I'm sure that the guys at ZDNet were debating whether to publish the video interview I did on their site or just post it to You've Been Framed. It's quite an odd experience being interviewed in front of the camera. From the comfort and safety of desk I can try to communicate exactly what I trying to say without a single 'um..' or 'er..'.

What I was trying to say is that Windows Server 2008 is actually quite good.
There’s lots of things that have been improved upon and new features that truly, either make our lives easier or make our servers more secure. It's still early days, even though we've been using the product for some time now, we are still finding new scenarios that new features can fit into and trying them out from there.

As a company providing Managed Hosting Solutions you won’t be shocked to hear we have a large number of web servers. IIS 7 is a big feature for us to get to grips with and I guess it'll still be quite a while before most companies are confident that leaving out one of the 40 service components that it uses won’t have some side-effect somewhere down the line.
It’s here where experience in using the product comes into its own and this is why we were keen to give our existing customers a chance at using Server 2008 for themselves in an isolated environment to see what real-world problems we would face.

The results of this became an opportunity to push further than we anticipated with a customer of our called Data Liberation. A very good ISV with an equally as good Managing Director, Chris. It was in Chris’s roadmap to use Visual Studio 2008 and look at SQL Server 2008 for the benefits it’ll bring his application. So we suggested giving him a platform to try this out for real. The issues around this suggestion was that we couldn’t affect his Live platform and SQL 2008 was/is in CTP stage so we assumed that it would be a struggle to get it working or to use any of the proposed new features.

How wrong we were... Windows Server 2008 (RC0) and SQL Server 2008 (CTP) worked very well together and Chris upgraded his application, all 30,000 lines of it to .Net 3.5 with 3 mouse clicks inside Visual Studio 2008. We worked with Chris to configure data replication from his live platform to this test platform with a view to actually go live with this configuration.
A pretty big step considering this a live customer with many users who would be running on pre-release software. It’s not something I’d ever consider doing previously and maybe goes to show that Microsoft have learned from previous errors in judgement when it comes to releasing OS’s too early (not going to say the V word here) and have got it right this time.