Here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=57E27A97-2DB6-4654-9DB6-EC7D5B4DD867&displaylang=en

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsserversystem/launchtour/default.mspx

Might be worth going for a freebie or two - I went to one a few a years ago and got a copy of VS2002.

Here

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/r2/default.mspx

Prerequisite is to have SP1 installed. It installs .NET Framework 2.0 so I may hold back on installing in case it affects my VS and SQL 2005 installations.

In terms of pricing, MS are classing this as a full release rather than a service pack, meaning than everyone not on software assurance will need to pay to upgrade - can;t really see many people taking this one up.

Below are some links I have gathered over the past few weeks.

• JP Morgan powerpoint presentation talking discussing the various restructuring definitions

http://www.isda.org/c_and_a/ppt/FINAL-ISDA-PRMIA07Jan0703seminar.ppt

•   Lehman Bros documents describing credit derivatives

http://www.investinginbonds.com/assets/files/LehmanCredDerivs.pdf

http://www.investinginbonds.com/assets/files/LehmanExoticCredDerivs.pdf

• Document describing how to price a CDS using risk-neutral theory

http://www.skora.com/default.pdf

• Paper discussing how restructuring type affects spread

http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt0503h.pdf

• JP Morgan paper discussing credit derivatives in emerging markets

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~smirnov/Finkelstein.ppt

• CDS pricing calculator

http://www.derivativesmodels.com/FDX/CreditDerivatives.htm#defaultswap

• Paper examing how reduced form modelling equates to real world CDS prices

http://www.patrickhouweling.com/files/cds.pdf

• Credit pricing models

http://www.vcallc.com/mailings/additions/cdsspreads.htm

• 2 parter from John Hull

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/~hull/DownloadablePublications/CredDefSw1.pdf
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/~hull/DownloadablePublications/CredDefSw2.pdf

• Document discussing why spreads are wider than they should be given probability of default

http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt0312e.pdf

• MarkIT talk about CDS Indices

http://www.markit.com/news/2005%2008%20CDS%20Index%20Primer%20-%20Final.pdf

• Credit magazine discussing correlation the effect on CDO tranches

http://db.riskwaters.com/public/showPage.html?page=168572

• Discussion on index tranches and credit risk correlation

http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt0503g.pdf

• Bear Stearns: Valuing CDO Tranches using base correlations

http://www.wilmott.com/attachments/BearSterns_Base.zip

• Probability of default as a function of correlation

http://www.fma.org/Chicago/Papers/Daglish_Li140105.pdf

• Paper discussing why there are pricing discrepancies between USD and JPY CDS spreads

http://www.math.ethz.ch/~ehlers/FX_CreditSpreads.pdf

• Lehman Brothers paper discussing implied correlation in CDO tranches

http://www.columbia.edu/~rm586/pub/Impliedcorrelation.pdf

• Merrill Lynch Credit Derivate Handbook 2003

http://www.cema.edu.ar/conferencias/download/CDS20.8.pdf

• Zurcher Kantonalbank - Danilo Zanetti - Introduction to Credit Derivatives

http://www.isb.unizh.ch/studium/courses05/pdf/3342_lecture_7.pdf

• Lehmen Brothers: Correlation and Tail Risk for CDO Tranches

http://db.riskwaters.com/global/events/im_cdotraining2005/precourse_cdos/QCRQ_Tuning_Correlations.pdf

• Nomura CDO/CDS weekly update

Note: For this you can either subscribe or modify the URL (it comes out every Monday)

http://www.securitization.net/pdf/Nomura/CDO-CDS_14Aug06.pdf

• Credit Default Swap prices as Risk Indicators of large German banks

http://www.efmaefm.org/efma2005/papers/72-duellmann_paper.pdf

• JP Morgan - Par Credit Default Swap Approximation from Default Probabilities

This is used on Bloomberg CDSW screen

http://www.wilmott.com/attachments/CDS_JPM1.zip

• HVB Indices paper - examining DJ ITRAXX and pricing from underlying constituents

http://www.nuclearphynance.com/User%20Files/464/DJ%20iTraxx-%20Credits%20at%20its%20best.pdf

• Riskmetrics:Measuring Risk on Credit Indices

Similar to the above HVB paper

http://www.math.ethz.ch/Finance/CoursesTalks/FingerPaper20060518.pdf

• Pricing tranches on CDO and CDS Indices

http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/research/papers/2006mid/workshop_DW7.pdf

• JP Morgan: Credit Derivatives 2004 Introduction to Credit Derivatives

http://www.wilmott.com/attachments/CDConference2004_Credit_Derivatives_101.zip

Actually, they've ben out for almost a fortnight now, but I've been a little busy at work. SQL can be downloaded by all

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2005/productinfo/ctp.mspx

whereas VS2005 requires an MSDN subscription

http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/

I'm probably going to wait until the release comes out on the 7th November before upgrading from Beta2.

I have spent the last couple of weeks reading a couple of books on Credit derivatives. This market is moving very quickly, so I bought the most recent that I could find that had reviews either on UK or US Amazon.

I was impressed with both although I have forgotten a lot of Maths since my degree days.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405126760/qid=1127486152/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2_2/202-0617262-3706237

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/047002416X/qid=1127486191/sr=1-9/ref=sr_1_2_9/202-0617262-3706237

Never had need to use this before, but after I couldn't get Messenger working on a client site I discovered this

http://webmessenger.msn.com/

I had to remove my USB wireless key from my server the other day to help build a friend’s machine. When I put it back in my machine I noticed that it had assumed another IP Address. When attempting to set the IP back to what it should be so that the router will forward web requests, I was given the conflict of IP addresses message. Initial investigation led me to this KB article.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=269155

I attempted this on my machine (Win 2003) but I couldn’t get any of the hidden items to show – I’m assuming that the KB article doesn’t apply to Windows 2003. The only solution I could think of at the time was to modify the IP address that the router forwards to, and modify the IIS configuration to listen for a different IP address. Another solution would be to remove and add TCP/IP – I cannot do this at present because I don’t have a screen to plug in.

I've spent the last few days playing with ASP.NET 2.0 (beta 2) so that I can get a website up and running. In the past I have developed with Interdev and the original ASP.NET, so I was interested to see the improvements.

I decided to use the personal web site starter kit

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vwd/starterkit/default.aspx

attempting to change as little as possible to get a basic website up and running. The first problem I had was getting the membership database up and running - by default it expects an instance of SQLExpress, and attempts to create a database in a local folder - this fails for security reasons.

Instead, I ran aspnet_regsql.exe - this populates a database of your choosing with necessary tables.

The next problems I had were with dasblog. The first one was easy to fix and is documented - cookieless="UseCookies" needed to be added to the <forms> element. I next had to add styleSheetTheme="" to the <pages> element - the default is white for the starter kit. Finally I had to disable the rolemanager - <roleManager enabled="false"/> - if I didn't do this the blog wasn't working correctly when I logged in. I think there may be a more elegant fix for this

My final problem is administering the users - when running locally I can use the Website Administration tool - but at the moment I'm having to use profiler and query analyser to modify the "live box"

The site is at http://www.noelwatson.com

The other day a friend tried to send a voice message to me via Messenger - this was the first I  knew that 7.5 was out

http://messenger.msn.co.uk/xp/downloadDefault.aspx

I assume this is an attempt to compete with Google talk

http://www.google.com/talk/

http://www.jabber.org/

Finally got around to upgrading from 1.6 to 1.8. Download can be found here

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=127624

The upgrade went smoothly - the next step is to get it working with ASP.NET 2.0 - the documentation suggests this will be easy.