Published on Wednesday, 29th November 2006 .
Microsoft have just released version 6.0 of the Remote Desktop Connection client to the wider community! This version allows users to leverage some of the great new functionality introduced in Terminal Services under Vista, including:
- Network Level Authentication – a new authentication method that finishes user auth before you establish a full Remote Desktop Connection and the logon screen appears, reducing the number of resources before a full RDC connection is established. Also, NLA helps protect users from connecting to remote computers that are set up for malicious purposes.
- Server Authentication – verifies that you are connecting to the correct remote computer or server, prevents you from connecting to a different box than you intend and from unintentionally exposing confidential information. This feature is enabled by default.
- Resource Redirection – support for Plug and Play devices that allow redirection.
- Terminal Services Gateway (TS Gateway) Server Support – RDC uses port 3389 which is normally blocked by a firewall if you are attempting to initiate a connection from the internet. With TS Gateway Server, an internet based Remote Desktop connection is initiated over port 443 through a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) tunnel, negating the need for a costly VPN or corporate network to send and receive data over the remote connection.
- Monitor Spanning – support for high-resolution displays that can be spanned across multiple monitors, with a max resolution of 4,096 x 2,048. The monitors must have the same resolution. Additionally, the monitors must be aligned side-by-side.
- Visual Improvements – support for 32-bit colour and font smoothing.
My personal favourite is of course monitor spanning, but I’m sure that the TS Gateway functionality will be a serious sweetener for the corporate market.
Published on Tuesday, 28th November 2006 .
Richard Seroter has just posted about the BizTalk 2006 R2 beta 1 installation experience and new functionality – it would appear there is lots of .Net 3.0 and WCF, along with Microsoft EDI/AS2 and BAM Evening goodies!
The installation experience appears to be along the same lines as BizTalk 2006, with added EDI/AS2 configuration options (which appears to be in addition to the Base EDI Adapter), this comes hot on the heels of the AS2 adapter gaining Drummond Certification. A new application (‘BizTalk EDI Application’) appears to be present following installation, along with the new LOB and a host of WCF adapters.
Roll-on the public release of R2!
Published on Friday, 24th November 2006 .
I’ve just completed the Microsoft 2934 BizTalk 2006 Admin course and this was the first time I’ve installed BTS06 on an offline server instance (my UAT VPC machines always have an internet connection).
I was pleased to see that for offline installations, the BizTalk team have provided an option to install the pre-requisites from a local CAB file – great work!
Microsoft provide the CAB on their website, however rather than link back to Microsoft, Grant Holiday has all the details on his blog, including the internationalisation links for Windows 2003, XP and 2000.
Yet another great feature in BTS06 – BTS04 installations now take soooooooo long!!
Published on Friday, 24th November 2006 .
The SOA Hub website provides a handy tool for all things SOA. They have a browsable list of available web services and provide tools to publish and test your own custom services.
The detail for each published web service includes the average response time, costs, provider and service details and links to test the service.
Some of the web services of particular interest (here in the UK) are:
- Credit card verifier (verify credit card checksums for valid Visa, MasterCard, American Express etc.);
- Dun & Bradstreet Business Credit Check (perform low risk credit assessments and pre-screen prospects with D & B’s core credit evaluation data);
- Currency rate converter (perform interactive foreign exchange rate calculations, using current currency rates updated every 10 minutes);