Leap Year Baby is here!

Today, in beautiful Barcelona, Microsoft has made available to the public at large (in a prerelease version) a newer iteration of the Windows Operating System under the label of Windows 8 Consumer Preview. This new release dubbed WOA (Windows on ARM) is designed to run in these ubiquitous ARM processors (ironically not as well known as Intel) same that run in smartphones (Apple and Android). "WOA will be hugely successful and is a huge opportunity for ARM", said a top executive of this successful semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier to ComputerWorld. If you want to have an inside look to the Windows engineering team visit Building Windows 8, or if you want to know more details about this launch and what's in store for users and developers read the Windows Experience Blog.

"NOT_ENOUGH_SPACE": That's what it is!

Here's the problem: Your Windows 8 Developer Preview won't start and you will most likely get error messages not always easy to understand. However, there is one single error message which is self explanatory: VHD_BOOT_HOST_VOLUME_NOT_ENOUGH_SPACE. Your Windows 8, at run time, will occupy all the space assigned during setup. For instance, if you assigned 50 GB, it will gobble up that amount, it doesn't matter that your file explorer shows that the Virtual Machine Hard Drive Image (a huge file with a .vhd extension) holding the virtual machine, is just 17 GB, as in my computer. Obviously the solution is to give more room to the partition where Windows 8 is located. Ideally you will use a dedicated partition for a different operating system.

IIS 8, also included, is not well documented

I would assume that the web server IIS 8, that comes with Windows 8, is not much documented simply because this is not a major upgrade, but a minor one from version 7.5 already in Windows 7 Ultimate and certainly in Windows Server 2008 R2. The official IIS site takes you on a review of the main features and tools of this very mature web server: ASP.NET and PHP support, modularity and extensibility, integrated media platform, centralized web farm management, delegated remote management, versatile admin tools, dynamic caching and compression, enhanced server protection, among others.

IE 10: test drive an amazing browser

If you are a developer, get ready to test and play with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3, using the tools available to Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview Build 4 in the Guide for Developers. But above all, test drive it like this! Add or remove snowflakes using hardware acceleration, interact with the new APIs, construct files (no uploading or downloading) directly in the client with Blobbuilder, benchmark HTML5 with the "particle acceleration" and your browser performance, etc. IE 10 came with the Developer Preview of Windows 8 back in September 2011, the first time I laid my eyes on this awesome OS.

Let's start with the "Developer Preview"

Welcome to the world of the latest Microsoft operating system: Windows 8, a revolutionary and refreshing iteration in the changing world of personal and enterprise computing. You can start with downloading the Developer Preview directly from the Microsoft website. Do you have a good connection, some time and space for an ISO image which is 4.8 GB? So you are ready. The next step is to copy the ISO image into an USB flash drive and make it bootable and that you can do with the
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool. All the steps are clearly explained by Windows guru extraordinaire Scott Hanselman in his blog: Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk). It was very helpful for me and I am running Windows 7 and this Developer Preview in my laptop. The latter within a 15 GB .vhd file, but make sure you have plenty of space or you won't be able to start Windows 8. The cool thing is that it will run as it was installed in a separate hard disk partitition or in another hard disk. When you start your computer you will see a new boot entry in the boot configuration data (BCD) store on the system partition (the BCD is there since Windows Vista instead of the old boot.ini). Give it a try and start appreciating Windows 8. It's worthwhile. It's another reincarnation of Windows 7, sort of.