As some of you may have already heard, Windows 7 has now been released to manufacturing! Read the latest blog post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. This also means that now you have all the more reason to try the new functionality in Windows Installer 5.0 that is included in Windows 7. Windows Installer provides

... read more

It’s been a few months now since the Windows Installer 4.5 redistributable was released [link]. Over the past couple months I have received several questions (quite often similar in nature) that warrants this blog post <grin>. In this post, I will attempt to answer some of the most frequently asked questions with regards to adoption &

... read more

Setting appropriate permissions for an object is one of the core operations in creating an application installer. One of the most frequent pieces of feedback has been to provide enhanced capabilities around securing resources installed on the system. MsiLockPermissionsEx Table in Windows 7 enhances the functionality over LockPermissions Table. With MsiLockPermissionsEx table, users now have the

... read more

In Windows 7, Windows Installer provides enhanced native support for setup authors to configure services as part of an application install.

Starting with Windows Vista, Windows provides a powerful set of configuration options to configure services. These enhancements result in better security, performance and reliability for services. For example, the least privilege and resource isolation

... read more

Windows Installer version 5.0 is included in Windows 7 Beta. The MSDN documentation section “What’s new in Windows Installer 5.0” has been updated accordingly and available for online viewing. In addition, all functionality provided with the MSI 4.5 redistributable release is included on Windows 7. Over the next few days, we will do

... read more

The final version of the Windows Web Services API for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 is now available. This version corresponds to the final version of the WWSAPI released as part of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. To develop for this version of the runtime, you need to install

... read more

For the super eagle eyed developer or Web Server admin, you might have noticed that cache entry validation happens slightly less frequently in IE8. I’m talking about the check to the Web Server (via

... read more

HTTP is a request/response protocol. You request some resource like the HTML of a webpage and the response comes back with the HTML attached.  As each request is sent on a connection, the complete response must be read from the connection before the next response can be read. (There is an optimization where you make more requests on a connection

... read more

In my last post, I announced the availability of QoS Traffic Generator on Microsoft Connect. In order to help you understand the usage of this tool, I have provided some examples of what it can do.

One of the most common tasks is to send traffic from one computer to another. The following example sends UDP traffic at

... read more

Just a quick note that over on on haoxu’ s “Lost in History” blog is a posting about how to create and register test SSL certs in http.sys for the Windows Web Services API Security Sample code. This might also be useful for developers using the http.sys apis.