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Windows Woundup The latest news from around the sites

Where it's at, what it is, where to stick it...

Probably the biggest story of the week was the release of Office 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2). Unlike Office 2000 Service Release 1a (SR1a), SP2 is 'patch only' - Microsoft will not reissue the full product with these fixes preinstalled, as it did with SR1a.

As always, Microsoft screwed up and included the much-hated Outlook security 'update,' which does some funky things with the way the Personal Information Manager (PIM) sends and receives attachments. Also, the descriptive text in the About dialogs for all of the Office applications will still read as "SR-1", but the version number changes to let you know that the update worked. Pre-SP2, the version was 9.0.0.3821. After the patch is installed, the version should change to 9.0.0.4527. Also, make sure you install the SR-1 or SR-1a update before installing SP-2; this is required. To download Office 2000 SP2, please visit the Microsoft Web site. A 30MB download for administrators and a 9MB download for end users is now available. If you want the list of bug fixes, you can get that here.



Microsoft quietly changed the name of ASP+ to ASP.NET in November and launched a pair of advocacy sites to promote it and other .NET related technologies. If you're into this kind of thing, head on over to the ASP.NET homepage and the .NET Framework Community Website and go nuts. But please, get out into the real world occasionally. Please.



WinMag.com's Serdar Yegulalp has come up with his perspective on the future of Whistler. He covered similar ground in his tour of Whistler, but here makes the point that Whistler is "where we're all going to end up," and making the move to it will be hard if you’re not already Windows 2000. So if you're going to have to make the jump sooner or later, why not make it now?



Early last week, Paul Thurrott of Wininformant covered Microsoft's announcement of the next version of FrontPage, FrontPage 10. A new feature that seems to stand out to me are analysis reports. Web site creators, myself included, always want to know who the heck and why the hoot people are visiting their sites. Yes, there are probably thousands of free stats programs out there, but they all have some kind of banner or button. This new feature will let Webmasters control and manage their Web site more easily. FrontPage 10 also integrates with SharePoint, the Web-based collaboration tool Microsoft intends to ship with FrontPage 10 and Office 10 next year.



James E. Powell of WinMag.com has a write-up about the recently released Office 10 Beta 2. Although Powell had a hard time testing this release due to continuous crashes and "odd behavior", he still managed to write up the differences since Beta 1 between FrontPage, Publisher, Access, and the speech recognition application. In my opinion, this release of Office will be like the other releases, with minimal differences and a few new features and what not. Hmmm... another evil marketing tactic?



Lastly, I’d like to encourage all Register readers to go and vote for The Register as Site of the Year at Windows Planet! So go and vote, and be sure to punch the right hole! It's that simple. ®

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