Students to get Windows 7 for £30 in the UK ($30 in the US too!)

Tom Warren over at Neowin told me this morning about an excellent Windows 7 offer in the UK, where students will be able to get either Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for just £30 : We are offering students the opportunity to buy Windows 7 for an amazing discounted price, £30 for either Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional. You can take advantage of this offer from October 1st but you will need to be quick as it is for a limited time only and is only eligible to college and university students with a valid .EDU email address (an email address given by the college or university, for example: Suzanne@leeds.ac.uk ), a PC that is currently running a genuine copy of Windows Vista or Windows XP and can run Windows 7. This offer will be available from 1st October so please check back then for details on how to take advantage of this great offer

DIAS-iS is now certified for Windows 7

I've been playing with Windows 7 for quite some time and the internal deployment at the company i work for is also coming along quite nicely. A few machines are still on the RC and our branch office is still running on Vista, but this should be resolved until the end of the next month.

However, we're also an ISV. DIAS-iS has been running on Windows Vista since the release – thanks to the efforts of our developers, who fixed everything during the beta phase of Windows Vista. As such, our software ran on Windows 7 since the beginning.

During the past few weeks, i did all the necessary administrative work to get our Software certified with the "Compatible with Windows 7″ Logo.

Doing this isn't that hard, but it requires you to jump through quite a few hoops.

Here's a basic rundown of steps:

• Obtain a MS Authenticode certificate from Verisign. Note that other code signing certs won't work (e.G. Thawte)
• Create a WinQual Account here
• You'll need to sign a sample .exe with the code signing cert from step one
• Download the Software Logo Toolkit
• Download the Windows 7 Logo Requirements Document
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• Both of these packages contain all the documentation you need – most of the requirements are easily satisfied if you have an application that behaves nicely, uninstalls correctly, works in TS environments
• Create an empty Windows 7 x64 VM. Note that it must be x64.
• Install the Software Logo Toolkit on the machine
• Start the GUI, start the Session Server in a second session on the same machine
• Run through all the phases, make sure the report says "Pass" or "Pass with warnings" (verify that the warnings are not real errors)
• Submit the .xml through the WinQual account. You'll immediately get certified

So it's not that hard.

The key point to delivering a good user experience is to ensure that your application uses standard installation technology like .MSI, that it doesn't require administrative privileges, that all configuration is stored in the userprofile (Registry or %APPDATA%) and that it's multi-session capable.

And that's all the "Compatible with Windows 7″ logo verifies – so if you already have a well-behaving Windows application, getting that logo is easy as pie. It does not cost anything directly – the only costly requirement is the fact that you need a VeriSign Authenticode certificate. This will set you back 400$. Microsoft does not want any money from you for this Logo – and it can be great in Marketing your competitiveness and readiness as a software vendor

Windows Server 2008 R2 and the missing fax printer

Windows Server 2008 R2 was released to MSDN a few weeks ago, and of course i want and installed it on a machine that did something more or less useful – a Fax server. Which is of course an internal system and not really in production.

I’m using a Diva BRI-2 2 Channel PCI-E Card, which already has support for Windows Server 2008 R2, and installing the Diva Software went without any issues.

Installing the Fax service was also easy, but there was no Fax printer to be seen anywhere.

I’ve followed the TechNet documentation for creating Fax printer on Windows Server 2008 R2, but it didn’t work – at first i received a “Permission denied” error message, after which i started Windows Fax & Scan using Administrator privileges.

This didn’t help that much – i could now go through the wizard, but no Fax account and no printer was created. This seemed strange.

Now, this really seemed like a permission issue. So i disabled UAC, rebooted the server, and tried it again. Everything worked – i was able to create the Fax printer, and after sharing it faxing worked as it should.

So, what now? Why doesn’t this work with UAC? I’ve been running our WS08 servers with UAC disabled (our Vista client were UAC enabled, and so are our Windows 7 clients), and thought WS08R2 should also work well with UAC enabled. But apparently, that wasn’t a good idea.