I’ve arrived.  The wheels are down here in Las Vegas and I’m getting pretty excited.  I’m participating in a few sessions this week and I wanted to talk through some of the things to expect if you attend our MDT 2012 User-Driven Installation...

It’s that time of the year!  The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) has moved back to its favored home at “The Venetian Hotel” and at the moment is an absolute sold out house.  This conference ranks high upon my list of favorites as it provides...

As you already know, Windows 8 Consumer Preview hit the market just over a week ago.  The 1 million downloads in the first day sheds some light on the demand and I’m sure that many of you are clambering to get it on your devices and find out what...

In Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC2, we added a feature called Scheduled Package Analyzer (SPA) to assist customers in automating the analysis process for your migrated packages/programs.  This feature gives administrators a lot of flexibility...

Back in November 2011, I announced that our team had reached a critical milestone of releasing the System Center Configuration Manager Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC1 feature pack.  The engineering team that I oversee spent a great deal of time...

In our group, we have several highly-available sets of clusters that service various needs.  We have one cluster dedicated to running our Team Foundation Services (TFS) and all the System Center management infrastructure to support all clusters. ...

As I’ve started exploring System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 , the first task I took as an action item is to learn how to configure active management for our engineering EMC Clariion AX4-5 .  I’ve personally been slacking a bit in getting...

In today’s post, I wanted to take some time to outline to ConfigMgr administrators how to effectively use a key feature that is in Package Conversion Manager (PCM) RC released last week .  Beyond the US – English release , we also released the international...

Since the release of MDT 2010 Update 1 , our User-Driven Installation (UDI) engineering team has worked extremely hard at making the use of UDI much simpler for administrators and end-users to use.  This is the founding principle, or pillar, we focused...

In today’s post, I wanted to take a little bit of time to build a bit deeper on the underlying principles of the “Readiness” state for Package Conversion Manager (PCM) as it is the fundamental to understand.  My colleague, Cameron King, outlined...

For the past 15 months, our engineering team has spent a great deal of time partnering with the System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) team building a feature pack called Package Conversion Manager .  As many know, ConfigMgr 2012 introduces...

We recently ran into a problem whereby all of our build definitions started failing, mysteriously. We had a few developers investigating what was occurring and we did see that we were having issues with namespace mismatches. This issue baffled us as we...

We recently had a change take place in our engineering lab that included a large set of layer 3 changes (IP, VLANs , Subnets, etc.) that caused us some downtime.  Although most of the issues are well documented, I found though that there was one...

In today’s post, I want to spend some time sharing how to use the virtualization tools that our team (MPSD Development) built as part of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit (ConfigMgr P2V). In previous posts , I shared...

In the past two posts , I’ve focused on the first two capabilities provided in the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit .  The primary scenario for this toolkit is to offer customers the ability to virtualize their physical...

The entire goal of the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit is to, as I outlined in my previous post , is to “flip” the physical server with no need for additional hardware.  I outlined in “ Using ConfigMgr Physical-to-Virtual...

  As I’ve previously discussed on my blog , our engineering team has partnered with two System Center teams – Configuration Manager & Virtual Machine Manager – to deliver a new toolkit called Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) Migration...

“Get an inside peek into internal Microsoft development practices as Chris Adams documents his team’s move to Agile using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010, starting out with the Microsoft Solutions Framework Agile v5.0 process template and eventually...

During a ask-the-experts at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2011 in Las Vegas, a customer asked a question of how to utilize Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 to install Windows Server 2008/R2 and enable the Hyper-V role .  The customer...

As is usual for many of my posts, I like to document things that become somewhat as a “reference” for me because I know I will forget it.  The one side benefit to this is the fact that many of you might be looking for similar documentation. ...

During the past year, we’ve been working on building a new P2V toolkit that was recently released.  This toolkit, Configuration Manager P2V Migration Toolkit, aims at accelerating the migration to Configuration Manager 2012.  It is, though,...

I’ve landed.  My bags didn’t arrive so the first evening in Vegas was one of no relaxing.  I now can officially relax and get excited as we prepare for this great week.  As many of you already know, Microsoft is preparing for this week...

I’ve been dealing with a “application” these days that is absolutely driving me nuts. In short, this application that runs in user-mode context and displays data on the screen while locking the keyboard makes for a difficult situation...

In this final post for this series, I wanted to outline how Visual Studio SCRUM 1.0 is alike and differs when doing planning compared to MSF Agile v5.0 .  As I pointed out in my post last week , MSF Agile v5.0 ships as a process template with Team...

In my earlier post , I focused on bringing to light that MSF Agile v5.0 vs. Visual Studio SCRUM 1.0 had differences and one was just in their use of terminology.  Whether it was user story or product backlog item (PBI) the usage was very close minus...