I don’t have any official press release to point to, but most of the blogs I read today are buzzing with the story that Microsoft has officially set the date for the Win7 release as Oct 22nd. Here are a few links:
MSDN subscribers should be able to download the VS.NET 2010 BETA 1 today off the subscriber download site. I personally can’t wait to get my hands on it. There are some cool new features in C# 4.0 as well as the addition of the functional language F#. It’s not up yet, but keep your eyes peeled and let everyone know if you see it up there.
Hopefully I haven’t lost too many of you (all 3 of you) with my absence. Contrary to the title I really haven’t been hibernating. Actually quite the opposite. I’ve had a streak of good luck in the past 2 months and have been flooded with ideas and projects. I’ve been trying to work on all that I can. Some I plan on releasing to the public domain on CodePlex others are business ventures. I apologize for the long absence and thank you for your patients while I wrap some of these things up. I will return to more “useful” posts (if you can call them that) soon.
In the mean time check out Win7 RC1. It’s well worth it!
Back in December I blogged about a tool MS was working on called Chess. Well I am glad to announce Microsoft has released it. You can download it here.
After two possible vulnerabilities issues were found in how UAC was configured and implemented in the Win7 BETA Microsoft initially responded with why they didn’t think it was an issue. After a lot of suggestions/feedback from the community Microsoft has decided to listen to the community (Go MS!) and make two simple changes that I believe fixes both of the issues. Here are the two changes Microsoft will make to UAC:
The UAC control panel will now run in a high integrity process. This means that to run the UAC control panel you will get a UAC prompt. This resolves the issue where malware could script some mouse and keystrokes to change your UAC settings. MS said this was actually already in the works.
When UAC settings are changed a UAC prompt is presented. This one MS said comes straight from community feedback.
Malware would now have to bypass the UAC prompts to elevate permissions. I’m glad MS is listening to the community. I’ll admit I’m a huge fan of MS and in the past years had been let down by how little they seemed to listened to the community. I think this is a step in the right direction and glad to see MS is going back to what they used to do well. Thanks MS!
If you are using Windows 7 BETA like I am then you may want to raise your UAC settings to high. It seems that Rundll32.exe has the ability to auto-elevate itself to administrator without the users permission. Microsoft signs some of it’s applications so that a UAC prompt isn’t needed if you have your UAC settings at the default settings or below. All good except Rundll32.exe is one of them. Rundll32.exe is a utility that lets you load a library and execute function in the library. Malware could possibly exploit this. See this article for more details:
While re-installing the Win7 BETA yesterday I noticed something odd. One of the new features in Win7 is the “Action Center”. It’s really an evolution of Vista’s security center. The Action Center aggregates all kinds of information coming from the system. In the action center you will find messages relating to system maintenance, security, and troubleshooting information. As I was going through the process of reinstalling all my applications I noticed the action center icon had a critical message to tell me about. The message simply stated that I needed to perform a scan on my system. I clicked on it and Windows Defender popped up and started it’s scan immediately. Nice! I really didn’t have much to do at the moment so I left the scan up as I chatted with a friend on IM. Then all of sudden something caught my eye. Defender was saying I might have some malicious software on my machine.
What?! How can this be? I’ve hardly visited any sites yet. In fact the only place I had been was the Microsoft site. I was anxious for the scan to complete so I could see what the offending software was. However when the scan completed Defender reported all was well.
Keep in mind this is a BETA. I was glad to see everything was ok (I think???), but I have to wonder what Windows Defender was doing here and why it reported what seemed to be a false negative at first. Anyone else seen this before?
I enjoyed the Windows 7 BETA so much that I jumped the gun and replaced Vista on my main PC. I mean don’t get me wrong. I’m one of those rare people that actually like(d) Vista. I didn’t have all the issues that most were reporting. However when I installed the Win7 BETA I suddenly felt what Vista could (should?) be. It’s very fast. I mean noticeably fast. It also feels very well polished. I’ve been saying to my peers “It feels more like an RC than a BETA.” Life was good. Then today rolls around. I had installed Office 2007 with the wrong product key and Office activation was complaining that I had activated too many (oops). I quickly realized I had used the wrong key and took the documented steps to change my product key to a new one. To change the product key office needs to do kind of a reinstall (Not of everything of course). However this time I got a message saying it crashed. I tried it again. Crash! The next step was to uninstall office and reinstall it. Surely that would work, because hey I just installed it fine right? Nope that too failed. What is going on here?! This makes no sense. Maybe it was AVG anti-virus I had installed after installing office? I uninstall it and still no dice. I finally (head held low in shame) reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch. Well as it was installing I popped over to Neowin to read the latest news and wouldn’t you know what was smack dab on the front page? That’s right the fix to my problem! It turns out I’m not the only one experiencing this installer issue all of sudden. Here I was installing from scratch and all I had to do was disable the Customer Experience Improvement Program. All is well again in E-Town. Check out this link at Neowin if you are having any issues with installers crashing on the Windows 7 BETA. It will save you from re-installing. Where am I at right now? Installing VS.NET 2008 SP1. *sigh*
Sure I could have downloaded it off bit torrent, but I resisted. My wait is over however. Windows 7 BETA is available for MSDN and Technet subscribers now! It seemed after Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech at CES 2009 I was going to have to wait until Thursday to get it, but after checking the MSDN site it’s up now. Call me what you will, but I am downloading it now and installing it tonight. It’s going to be a long night :)
