Whether you’re a fan of Team USA swimming or not, you have to admit it was pretty exciting when the men’s 4x100m freestyle relay somehow came from behind to win gold at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Thanks to some exciting new media serving technologies we’ve just announced, you will be able to experience moments like this in high definition, both live and on demand, throughout the 2010 Winter Olympics and other online events.

This week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show, we released IIS Smooth Streaming alongside a beta of IIS Live Smooth Streaming, adding to our canon of IIS Extensions. These are both features of IIS Media Services, which is an integrated HTTP-based media platform for cost-effectively delivering, managing, and caching media.

Instead of the old ‘click and wait’, with IIS Smooth Streaming you get a fast startup time and very little buffering so you can watch your favorite gold medal sport, show, movie, or whatever you want right away. IIS Smooth Streaming automatically and continuously blends the quality of the video to match your available bandwidth and CPU conditions to deliver the best viewing experience.

Media companies can also take advantage of IIS Smooth Streaming features to boost advertising and subscription revenues with uninterrupted delivery, so even if you have to watch commercials, at least you can view them in true high-definition (HD) video (1080p). Hey, somebody has to pay the bills. J

And rather than reinventing the wheel, IIS Smooth Streaming takes advantage of the Web’s existing infrastructure and brings superior performance and scalability to media experiences delivered using plain-old HTTP.

IIS Media Services is comprised of five IIS Extensions:

·         Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of on-demand media for Silverlight

·         Live Smooth Streaming, live adaptive streaming delivery to Silverlight

·         Advanced Logging, rich, real-time client and server side logging

·         Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player

·         Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content

More information on IIS Media Services and Smooth Streaming can be found at www.iis.net/media, www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming and blogs from the IIS Engineering team.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

 

Posted by WindowsServer, filed under Uncategorized. Date: April 22, 2009, 6:33 pm | No Comments »

I have been tagged by Aaron Alton as part of the latest meme and the question this time around is: Who has been a great leader in your career and what made them a great leader?

This is a tough one and this will probably sound like a cop out but it is not. I will actually pick two people one of them is real and the other ‘one’ is more than one single person
 
 
Let’s start with my previous manager Mike. Mike is a manager who still writes code daily, he understands the life of a developer. When you tell him that something will take 2 weeks he will ask you if you are sure because it sounds like that isn’t enough time. Mike was never a person who would pressure you into committing to a tighter schedule. When you arrived at work Mike was there, when you went home Mike was still there….I really felt bad leaving half the time knowing that Mike was still in his cube and here I am leaving to go home. If you need a tool there was never a problem getting it. Mike was the person who got our first real bug tracking software (Jira by Atlassian) and he also got us Subversion servers.

Scrum was introduced to our team by Mike. I remember a time when it was common for me to go over documentation with the rest of the team for 3 weeks straight because we had a 9 month project. After 9 months the client would of course tell you that it wasn’t really what they wanted. Scrum changed things drastically, we pushed out two projects, and each was a three or four three week sprint. The feedback was immediate and there was no time wasted implementing feature that nobody really wanted, stuff we weren’t sure about were put in the ‘nice to have’ bucket. You needed books, no problem; an email would get you what you need.

The second ‘person’ is ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ or ‘collective intelligence’ 
What do I mean by that? These are the people who are active in the newsgroups, forums, blogs, email lists, user groups, write books etc etc. Not one of these people made a reaaly huge impact but all of them combined did.

Newsgroups/forum
One of the better ways to learn SQL is still to participate in newsgroups/forums. In the beginning you will probably ask more than you answer but after a while you will see that 50% of the questions are the same 20 questions asked over and over again with a slight variation in the question itself. You can just lurk in these newsgroups and take in all the great information that has been passed around. There are many people that taught me some really good stuff; here is just a small number: Aaron Bertrand, Adam Machanic, Denny Cherry, vongrunt, George Mastros, Jonathan Kehayias, Itzik Ben-Gan, David Portas, Ted Krueger, Emtucifor, Uri Dimant, Dan Guzman................

Bloggers/website
Blogs have really made a difference for developers in the last 5 years. There are blogs that specialize just in one thing in terms of a product. If you want to learn stuff about checkdb and indexing, then you visit Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal’s blog. If you are interested in admin related stuff then Denny Cherry is the man. If you want to get someone’s perspective on large data sets then Michelle Ufford is your woman. Dynamic SQL interest you and you want to learn more? Erland Sommarskog has the definitive page. Datetime data? Tibor Karaszi has all the answers. Then there are blogs where a bunch of really good bloggers all blog on the same site; sqlblog is one of these

Authors and content creators
All this online stuff is nice but I still prefer to hold a ‘real’ tree disappearing book in my hand. Every SQL developer should own a bunch of these books, following is a short list. Ken Henderson’s The Guru’s guide to SQL, The Inside SQL Server series by Kalen Delaney, Itzik Ben-Gan and others, Louis Davidson design book, Adam Machanic’s Expert SQL book, Joe Celko’s for smarties and puzzle books. In terms of Video/Audio content you should check out Greg Low’s SQLDownunder podcasts, the podcast on SQLServerPedia, DotNetRocks and Channel 9

The SQL community
All the #sql folks on twitter who make everybody suffer from ADD these days, yes Brent Ozar and Jason Massie I am talking about you.
 
 
And I  will tag no one  :-)






Posted by Denis Gobo, filed under Uncategorized. Date: April 22, 2009, 12:46 pm | No Comments »

It was in 2007 at RSA that Bill Gates first spoke about his vision to enable secure and easy anywhere access to people and organizations. I remember people asking me then if this was just another grand vision that would take a decade to see light of day. It certainly was grand and it could definitely not be done overnight, but we have taken the vision to a deployable and usable technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Say hello to “DirectAccess”!

 In very simple terms, DirectAccess extends the corporate network to wherever you have Internet access. As an end-user on the DirectAccess pilot that Microsoft IT (MSIT) has initiated, this has been a great experience. Every time I’m on the road all I need is an Internet connection and I’m connected to the corporate network. I don’t have to go through the time consuming connection or quarantine process that I have with our current VPN solution. This also a great plus for the IT organization since they do not have to wait for remote users to connect via VPN to get their security updates. Every time they are connected to the Internet, their machines get the latest updates issued by the IT organization. This is not to say that all Internet traffic is routed back to the corporate network. Regular Internet traffic goes through the Internet Service Providers’ (ISP) network while only Intranet traffic is forwarded to the DirectAccess server, which is placed in the perimeter of the corporate network.

 This idea of extending the edge of the corporate network beyond the current parameters has been work in progress with the Jericho Forum for the past many years. Robert Whitely from Forrester has also done extensive research on de-perimeterization and published some interesting papers. The basis for all this work is that it is possible to extend the corporate network perimeter while also ensuring secure business transactions via the Internet. This picked up steam with the increasing importance of Network Access Control (NAC) solutions.

 Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP), Microsoft’s NAC solution included with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, Vista and XP SP3 clients, ensures the health compliance of devices accessing corporate networks using DirectAccess. In addition to NAP, DirectAccess uses various technologies including Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and IPv6 transition technologies to provide an end-to-end secure and seamless solution for accessing corporate resources remotely. DirectAccess also works well with two-factor security mechanisms provided by Microsoft.

 So what turned out to be a vision few years ago, is now a reality in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, and as I write this blog sitting in my hotel room, while also responding to my personal emails and downloading a document from a share on corporate network, I cannot help but be impressed.

Posted by WindowsServer, filed under Uncategorized. Date: April 22, 2009, 10:09 am | No Comments »


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