This will make life simpler. I have been looking to upgrade all my corporate laptops and desktops on Windows 8 and the response from the pilot that I did with few users, was not that great. The tile based UI is a killer in terms of real enterprise productivity. For the IT Pro team, installing Windows 8 is superfast but setting up the user id through AD requires a round turn approach. The team is wasting time in setting a Microsoft Login Account than setting user and accounts from the control panel to give it the enterprise feeling.  Here are few simple tweaks that could help Microsoft win hearts of users from both enterprise and consumer world:

 1.       Allow Users to install Windows 8 for non-touch devices same as Windows 7

95% of the enterprise users will be using desktops/laptops which are not touch friendly. It is not wise to expect all the users to shift on a touch friendly hardware. In some cases it is just not feasible whereas in some cases it is not required.

Microsoft should provide option to install Windows 8 with the older look & feel to enable enterprise users to use Windows 8 in the same way as they are using Windows 7. This alternative allows organizations to maintain a low learning curve and use the existing hardware. Windows 8 has the core improvements that make the user experience a win-win situation for organizations.

2.       Add Windows Tile User Interface as a feature

This will be a handy feature for those who want to use the tile interface. At present, from an enterprise user points of view there are some challenges that make it difficult to use the current interface:

1. Desktop view doesn’t have start button
   1. Very difficult to find installed program.
   2. Flipping through tiles may be good for contacts/photos/video BUT it is painful to search programs.
   3. The notion of mouse click doesn’t gel well with the Tile theme. You need 3-4 clicks to get what you need as opposed to just 2 clicks when

3.        Remove the Windows ID requirement during setup

Most of the machine setups are done by IT Pro and they won’t know the Hotmail/live/windows ID of the people. This may be a good option for consumer devices like tablets and phones but definitely not for PCs and laptop notebooks.

2. Provide Windows Media Player as an option during installation

When I got my machine with Windows8 recently, I found that Windows Media player was not installed. After so many searches, I found the link for Windows Media Feature Pack to install Windows Media Player in my notebook. This was really annoying and time consuming. As a consumer I would expect a media player installed with the OS and if Microsoft has obligation to provide Windows installation without media player, I would expect the installation to give me an option to choose if I want to install Windows media player.  This may apply both for consumers and enterprise users.

Conclusion

While Windows 8 is making headlines for all good and bad reviews, I still believe this could be the disruptive force behind having a single OS on all your devices (Phone, Tablet, PC, and Notebook). However, Microsoft need to act quickly on the user experience and provide freedom of choice on what users wants to use. The age of forcing user behavior is over and we are living in an age of science where consumer behavior is driving enterprise products. I sincerely hope Microsoft will make some of these changes before they launch this to wider audience in Oct 2012.

Believe me this causes a great annoyance for a regular PC user and Microsoft gets all the heartfelt good vibes free of cost. To add more, when I go to http://windows.microsoft.com, it shows a link to popular downloads and that redirects to me a page which shows all about XP, VISTA and Windows 7. There is no mention of Windows 8 at all. {Hope content team is reading this}

Bing and Google both have listed a link that has given me the link for actual Windows 8 Media Feature Pack download. Thanks to the writer.

Here is a link to download the Media Feature Pack for N and KN versions of Windows 8: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30685

I hope Microsoft content team looks into this issue seriously and makes the Windows 8 Media Feature Pack links easily available for users.

Download the Standalone Intellitrace Collector http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245688

Step 2:

Run the Standalone Intellitrace Collector. This will create the IntelliTraceCollection.cab file in the specified directory.

Step 3:

Expand the .cab file using this command:

expand /f:* IntelliTraceCollection.cab

This preserves the folder structure of the collector files, which is important for later steps in this topic

Step 4: Setup permission for Log Collection Directory.  Make sure the collector installation directory is secure. Configure only these permissions to this directory:

• Full permissions for the server administrator. For Web apps, full permissions for the person who will run PowerShell commands to collect data.
• For Web apps, read and execute permissions for application pool identities to access the collector installation directory.

Step 5: Open Powershell command prompt. I am assuming that the cab file is extracted at c:.

Step 6: Import Intellitrace Module by running command.  Import-Module c:\IntelliTrace\Microsoft.VisualStudio.IntelliTrace.PowerShell.dll

Step 7: Start the collection process:

Start-IntelliTraceCollection "<TYPE APPPOOL FULL NAME>" c:\IntelliTrace\collection_plan.ASP.NET.trace.xml c:\LogFileLocation

Step 8: Get the Collection Status to check whether something is getting captured or not:

Get-IntelliTraceCollectionStatus -ApplicationPool "<APP POOL FULL NAME>"

Step 9: Stop Intellitrace collection

Stop-IntelliTraceCollection "<APP POOL FULL NAME>"

Step 10: Get the iTrace file generated in c:\LogFileLocation folder and send it to a developer or tester for a more detailed look. (if you not the one)

The link is https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/Office2013Preview/enus/   ---- THIS IS BROKEN. NO MORE WORKING.

You will need to login with your Live/Hotmail or Outlook.com ID to obtain the download. Happy Experimenting! 

Update: 9/12/2012

It seems Microsoft has changed the way Office 2013 is going to be distributed to users. Here are the steps to get Office 2013 installed on your machine:

1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

2. Click on Try

3. Select appropriate category from "For Home", "For Small Business" or "For Enterprise". I selected for small business for myself. I wanted to try out the enterprise features as well so I created one more account later (:)

4. Once you complete the account registration process and log in to your account at (https://portal.microsoftonline.com/), you will see the dashboard similar to the image below:

5. Click on the Download Software Link

6. On the next screen you will see the language and version selection as displayed below:

7. You are almost there. You will need internet connection throughout the installation. Once you get the one click installer, it will download the required software and install it on your machine.

8. I have installed Office 2013, it looks like below on Windows Server 2012

For more information on this tool, here are few other blog posts for your reference:

http://blog.kynetix.com/2011/01/31/computing-visual-studio-code-metrics-during-builds/ 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/camerons/archive/2011/01/28/code-metrics-from-the-command-line.aspx

Primarily as a developer, I always wanted an online service which is free for me to put my projects under source control. I could find few paid TFS hosted services but I was not ready to put sample projects or source code which has no real dollar value associated under a paid service.

Secondly, I used to give sessions on TFS & source control and main problem for my students was to perform hands on practice when they are not at the lab. I used few alternatives like CodePlex by using community projects, VPC and Handson Lab environment at MSDN etc. but all those were/are still workarounds.

Lastly, deploying & implementing TFS is a relatively big effort for companies who want to 'test the water' first before diving deep. It sometimes becomes a real challenge to coordinate TFS implementation and promote usage among teams without a 'test' or 'dogfood' environment.

Team Foundation Service: TFS as a service by Microsoft at http://www.tfspreview.com

This is a positive step towards developer empowerment. Specially - this will be helpful for all small, medium and large enterprises where developers and IT teams struggle to set the working environment for learning TFS and source control practices. Also not only this, it will be a boost for all freelance developers who struggle to maintain source control for their code & delivery while keeping the cost to the client low. 

While the service is in preview mode, the feature-set is still very rich and most importantly users can get started for free. The website has a mention that when the service is out of preview mode, the free services will still continue(* - may have reduced functionality or may be not) and there will be paid services as well. I sincerely hope Microsoft will continue to offer free services at least for Source Control and Continuous Bulds.

Learn:

The website also has a menu named "learn" and the content are amazing. It is mostly step-by-step and easy to understand and practice. Here is a direct link for 'Learn":

http://tfspreview.com/en-us/learn/start/connect-to-vs/

Getting started with Windows Metro style app development

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/br211386

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx

Through this article, I have introduced a new term called 'De-Agile' which essentially means tailoring Agile to fit your team by taking out processes that don’t make sense and tweaking those that need to be modified to suit your needs. In this article, you will find my personal experiences and techniques I have used to make a successful agile team.

As always, feel free to forward this message to people of your choice and provide your valuable feedback.

Direct link to article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh771057.aspx

January 2012 Issue: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh708738.aspx

Here is a link to MSDN Virtual Lab: Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3 Fundamentals

https://cmg.vlabcenter.com/default.aspx?moduleid=069def11-decf-4f3f-ad60-2ec48123d9d3

Enjoy!