Great news, today I received a very pleasant e-mail from Microsoft, that told me that I’ve been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for 2009, to follow the award which I received in 2008.
I am very happy and once again extremely humble to be associated with a great group of very clever people around the globe.
Thanks to Microsoft for the award, I really appreciate working with Microsoft and getting access to the information and resources that the MVP award opens up for.
Congrats to all the other newly and renewed MVPs!
Couldn’t resist anymore, I’ve bought myself a Fujitsu Scaleo Home Server based on Windows Home Server. The server is the 2. generation WHS from Fujitsu and it was just to cheap (approx 360$) to resist anymore, apparently Fujitsu has dumped their prices this spring with like 50%.
I like the idea of having the homeserver handling backup of my PCs and the integration to my Mediacenter, especially now with Power Pack 2 for WHS.
Specs of the Fujitsu Scaleo 2105 is:
- Intel® Celeron® 420 processor2 (1.6 GHz, 512 KB, L2 Cache)
- 2 Gb memory
- 2 x 500GB harddrives
Official data sheet.
Experience so far… It’s very quiet, not a single noise from it.
A while back Microsoft released a free set of online training for Exchange 2010.
Collection 6899: Exploring Features of Exchange Server 2010
Overview:
This two-hour collection provides you with an overview of the new features in Exchange Server 2010. It also describes the enhancements made over Exchange Server 2007.
The clinics within this collection cover:
- New features in Exchange Server 2010
- Technology enhancements
- Management tools used in Exchange Server 2010
- Managing a Mailbox server
- Unified Messaging in Exchange Server 2010
- High availability features in Exchange Server 2010
Users completing this collection should have three or more years of experience working with previous versions of Exchange Server, including the implementation of Exchange Server 2007. They should be familiar with Active Directory, Exchange messaging, and SharePoint and fundamentals of Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. It is beneficial if they have experience with a Windows or command-line scripting.
Find the free e-learning here.
The IIS Team has released another cool product for IIS 7. A few days ago The IIS Team released the beta of IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. The toolkit provides you with a number of features which can help you ensure that your site follows best practices with regards to how search engines crawl and parse your site as well as providing features for generating robots.txt files and sitemaps.
Carlos, the person behind the toolkit, has more information about the release here as well as a great video giving an overview of the Site Analysis feature of the toolkit here. ScottGu also has a walkthrough post up on his blog here.
Installing
Use Web PI (click on the image below):
Or from Microsoft download center:
Don’t expect many updates from me in May, since I’m attending the Exchange Master training in Redmond and will be in Redmond all May. 
Read more about the Microsoft Certified Master Program at the Master Blog.
Saw this great blog post about IIS Security written by Tobin from the IIS Team. It covers the following topics with IIS Security:
- Ghosts of IIS Security Past
- Improvements in IIS 6
- Improvements in IIS 7.x
It’s a must read for everyone working with IIS.
Read the blog post here.
The IIS Team released the latest version of IIS Media Services 2.0 last week, it’s available as RTW (Released to Web) and can be downloaded is these versions:
There are two releases available side-by-side on iis.net and through the Web Platform Installer:
- IIS Media Services 2.0 RTW – the production-ready release announced last week. Includes:
- Smooth Streaming
- Bitrate Throttling
- Web Playlists
- IIS Media Services 3.0 Beta – a preview of new features in 3.0 made available in March at MIX. Includes:
- Live Smooth Streaming
- Advanced Logging
For production deployments, you’ll want to use the 2.0 RTW.
For at demo and more info about Smooth Streaming, check these sites:
The IIS Team has released the FastCGI Extension 1.5 for IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1 - Beta.
It’s an upgrade of the existing FastCGI Extension 1.0, based on the same technology and this new version adds several important improvements and features.
The FastCGI Extension 1.5 includes these new features:
- Monitor changes to a file. The extension can be configured to listen for file change notifications on a specific file and when that file changes, the extension will recycle FastCGI processes for the process pool. This feature can be used to recycle PHP processes when changes to php.ini file occur.
- Real-time tuning of MaxInstances setting. This MaxInstances setting dictates the maximum number of FastCGI processes which can be launched for each application pool. If it is set to 0 then FastCGI extension will automatically adjust the number of instances up or down every few seconds based on the system load and number of requests waiting in the queue.
- STDERR stream handling. There are several options of how the extension can handle text sent by FastCGI application on STDERR. The extension can send the error data as a failure response to the HTTP client or it can ignore the error and send whatever was received on STDOUT as a response with 200 status code.
- Sending a termination signal to FastCGI processes. The extension can be configured to send a termination signal to FastCGI process before terminating it. This enables FastCGI process to do a clean shutdown before getting killed.
- _FCGI_X_PIPE_ environment variable. This variable is set by FastCGI extension and it contains the name of the named pipe that is used for communication between the extension and FastCGI process.
- Relaxed enforcement of response headers syntax. The FastCGI extension has less strict enforcements for the correctness of the response headers.
Read more at source.
