Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Fighting SPAM and HIV

Microsoft researchers announced on Wednesday that the same technology used to effectively fight SPAM is now being used to fight HIV. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have already given over $1 billion in grants to help fight HIV, TB, and reproductive health alone, with over $4 billion since the foundation's inception given to global ...

Security Improved…then Destroyed

Michael Howard - our Sr. Security Program Manager here at Microsoft - blogs about how the improved security features in XP SP2 were effectively destroyed in an article in PC Magazine, "Making Windows XP Start Faster", by turning off the Automatic Updates and Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) services.Great improvements have - and are still - ...

x86 and ia64 and x64, oh my!

With the .NET Framework 2.0 now supporting 64-bit platforms, I have begun work on upgrading our patch build system to handle 64-bit patches. It's been quite an adventure down the yellow-brick road of 64 bitness that I think is worth sharing.Why does the .NET Framework need to support 64-bit platforms, though? While most IL modules ...

The Differences between Locales and Languages

In a recent change - while we were still known as Developer Division Sustained Engineering - I addressed a functional change that relied on locales instead of languages for MUI support. I see this mistake a lot in developer forums and so I wanted to address what the difference was between a locale and languages.A locale represents regional ...