What starts out hot, gets unpleasantly sticky after a while, starts to stink like a minty goat soon after that, and ends up making you wish you had never experienced it? No, we're not talking about the experience of getting Linux actually working on your machine. It's summer in New York City! And at MIND House, this summer's a bit different. This year, instead of marking the beginning of the season by discovering the first deceased drunk who's been riding the subway untouched for five hours, we decided to take a shot and install our latest beta 3 rev of Windows 2000.      We approached the task with some trepidation. After all, we're not talking about a new version of an MP3 player. This is the entire operating system. It actually controls where all the files are saved. We were somewhat assuaged by the fact that company-wide, all sorts of critical-path servers (networking, Internet proxy, and messaging) are already running on Windows 2000. So we gave it a shot.       Well, believe it or not, everything went smoothly. The desktop has a couple of improvements, and the underlying system is clearly improved. It's faster than Windows 98 on our machines. It supports 4GB of RAM. It provides ACPI support for laptops. The Windows 98 users in our office liked a lot of the new features (some of which already exist in Windows NT 4.0, but we didn't tell them). Windows 2000 also supports all the newest devices, like USB, AGP graphics, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). ATM lets you handle voice, data, and video simultaneously. Cool!      The features we found most useful are the ones that will impact Web professionals directly. Windows 2000 Server implements several RFCs (RFC 1122, 1123, and 1323) that spell out requirements for Internet hosting and high-speed networks. It also supports Selective Acknowledgements (SACK), which promises to provide better performance in ISP and wireless networks.      Active Directory is another major feature of Windows 2000 Server that will mean a big difference for programmers. Active Directory enables you to centralize your name resolution by using DNS. It creates a logical hierarchy of directories across the entire system, making it appear as a single gigunda hard drive.      Of course, the biggest feature for all you Web people is the new version of Internet Information Services (IIS), which is now an integrated part of Windows 2000. Check out some of the features that you will get right out of the box with Windows 2000 Server: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) WebDAV lets multiple people collaborate on a document using an Internet-based shared file system. It addresses issues such as file access permissions, offline editing, file integrity, and conflict resolution when competing changes are made to a document. WebDAV expands an organization's infrastructure by using the Internet as the central location for storing shared files. Web Folders With Web Folders, you can maintain a consistent, seamless appearance and functionality when you navigate between your local file system, a networked drive, and a Web site. FrontPage Server Extensions If your site is running Windows 2000 Server, you automatically get these extensions. Administrators can use FrontPage Web authoring and management features when they deploy Web sites. Authors will be able to create, post, and edit Web pages to IIS from wherever they are. XML Integration The new Microsoft XML Parser is part of Windows 2000 Server. Browser Capabilities Component When you use ASP on Windows 2000 Server, you'll be able to use this new component to determine the exact capabilities of a browser hitting your site. ASP ASP's not new, but the new version of IIS is improved in a number of ways. ASP self-tunes in Windows 2000 Server by providing extra threads when requests are blocked by external resources. If the CPU starts to get overloaded, ASP cuts down on the number of threads to reduce excessive thread switching. You'll be able to encode scripts written in VBScript or JScript to keep casual users from seeing what you're doing behind the scenes. (Details can be found in the article "Script Encoding with Microsoft Script Engine 5.0," by Andrew Clinick, in this issue).      This list is obviously only the tip of the iceberg. If you're interested in Windows 2000 Server, check out the official Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/server. At press time, this page included information on how to get a copy of beta 3 so you can keep ahead of the curve. —J.T.

From the August 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.