Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

Microsoft WinXP SP2 News

There's an interesting article on IAmNotAGeek that talk about good news in Windows XP Service Pack 2 (they have read all the 200 pages of the official Microsoft documents, good!).

The interesting good news can be resumes as follow:

• A native Bluetooth support (great, with XP sometimes I've problem with Bluetooth stack).
• Windows Installer 3: MS is setting things up for automatic updating of all the applications on your system. Not only that, but it'll only grab the updates that YOU need. It will be also able to create patch packages.
• Alerter and Messenger Services Disabled: the Messenger and Alert services will be set to Disabled as default.
• Boot Time security: In earlier versions of Windows, there is a window of time between when the network stack was running and when Windows Firewall provides protection. This results in the ability for a packet to be received and delivered to a service without Windows Firewall filtering and potentially exposes the computer to vulnerabilities. Now this will be fix.
• IE's Addon Manager: a nice tool to know what plugins were installed for IE and what are used.
• FTP and gopher dropped: These protocols have been removed from the command prompt.
• WinHTTP: Microsoft Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP) provides developers with a server-supported, high-level interface to the HTTP/1.1 Internet protocol. More details here.

It seems to be an interesting package, but my little alarm is these: Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET is will not be fully function with this SP. The developer tool's remote debugging feature won't work because of the Firewall. Another MS product that'll break is the .Net Framework. It'll only break in the Itanium and AMD64's with memory protection turned on.

I hope that possible problems will be solved!