Some time ago I recommended focusing on PowerShell in the future when it comes to scripting. Jeffrey Snover from Microsoft also suggests making this move. He has a couple of hints to help you convert your VBScript scripts to PowerShell.

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Microsoft is accepting nominations for the beta program of Windows Installer 4.5. You can apply for it at Microsoft Connect. At the moment there only is a draft of a white paper from Robert Flaming, Windows Installer Program Manager, with the title “Agility Trends in Packaged Software“.

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Microsoft has a new PR site for Windows Server 2008. I played a little with it, but I somehow didn’t get the point behind this site. You can see a lot different faces. Nice faces, really! You can also upload your own picture, and show your face to the world. Okay, that is nice, too. But can someone please tell me what this has to do with Windows Server 2008?

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Update: RSAT is ready for download.

There are quite a few names for this famous tool collection. Some write Adminpak, Admin Pack or Adminpack. The official name is Administrations Tools Pack, but Microsoft often speaks about the Windows Server 2003 management tools. Now, you have to learn a new name: RSAT or Remote Server Administration Tools. This is how the management tools are called under Windows Server 2008.

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This new feature of Windows Server 2008 allows you to create a snapshot of the Active Directory database with the command line tool ntdsutil. The created snapshot can be exposed as an LDAP server using the dsamain utility. This is useful whenever you accidently delete Active Directory objects and are unsure which backup to restore. You can also use snapshots as backups. However, this is not really a substitute for professional backups. The whole procedure for creating snapshots and viewing is quite long-winded and inconvenient in my view. Here is how it goes:

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Introducing Windows Server 2008 from Mitch Tulloch with the Microsoft Windows Server Team has been available for a couple of days. It doesn’t happen often anymore that I read IT content on dead wood, but I will probably read this one to the end.

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Ryan Naraine from ZDNet is lamenting over Microsoft’s strategy of secretly releasing patches without disclosing its corresponding vulnerability. This certainly is an old discussion. However, how frankly Microsoft admits this in a bulletin of a patch, I suppose, is new.

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Update: Vista SP1 Beta might be released next week.

There have been rumors recently that the release date of Service Pack 1 for Vista might not be too far away. Now, Joe from ITsVista digged up a sentence in a Microsoft statement making it very clear that we won’t see Vista SP1 this year.

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Switcher for Windows Vista is the first really useful Aero application I found. Like Alt-Tab or Flip 3D, you can use it to switch between open applications. It is better than Vista’s on board solutions since it uses the whole screen to display thumbnails of all windows. You can find the app you want to access much faster this way.

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Restartable Active Directory Domain Services (RADDS) is one of those new features in Windows Server 2008 that seems to be relatively unimportant at first glance. However, in certain environments it might be a killer feature. It enables you to stop or restart Active Directory Domain Services (AS DS) on a Domain Controller for maintenance tasks.

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