stuart test blog

Yesterday I passed the last exam I needed to gain Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) status. It’s taken me a long time (four years to be exact) to get here but I’ve finally got it. These are the exams I passed and the certifications I picked up along the way… Aug 2001 – 70-210 – […]

Service pack 2 for Office 2003 was quietly released today. Nothing ground breaking (update: the only major, new feature appears to be some anti-phishing tools for Outlook 2003 – I haven’t tested them yet though), just the usual collection of security/stability/performance fixes. Download links here: Office 2003 SP2 Visio 2003 SP2 Project 2003 SP2 OneNote […]

For the past year or so I’ve been using Virtual PC for setting up labs for study and testing purposes, but recently I decided to give VMware Workstation 5 a go. I couldn’t believe the difference between VMware and VPC – the first major difference was the performance improvements in VMware. I had gotten used […]

I spotted this last week and have been really impressed with Microsoft’s new IE developer’s toolbar (screenshot below – click to enlarge.) I’m a long time Firefox user and try to avoid using IE as much as possible, but as a part-time web developer it’s always important to test website in a number of different […]

I haven’t managed to get my hands on a copy of it but it’s good to hear that the beta has finally been released. From what I’ve read so far about it, this release doesn’t contain too many of the cool features that we’ll see in the final release – it seems to be more […]

Haven’t seen this on any of the tech blogs that I read so I don’t know if I’m the first to notice it, but there is a big change coming up with the imminent release of Exchange 2003 SP2. The maximum database size will be increased to a whopping 75GB. This is huge news for […]

Just been reading about this on a couple of tech blogs – notably John Howard’s – Windows Longhorn has now been renamed to what will be it’s official release name, Windows Vista. The name is supposed to give thoughts of clarity and connectivity…

More exciting news from the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 camp – Microsoft have released a gui that taps into the new Access Based Enumeration (ABE) features in Service Pack 1. Novell admins will scoff at this as they have had this feature since the early days of Netware, but Windows admins will definitely […]

Microsoft have now posted an interesting knowledge base article detailing common server applications that work/don’t work with Service Pack 1 on Windows Server 2003. The Windows Application Experience test teams tested 127 server applications on computers that were running Windows Server 2003 with SP1. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 application compatibility