TechRebulic has an interesting article about Microsoft’s advances in China. When I first heard about Red Flag Linux, a Linux distribution supported by the Chinese government, my first thought was that this will bring the breakthrough for Linux on the desktop. That was about five years ago. It turned out that this project was a complete failure.

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Microsoft has a new site dedicated to the relationship between Microsoft and the Open Source community. When I skimmed over the site I had a hearty laugh when I opened one of the PDF flyers there.

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Paul Thurrott wrote an FAQ about Vista SP1. The most interesting he said is that it will bring a major update to the Windows kernel. Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will then both have the kernel version 6.1.

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Microsoft released Process Monitor v1.2, a free tool to monitor real-time file system, registry and process/thread activity. There is an “interesting” SearchWinIT article about its new features. I guess the author never saw Process Monitor in his life.

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Did you ever wonder why you can’t uninstall Pinball on a Windows XP machine? Pinball is an optional component of Windows XP. Most of these components can be installed or uninstalled with the Add/Remove Programs tool in the Control Panel. However, some of these apps don’t appear there.

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Microsoft offers quite few Active Directory related products which can be generally described as Identity and Access (IDA) solutions. It is sometimes difficult to keep track with Microsoft’s enterprise products, not only because MS extends their functionality or releases new ones, but also because their names are constantly changing. In Windows Server 2008, there will be many such changes. In this post I summarized all of Microsoft’s IDA solutions with their new names.

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Mark Wilson installed Apache on Windows Server 2008 Server Core and it seems to work without problems. All you have to do is to run msiexec /i apache.msi. Now, you might ask why Microsoft made IIS available on Server Core if Apache works, anyhow. I mean, you can’t use ASP.NET on Server Core. So if you want more than just static HTML pages you have to work with PHP or another solution for dynamic web pages.

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Steve Rosa described how he installed Active Directory Domain Services on Server Core in Windows Server 2008. Even though, Active Directory is just another server role, you can’t install it with ocsetup on Server Core. Like on the standard version of Windows Server 2008 you have to use dcpromo.

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Last week I blogged that Vista SP1 beta might be available this week. This information was based on a post of Mary Jo Foley. It seems that her contacts to Microsoft are not as good as I thought. Joe Willcox from Microsoft Watch seems to have other information.

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If you are an MCSA or MSCE on Windows Server 2003, you can now try your luck with the beta of the MCSA/MCSE 2008 transition exams. The good thing about these exams is that they are for free. Lukas Beeler took the exam and blogged about his experiences.

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Reuters reports that Microsoft offers now a pay-as-you-go model for Office 2007 in South Africa. First-time users can buy a three-month subscription for $28.54. The official justification for this move is that software becomes affordable for customers in the emerging markets this way. However, I have doubts that this is the real motive.

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Active Directory Explorer v1.0 is a free new Sysinternals tool from Microsoft. It allows you to view and edit the Active Directory database. The utility is similar to ADSIedit from the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools. It offers two useful additional features: You can create snapshots and you can bookmark AD objects.

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You might have noticed that I have the honor of being a member of Tech Dispenser, “Computerworld’s human powered technology blog network and news aggregator”. I recommend checking out their site. You’ll find many great computer related blogs there. You might also consider subscribing to some of their category feeds. Those articles are hand selected by Computerworld editors. Thus, you’ll find many interesting stuff there.

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Do you get stomach ache whenever you think about the complaints you will hear from your colleagues after upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007? I think the new Office user interface is really great! But I am sure you also have these people in your organization who hate any kind of change. And this change is really big! There are two Office add-ins that might be of help to your stomach problem. One is Classic Menu for Office 2007 and the other goes for the name “Toolbar Toggle“.

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Microsoft new malware database is online now. Such a virus encyclopedia is quite useful if one of your machines gets infected by a virus and your antivirus software is not able to get it under control. You can then search for technical background information and ways to get rid of the pest. It is advisable not to rely on just one virus database, though.

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