem resolution, an improved support experience, and a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for supporting end users in large, corporate environments.

Remote assistance vs. Remote Desktop

Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop are different features of Windows 7 that have entirely different uses. Remote Desktop is based on Microsoft Terminal Services and is a tool for logging on to remote computers. When you use Remote Desktop to connect to a remote computer, a new user session is established. Remote Desktop can also establish sessions with computers that have no interactive sessions running (no users logged on locally), such as headless servers. For more information on Remote Desktop, see Chapter 27, “Connecting Remote Users and networks.”

Remote Assistance, on the other hand, is a tool for interactively helping users troubleshoot problems with their computers. to use Remote Assistance, both the User (also called the novice) and the helper must be present on their computers. Unlike Remote Desktop, Remote Assistance does not create a new session. Instead, Remote Assistance allows the helper to work in the existing session of the User. the User’s desktop gets remoted to the helper, who can then view the User’s desktop and, with the User’s consent, share control of the desktop. here is another way to summarize the difference between these two features: In Remote Assistance, both users involved are looking at the same desktop using the same logon credentials (those of the interactively logged-on User) and can share control of that desktop; in Remote Desktop, when the remote person logs on, the interactively logged-on user (if one exists) is logged out.

—

Excerpt from Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Deploying IPv6

• Understanding IPv6
• IPv6 Enhancements in Windows 7
• Configuring and Troubleshooting IPv6 in Windows 7
• Planning for IPv6 Migration
• Summary
• Additional Resources

Like the Windows Vista operating system before it, the Windows 7 operating system has a new Next Generation Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack with enhanced support for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). This chapter provides you with an understanding of why IPv6 is necessary and how it works. The chapter describes the IPv6 capabilities in Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 and outlines how to migrate the IPv4 network infrastructure of your enterprise to IPv6 using IPv6 transition technologies, such as Intra-Site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP). Finally, the chapter describes how to configure and manage IPv6 settings in Windows 7 and how to troubleshoot IPv6 networking problems.

Understanding IPv6

The need for migrating enterprise networks from IPv4 to IPv6 is driven by a number of different technological, business, and social factors. The most important of these are:

• The exponential growth of the Internet is rapidly exhausting the existing IPv4 public address space. A temporary solution to this problem has been found in Network Address Translation (NAT), a technology that maps multiple private (intranet) addresses to a (usually) single, public (Internet) address. Unfortunately, using NAT-enabled routers can introduce additional problems, such as breaking end-to-end connectivity and security for some network applications. In addition, the rapid proliferation of mobile IP devices is accelerating the depletion of the IPv4 public address space.
• The growing use of real-time communications (RTC) on the Internet, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, instant messaging (IM), and audio/video conferencing, exposes the limited support for Quality of Service (QoS) currently provided in IPv4. These new RTC technologies need improved QoS on IP networks to ensure reliable end-to-end communications. The design of IPv4 limits possible improvements.
• The growing threats faced by hosts on IPv4 networks connected to the Internet can be mitigated considerably by deploying Internet Protocol security (IPsec), both on private intranets and on tunneled connections across the public Internet. However, IPsec was designed as an afterthought to IPv4 and is complex and difficult to implement in many scenarios.

IPv6, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to solve these problems, includes the following improvements and additions:

• IPv6 increases the theoretical address space of the Internet from 4.3 × 109 addresses (based on 32-bit IPv4 addresses) to 3.4 × 1038 possible addresses (based on 128-bit IPv6 addresses), which most experts agree should be more than sufficient for the foreseeable future.
• The IPv6 address space is designed to be hierarchical rather than flat in structure, which means that routing tables for IPv6 routers can be smaller and more efficient than for IPv4 routers.
• IPv6 has enhanced support for QoS that includes a Traffic Class field in the header to specify how traffic should be handled and a new Flow Label field in the header that enables routers to identify packets that belong to a traffic flow and handle them appropriately.
• IPv6 now requires IPsec support for standards-based, end-to-end security across the Internet. The new QoS enhancements work even when IPv6 traffic is encrypted using IPsec.

Understanding how IPv6 works is essential if you plan to benefit from IPv6 by deploying it in your enterprise. The following sections provide an overview of key IPv6 concepts, features, and terminology.

NOTE For more detailed information on IP concepts, features, and terminology, see the white paper titled “Introduction to IP Version 6” at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads /details.aspx?FamilyID=CBC0B8A3-B6A4-4952-BBE6-D976624C257C&displaylang=en. Another good reference for learning IPv6 is the book, Understanding IPv6, 2nd Edition, by Joseph Davies (Microsoft Press, 2008).

Understanding IPv6 terminology

The following terminology is used to define IPv6 concepts and describe IPv6 features:

• Node An IPv6-enabled network device that includes both hosts and routers.
• Host An IPv6-enabled network device that cannot forward IPv6 packets that are not explicitly addressed to itself. A host is an endpoint for IPv6 communications (either the source or destination) and drops all traffic not explicitly addressed to it.
• Router An IPv6-enabled network device that can forward IPv6 packets that are not explicitly addressed to itself. IPv6 routers also typically advertise their presence to IPv6 hosts on their attached links.
• Link One or more LAN (such as Ethernet) or wide area network (WAN, such as Point-to-Point Protocol [PPP]) network segments bounded by routers. Like interfaces, links may be either physical or logical.
• Neighbors Nodes that are connected to the same physical or logical link.
• Subnet One or more links having the same 64-bit IPv6 address prefix.
• Interface A representation of a node’s attachment to a link. This can be a physical interface (such as a network adapter) or a logical interface (such as a tunnel interface).

NOTE  An IPv6 address identifies an interface, not a node. A node is identified by having one or more unicast IPv6 addresses assigned to one of its interfaces.

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Be sure to visit the Microsoft Learning Windows 7 Training Portal, where you can download the free sample chapters (previews) as well as learning snacks and online clinics.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/windows.aspx.

New book: Windows 7 Inside Out

We’re pleased to announce that Windows 7 Inside Out, by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson, is now available for purchase in bookstores (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735626652; 1056 pages)!

 

In a previous post, we included the Foreword, written by Microsoft Windows Division President, Steven Sinofsky. Here, we provide an excerpt of two chapters from the book.

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Chapter 1

What’s New in Windows 7

IS Windows 7 a major upgrade or just a collection of refinements? The answer depends on your starting point. If you’ve been using Windows Vista, the upgrade to Windows 7 should be relatively straightforward. Windows 7 is built on the same foundation as Windows Vista, so you’ve already sorted out compatibility hassles with programs and devices. After you learn the basics of the revamped Windows 7 desktop and adapt to changes in search and file management, you should feel right at home.

For those who are moving to Windows 7 from Windows XP, the learning curve will be steeper. You’ll find fundamental changes in nearly every aspect of the operating system, and many of the expert techniques that you’ve learned through the years won’t work any longer. Three feature sets that were originally introduced in Windows Vista will be of particular interest to anyone upgrading from Windows XP:

• Search capabilities are a key part of just about every Windows task. In Windows XP, this capability is available as an add-on that installs a search box on the taskbar. In Windows 7, you’ll find a search box on the Start menu, in the upper right corner of any window or dialog box based on Windows Explorer, and in Control Panel.
• For anyone obsessed with performance and troubleshooting (we suspect most of our readers fall into this group), Windows 7 includes an impressive set of diagnostic and monitoring tools. Collectively, they offer a level of detail about system events that can be eye-opening and overwhelming.
• User Account Control was one of the most controversial and misunderstood additions to Windows Vista. This feature has been greatly modified in Windows 7, but anyone upgrading from Windows XP might be surprised by the extra layer of consent dialog boxes required for some common administrative tasks.

—

Introducing the Windows 7 Family

When you begin to delve into details about how Windows 7 works, the discussion can quickly become complicated. The primary reason for confusion is because the operating system is actually distributed and sold in multiple editions. Compared to Windows Vista, the lineup of available editions is less complicated, but you can still get tripped up if you read about an advanced feature and don’t realize that it’s missing from your edition.

How can you tell which Windows 7 edition is installed on your PC? The easiest way is to look at the top of the System applet in Control Panel—click System in Control Panel; right-click the Computer icon on the Start menu and then click Properties; or use the keyboard shortcut Windows logo key+Break. Under the Windows Edition heading, you will see the current installed edition, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1 System in Control Panel shows which Windows 7 edition is installed.

In this book, we concentrate on the three Windows 7 editions you are most likely to encounter on a mainstream home or business PC:

• Windows 7 home premium This is the edition you are most likely to find installed on a new PC in the computer section at your local warehouse store or consumer electronics specialist. It includes roughly the same mix of features as its predecessor, Windows Vista Home Premium.
• Windows 7 professional This edition is the successor to Windows Vista Business and incorporates the same features as that operating system, notably advanced networking features that work with networks based on the Windows Server family. In a noteworthy change, however, Windows 7 Professional is a superset of Home Premium and thus includes all features (including Windows Media Center) found in the lesser edition.
• Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 enterprise These editions are essentially identical, with the names reflecting the sales channel of each: Ultimate is available on retail and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) editions; Enterprise is distributed only to large customers who buy volume licenses of Windows. This edition contains all features found in the Home Premium and Professional editions plus some advanced networking features, BitLocker encryption, and support for multiple languages.

All of these editions are available in x86 (32-bit) and x64 (64-bit) options. When we wrote the previous edition of this book, 64-bit Windows was still a fairly exotic choice for most Windows users. Within just a few years, thanks in no small measure to the plummeting price of memory chips, that balance has shifted dramatically. Today, Windows 7 x64 is commonly installed on new computers, especially on systems with 4 GB or more of RAM.

 

note

The default settings we describe in this book are those you will see if you perform a clean install of Windows 7 using a shrink-wrapped retail copy. If you purchase a new PC with Windows 7, your settings might be different. Computer manufacturers have the right to customize Windows when they install it on a new system; they can change default settings, customize desktop backgrounds and screen savers, tweak the home page and Favorites list in Windows Internet Explorer, install third-party software, and configure the system so that it uses a different media player or browser than the Microsoft defaults.

Excerpt from Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Personalizing Windows

ONE of the most obvious changes that Microsoft made in moving from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is the taskbar, which has a bold new look, lots of new functionality, and new ways to customize, all of which we explain in this chapter. We also cover the many new techniques that make it easier to perform various window tasks, such as maximizing, resizing, and so on. A subtler change is the inclusion of the word Personalize prominently in the user interface of the new operating system. Certainly, earlier versions of Windows could be tailored, customized, and modified to suit a user’s needs and preferences—in a word, personalized. But the P word itself was missing. Now, when you right-click your desktop, the shortcut menu that pops up features an icon-festooned Personalize command. Personalize Windows is also one of the items that appear in the new operating system’s Getting Started task list. So the message is clear: It’s your operating system; make it reflect your tastes, your needs, your style. Make it work for you. More than any previous version of Windows, Windows 7 provides myriad tools for doing just that—tools that we survey in this chapter.

What’s in Your Edition?

The ability to personalize your computing environment by changing desktop backgrounds, window colors, and sounds is not available in Windows 7 Starter edition. Lack of Aero support in Starter edition means you can’t get transparent window frames, live taskbar previews, and other visual effects, and Aero Peek is unavailable. And Starter edition does not support the use of multiple monitors. All other features described in this chapter are available in all editions.

Working with the New Taskbar and Start Menu

The taskbar is that strip of real estate along one screen edge (bottom by default) that contains the Start menu button, program buttons, and status icons. The taskbar made its first appearance in Windows 95. In the years since, it has slowly evolved: installing Internet Explorer 4 in Windows 95 also added a Quick Launch toolbar and other toolbars; Windows XP reduced clutter by introducing taskbar grouping; and Windows Vista added taskbar previews, small window representations that increased your chances of clicking the correct taskbar button for the program you want to bring to the front.

The evolution continues in Windows 7, but at a generation-skipping pace. The Windows 7 taskbar (see Figure 4-1) continues to serve the same basic functions as its progenitors— launching programs, switching between programs, and providing notifications—but in a way that makes these basic tasks easier and more efficient.

Figure 4-1 Although the taskbar designs in Windows XP (top), Windows Vista (center), and Windows 7 (bottom) comprise the same basic elements, the appearance has evolved a bit—and the functionality has advanced by leaps and bounds.

Opening and Monitoring Programs from Taskbar Buttons

As in previous Windows versions, the taskbar houses the Start menu button, a button for each running program, and the notification area. You can use these task buttons to switch from one running program to another. You can also click a task button to minimize an open window or to restore a minimized window. But in a departure from earlier Windows versions, which had separate bands dedicated to a Quick Launch bar (from which you can open programs) and to taskbar buttons (which represent programs that are currently running), the Windows 7 taskbar combines these functions. That is, buttons between the Start button and the notification area can be used both for opening programs and for switching between programs.

Adding and Removing Pinned Programs, Documents, and Folders

Programs that you use often (the ones that you might’ve had on the Quick Launch toolbar in the past) can be easily pinned to the taskbar so that a single click launches them. To open a program that is pinned to the taskbar, you don’t need to open the Start menu or dig down to find a desktop shortcut. To pin a program to the taskbar, simply drag its icon or a shortcut (from the desktop, from the Start menu, or from any other folder) to the taskbar. Alternatively, right-click a program icon wherever you find it and choose Pin To Taskbar. To remove a pinned program from the taskbar, right-click the pinned icon and choose Unpin This Program From Taskbar. This same command also appears on other shortcuts to the program, including those on the desktop and on the Start menu. You can also pin frequently used documents and folders to the taskbar, using similar methods:

To pin a document to the taskbar, drag its icon or a shortcut to the taskbar. If the taskbar already has a button for the program associated with the document, Windows adds the document to the Pinned section of the program’s Jump List. (For more information about Jump Lists, see “Using Jump Lists on the Taskbar and Start Menu” on page 107.) If the document’s program is not on the taskbar, Windows pins the program to the taskbar and adds the document to the program’s Jump List.

• To pin a folder to the taskbar, drag its icon or a shortcut to the taskbar. Windows adds the folder to the Pinned section of the Jump List for Windows Explorer.
• To open a pinned document or folder, right-click the taskbar button and then click the name of the document or folder.
• To remove a pinned document or folder from the Jump List, right-click the taskbar button and point to the name of the document or folder to be removed. Click the pushpin icon that appears.

INSIDE OUT

Restore the Quick Launch toolbar

Some habits die hard. If you just can’t bear to give up the Quick Launch toolbar, you can display it in Windows 7. To do so, add the hidden Quick Launch folder as you would any other folder. (For details, see “Using Additional Toolbars” on page 112.) In the New Toolbar dialog box, type %AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch in the Folder box. To mimic the appearance of the Quick Launch toolbar in previous Windows versions, unlock the taskbar. (Right-click the taskbar and, if there’s a check mark by Lock The Taskbar, choose that command.) Right-click the Quick Launch toolbar and clear the Show Title and Show Text commands. Then drag the handle (the dotted line) on the left side of the Quick Launch toolbar so that it’s next to the Start button, and drag the handle on the right side of the toolbar to set the width you want. Then relock the taskbar. If you later decide you don’t need the Quick Launch toolbar after all, right-click the taskbar and select Toolbars, Quick Launch to remove the check mark and the toolbar.

—

To download the full sample chapters plus additional sample chapters from other Windows 7 books, as well as learning snacks and online clinics, be sure to visit the Microsoft Learning Windows 7 Training Portal.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/windows.aspx.

RTM’d today: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680): Configuring Windows 7

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680): Configuring Microsoft Windows 7 (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735627086; 912 pages), by Ian McLean and Orin Thomas, is at the printer.  Congrats, Ian and Orin!

About Ian McLean and Orin Thomas

Ian McLean is the coauthor of numerous Microsoft Press SELF-PACED TRAINING KITs, covering the Windows Server, Windows Client, Exchange Server, and SQL Server technologies.

Orin Thomas is a writer, teacher, and consultant whose books include the SELF-PACED TRAINING KITs for Windows Vista exam 70-620 and Windows Server 2008 exams 70-646 and 70-647.

The book will be available via online retailers around October 21, 2009. You can preorder it here or here.

Here’s information about Exam 70-680.

And here’s the book’s chapter-level TOC:

Contents at a Glance

Introduction xxiii

CHAPTER 1 Install, Migrate, or Upgrade to Windows 7 1
CHAPTER 2 Configuring System Images 53
CHAPTER 3 Deploying System Images 113
CHAPTER 4 Managing Devices and Disks 195
CHAPTER 5 Managing Applications 255
CHAPTER 6 Network Settings 297
CHAPTER 7 Windows Firewall and Remote Management 381
CHAPTER 8 BranchCache and Resource Sharing 421
CHAPTER 9 Authentication and Account Control 477
CHAPTER 10 DirectAccess and VPN Connections 513
CHAPTER 11 BitLocker and Mobility Options 553
CHAPTER 12 Windows Update and Windows Internet Explorer 599
CHAPTER 13 Monitoring and Performance 647
CHAPTER 14 Recovery and Backup 729

Answers 783
Glossary 843
Index 847

Microsoft and O’Reilly Media Teaming up!

You might have seen the news already: Microsoft is teaming up with O’Reilly Media to bring us more Microsoft Press goodness!

Starting November 30 in the U.S. (and expanding globally over time), O’Reilly will be co-publishing line of Microsoft Press books, and they be Microsoft’s distributor as well.

Microsoft will still develop new MS Press books, and O’Reilly will too—which means that over time you should see more books, faster. And with O’Reilly distributing Microsoft’s titles, I’m sure you’ll see some sweet advances on Microsoft’s e-book front, too.

Beyond that, how are you impacted as an MS Press customer today? Not at all: you’ll continue to see Microsoft’s books in physical and on-line book stores with the same look, ISBN#, etc. It’s all goodness!

Source: Ken Rosen (Born to Learn Blog)

Microsoft Press Book: Hot Sellers

For IT Professionals
Windows Internals, Fifth Edition, by Mark E. Russinovich and David A. Solomon with Alex Ionescu

For Developers
Code Complete, Second Edition, by Steve McConnell

For Home and Office Users
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Step by Step, by Curtis D. Frye

For Certification
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-620): Configuring Windows Vista Client, by Ian McLean and Orin Thomas

An unfinished MS Press book authored by Kurt Dillard (Server 2008)

I would like share an unfinished MS Press book authored by Kurt Dillard. Here is what he had to say about this work:

“I wrote half of a book for helping people to prepare for the Windows Server 2008 certification exams. I had two coauthors, but they didn’t finish any of their chapters. I didn’t have enough time to write the rest of the book on my own so the publisher (not MS Press) cancelled the project. What I have created is several hundred pages of study guides that cover 3 of the Windows Server 2008 exams, they aren’t enough to publish as a book so I decided to make them available online for free. I don’t want all of this work to just sit on my hard drive rotting, this way some people may get some value out of my effort.

The work is professional quality, as technically accurate as I could make it on my own. It hasn’t been reviewed by a copy editor though, I’m sure I have some silly grammar errors and other minor issues. Its worth a look if you’re thinking about certification, I’ve had dozens of books and articles published over the years so I’m confident that what I have created is useful. Please take a look: http://www.kurtdillard.com/StudyGuides/, if you like what you see share it with other IT professionals.

Exam 70-640, Configuring Active Directory
Exam 70-642, Network Infrastructure
Exam 70-643, Configuring Applications Infrastructure”

Please visit this to link to review the book: http://www.kurtdillard.com/StudyGuides/

Hope this is helpful.

RTM’d today: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming

MS Press is pleased to announce that Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Programming, by Itzik Ben-Gan, Dejan Sarka, Roger Wolter, Greg Low, Ed Katibah, and Isaac Kunen (Kalen Delaney Series Editor; Solid Quality Mentors) shipped to the printer today (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735626027; 832 pages)!

 

This book provides a detailed look at the internal architecture of T-SQL with this comprehensive programming reference. Database developers and administrators get best practices, expert techniques, and code samples to master the intricacies of this programming language—solving complex problems with real-world solutions. Some of the tasks you’ll learn include:

• Work with T-SQL and CLR user-defined functions, stored procedures, and triggers.
• Handle transactions, concurrency, and error handling.
• Efficiently use temporary objects, including temporary tables, table variables, and table expressions.
• Evaluate when to use set-based programming techniques and when to use cursors.
• Work with dynamic SQL in an efficient and secure manner.•    Treat date- and time-related data in a robust manner.
• Develop CLR user-defined types and learn about temporal support in the relational model.
• Use XML and XQuery and implement a dynamic schema solution.

All the book’s code samples will be available for download from the companion Web site.

I’ll post excerpts from the book soon, in the middle of September, when the book is available.

RTM’d today: Windows 7 Inside Out

We’re pleased to announce that Windows 7 Inside Out, by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson, shipped to the printer today (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735626652; 1056 pages)!

The book includes a foreword by president of the Windows Division at Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky.

Written by the authors of the immensely popular Windows Vista Inside Out, this supremely organized reference shows readers the best and smartest ways to work with Windows 7. Compare features and capabilities in each edition of Windows 7; Configure and customize your system with advanced setup options; Manage files, folders, and media libraries; Set up a wired or wireless network and manage shared resources; Administer accounts, passwords, and logons—and help control access to resources; Configure Internet Explorer 8 settings and security zones; Master security essentials to help protect against viruses, worms, and spyware; Troubleshoot errors and fine-tune performance; Automate routine maintenance with scripts and other tools.

The book’s CD includes: A fully searchable eBook; Downloadable gadgets and other tools for customizing Windows 7; Insights direct from the product team on the official Windows 7 blog; Links to the latest security updates and products, demos, blogs, and user communities.

We’ll post a teaser from the book in the next couple of days, and then an excerpt toward the end of September, when the book is available.

You can also pre-order the book here or here.

Also, be sure to visit the Microsoft Learning Windows 7 Training Portal, where you can download free sample chapters (previews) as well as learning snacks and online clinics.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/windows.aspx.

Save 20 Percent on selected Microsoft Office books from Microsoft Press

 

Visit any Barnes & Noble Booksellers store from August 6 through October 7, 2009, to save 20 percent on selected Microsoft Press guides for Microsoft Office, including the new full-color title 2007 Microsoft Office System and Your Windows-Based PC: A Real-Life Guide to Getting More Done.