Microsoft's 2008 Platform

Microsoft is releasing Microsoft Windows 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 at an event on February 27, 2008 7am. It's a pretty major event since it marks the next leap since the 2005 release.

The best feature of the new platform is LINQ, which enables developers to treat data as entities rather than relational tables. It's like taking NHibernate to the next level and integrating it with the programming language.

WSUS

Microsoft has a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) utility that we can use to download updates and get them installed within the network. It can download updates for different versions Microsoft Windows Operating System. The domain clients have to be setup via Group Policy. For workgroup clients, you would have to make registry changes; see:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/athif/archive/2005/09/14/Manually_Configure_WUA.aspx

To manually search and download Windows updates, you can also use the Microsoft Windows Update Catalog via your browser. Unfortunately, it doesn't list available updates so you can't browse - all it's got is a search box where you can type the update that you're looking for.

Findstr to grep on Windows

If you've been using grep all week only to come home to an PC running Windows, you're probably missing a part of your life when you leave your Linux workstation.

If you've been in the dark on the Findstr command line utility for Windows, you'll certainly love my blog for this. If you're on a text file containing huge amounts of text, such as a log file (I've got a log4net log that generates a few hundred lines every hour... that is after disabling the memcache logging) you can get Findstr to search for all lines with a particular word. Findstr does regular expressions too. It's got many of the options that grep does - printing filenames for matches, printing lines that do not match, and multiple file search.