As we get closer to summer, I keep recalling a commercial that starts playing on TV every year around mid-July.  As it starts you hear the famous Christmas-time refrain It's the most wonderful time of the year and wonder what the heck is going on (Christmas song in July??) until you realize the commercial is about parents getting ready to send their kids back to school and the excitement they...

If you attended one of the events in person, you got your hands on one of the Resource DVD sets. We had so many moving parts involved in a tight timeframe that one or two little things slipped by and have been brought to our attention. Since the Resource DVD kit was “my baby” to ensure it got done – I’ll have the updates posted here. Here’s what I know so far after talking...

For those of you who didn’t know – up here in Canada, Telus Mobility was the first Canadian based mobile operator to offer a Mobile 5 device to their regular walk in clients / web store patrons. A while back (it was the launch of this blog in January) Damir and I did the TNX: TechNet Exchange tour around mobile devices and collaboration using the Telus provided UTStarcom 6700 Windows Mobile...

Having held an MCSE for as long as I can remember, and realizing that many IT Pros out there have gone through and are going through the process of getting certified or upgrading their certification - me included - I asked Jennifer Waters, who manages the Learning and Certification Program and the CPLS (Certified Partner for Learning Solutions) channel to provide her perspective on the issue of certification...

There is a little battle going on right now in Twitterland between Mark Relph (@mrelph) and Rick Claus (@Rickster_CDN) on who's going to install Windows 7 on their Dell Latitude E4300 notebook first.  Looks to me that Mark is winning but that's now why I'm writing this post.  I'm writing it because I know that many of you have a TechNet Plus subscription that you may have received at TechDays...

As you may have read I recently jumped on the netbook bandwagon and have been playing about with the Asus Eee PC 901 for a while now. For the past few weeks I’ve been using it as I travel for TechDays as an email and web surfing machine but decided I should put some music and videos on there to watch on the road. That was were the fun began. I had installed Ubuntu Eee as I like to have one Linux...

Hi Everyone, Thanks for your all your emails.  After my announcement on Monday we’ve had many inquiries from those that need to gain approval, want to get the dates booked in their calendar or just want more information.  I’m sure you understand there is a process we have to follow to get such broad announcements to you, yet from your feedback….it’s going too slow to meet your needs.. ...

One of my favourite parts of being the “face of TechDays” in all communications is that I also get the opportunity to reply to every email that is sent to the td_can@microsoft.com email alias. I get lots of emails – over 1000 at last count – and I reply to each one. Keep them coming – I really love reading them and having the conversation. The fact that developers and...

It started off as an idea a couple of months back. That idea was around getting the soup to nuts details on the Hyper-V / SCVMM / iSCSI solution into an entertaining session that could be delivered in person, online or by a group of individuals across Canada. Well – it’s ready. With the help of Mitch Garvis from SWMI consulting group, David Kawula from TriconTS, myself and more to come...

Why hello esteemed audience of the Canadian IT Professional blog. My name is Anthony Bartolo and I am the newest Technical Evangelist focusing on IT Professionals to be added to the Developer and Platform Evangelism group here at Microsoft. I can’t tell you how excited I am to return to such an innovative organization. As most of you know, my passion for Microsoft runs deep and I am...

Whoo-Hoo! I saw a tweet, plugged in my Samsung Focus on the Rogers network and look what popped up? (12:35)   I hit the update Now button and then it started (12:37) some more checks and then this… (12:39) quickly followed by a backup procedure and cute image Update in progress (12:51) restart of phone (1:01) Update complete! (1:02)  

I hope all is well with you, your family and your extended "IT family" so far this year. How were your holidays? That is to say - if you had some to take or if you were actually able to take them ... I didn't get any support calls or requests from anyone over the holidays (except from family members of course) and I stayed relatively faithful to not checking mail. I like the new Outlook 2007 Out of...

This is part a lot of you have been waiting for. In the previous post – I laid the foundation with the nuts and bolts of how I setup and manage the Build ‘06 tour reference network. Now here is the fun Geek stuff – hardware specs and photos of the transparent case that makes up “the bot”. Before I do that – I have to caveat this post by stating this does not serve...

If you can identify various cell phones by model by their unique sounds (And are visibly irritated when you CAN'T!) Setting up the Bluetooth system to tie the GPS, Laptop, MP3 player and hands free system is a piece of cake.  Changing the tire isn't. If you had to genuinely think twice about paying for that new gadget or paying your hydro bill.  REALLY had to think. When your kids were born...

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008 Today is a very exciting day for me - SQL Server 2008 is released to manufacturing and ready for you to use in your organizations!!  While Rick and Rodney, and even Pierre, may get excited about Hyper-V , as many of you know I've been a database guy for a long time.  Now it's not that I was not excited when I learned that Hyper-V had RTMed - I really was. ...

2:45PM and the third track of the IT Pro track has started with Brian Bourne doing his thing and demoing rootkits and rootkit detection. Ali Rohani was up just before that to show off what's coming with regards to Unified Communications. The IT Pro tracked kicked things off with a session on SoftGrid Application Virtualization. It has been an exciting day and I know I've been uploading pictures...

Dani Sarfati (Winnipeg, Manitoba) DST Patching So as you can imagine, the DST changes have been on the top of everyone's mind lately. I can't count the number of things I've had to patch besides computers. My GPS had a patch, my Moto Q and my wife's GSM phone needed patching, my PVR got patched from the cable provider and so on..... A lot of work but hey at least at Microsoft I am an end user...

Hello my name is Rodney and I am hooked on Facebook. At first I wasn't keen on Facebook but everyone I work with was doing it. I signed up and at first it was cool, I could add people I work with as friends, "poke" them, and laugh at their silly high school pictures. I then started adding some real friends, which was great because it offered me another way to stay in contact with people in Winnipeg...

Most folks that know me also know that I tend to work rather late. Well past midnight most nights. It's not that I am a workaholic but there is that 11pm to 2am sweet spot when the kids are asleep and you can focus on whatever it is you need to do. Last night, while going through my email I got a new message indicator in Outlook 2007 that immediately caught my eye. It was from the folks at http://connect...

One of the challenges we on the Community Team at Microsoft face is working across distances. Because we are often on the road, and with the team split between Ottawa, Mississauga and Calgary, getting everyone together for a meeting is a challenge. I know that Rick in Ottawa and John in Calgary sometimes feel like they're on the outskirts and maybe missing something by not being at the Canadian HQ...

If you are any bit of a virtualization nut like I am (ok - passionate, not NUT), you have probably heard about how our hypervisor implementation of virtualization is called Windows Server Virtualization (formerly known as Viridian - shot form known as WSV). You also know that we've been talking about it for a while - possibly showing it to you a couple of times here or there, but it's never been available...

We wrapped up Day 1 of the HPC Workshop yesterday and it was been an interesting day learning about the fundamentals of HPC (Linux and Windows) and got to the point where we have each built up our 4 node HPC cluster. I have to say that there are much more difficult things to set up on Windows 2003, after the OS was intstalled, it took about 15 minutes to build the 4 node Compute Cluster Server (CCS...

So after some begging and pleading and promising to paint the fence at my managers house I managed to get a week off and I headed back to Winnipeg to visit friends and family and see the old stomping grounds. A couple of local IT Pros, Jason Miller and Pasquale Pescatore figured it would be a good idea to take me fishing. First thing wrong with fishing is the 5am wakeup call. The last time I was...

There I said it. USER GROUPS ARE DEAD! You probably think I am crazy. You are probably thinking about the 30+ IT pro user groups in Canada with 10,000+ members with monthly attendance at meetings surpassing 2500 nationally. You might then remember me being at some of these meetings as an attendee or a speaker and ask "what the heck is Rodney talking about?" I know Wendy Rogers (the Developer...

Today the Energize IT '07 "early-bird" registration page went live. You can go and register yourself for the event and join us for the day as we celebrate the past year and get your geek on! Energize IT '07 will be a big event, much bigger than last year and we have a lot lined up. While we are still working out the schedule I can let you in on this much.... At least three speakers up from Redmond...