James Van Eaton
Microsoft Developer Network
Hello and welcome to another edition of Backtalk, where your questions, concerns, gripes, and suggestions are addressed by the MSDN team. The MSDN inbox has been filling up with some great mail since the January 1998 quarterly release, so I won't bore you with any chitchat and cut right to the chase.
The MSDN program exists to give you the inside track on Windows development so we do our best to get you what you need as early as possible. One question that is often asked is: "I just heard about product x. Will MSDN subscribers receive it?" If it is released software, publicly available, and could be required by a developer to develop or test their own software, chances are it will be sent to MSDN subscribers. We include prereleases (betas) of strategic software when we can, and when we do you can rest assured that the final, retail version will also be included after its release.
The next question is, naturally, "When will I get it?" With Web releases becoming more frequent, interim releases are becoming scarcer. A Web release will always beat the fastest interim shipment—it takes some time to manufacture all those discs! So, if a piece of software has been posted to the Web (such as a service pack), odds are we won't schedule an interim release for it. But if it's hot new technology we'll get it out as soon as we can. Watch the MSDN newsgroup microsoft.public.msdn.general for announcements of upcoming shipments.
And speaking of interim shipments . . . As you know, beta versions of U.S. English Windows 98 have been shipping to all Professional and Universal subscribers for some time, most recently in the January 1998 quarterly release with Beta 3. In an upcoming interim shipment MSDN is going to distribute many international versions! Let us know if you find these helpful by sending us feedback to msdn@microsoft.com.
Mary Lelanie of Honolulu, HI, recently sent us rebuking e-mail for allegedly omitting Service Pack 2 for Windows 95 from her MSDN Professional subscription. Specifically, she needed to test a new Windows application programming interface (API) GetDiskFreeSpaceEx. How frustrating!
For the record, Windows 95 Service Pack 1 is the one and only service pack available for the Windows 95 operating system. It is a collection of add-ons and updates for the released version of Windows 95.
What she is really looking for is the updated version of Windows 95 that Microsoft released to PC manufacturers (OEMs) called Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2, or OSR2 for short. Unlike service packs, service releases cannot be used to upgrade the retail version. Don't feel bad Mary—the distinction between "service pack" and "service release" is often not made clear so this mistake is understood. Imagine the chaos if there is ever a service pack for a service release . . . ay carumba!
Both Windows 95 Service Pack 1 and Windows 95 OSR2 are included in the MSDN Professional and Universal subscriptions. Check out index.htm, on Disc 1 of the Development Platform—U.S. Pack, for their locations.
The Platform SDK documentation discusses important new features of OSR2—follow this navigation to the topic: Windows Base Services/Windows 95 Features/Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2/Elements of Interest to Win32 Programmers. The following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles (http://www.
microsoft.com/support/) may also be of interest:
Q142794: "Availability of Microsoft Windows 95 Service Pack 1"
Q155003: "Description of Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2"
This concludes our broadcast day. If you have any questions or feedback about the MSDN program, please send them to msdn@microsoft.com. If we use your letter on the air, you'll receive a limited edition MSDN T-shirt.