You may have seen that registration for UK TechDays events from 12 th to 16 th April is already open - but you probably won’t have seen this newly announced session, even if you are following   @uktechdays   on twitter After Hours @ UK Tech Days 2010 – Wednesday 14th April, 7pm – 9pm. Vue Cinema...

Yesterday I wrote about end-of-life planning for OSes and so it makes sense to talk about the end of a service pack, as retirement – it is after all the word that is used on the product lifecycle pages . Of course we don’t mean retirement in go and live by the seaside sense… Special police squads...

Over on the MSPress blog they have an announcement Mitch Tulloch has updated his free ebook of last year. You can now download Understanding Microsoft Virtualization R2 Solutions in XPS format here and in PDF format here . I’ve worked with Mitch on a couple of books, including the first release of this...

I had a mail earlier telling me about desktop virtualization hour , planned for 4PM (GMT) on March 18th. (That’s 9AM Seattle time, 5PM CET … you can work out the others I’m sure). More information and a downloadable meeting request are Here . Some effort seems to be going into this one, which makes me...

I mentioned a few days back that I was going to write some posts about deploying Windows 7, but there is some good material out there already and there is no sense re-inventing the wheel So I’d like to recommend 3 posts from fellow evangelist and all-round good chap Alan Le Marquand, Choosing the path...

Arthur : “You mean you can see into my mind ?” Marvin: “Yes.” Arthur: “And … ?” Marvin: “It amazes me how you manage to live in anything that small” Looking back down the recent posts you might notice that this is the 8th in a row about my new phone (so it’s obviously made something of an impression...

Information week published an article last week “ 9 Reasons why enterprises shouldn’t switch to hyper-v”. The Author is Elias Khnaser, this is his website and this is the company he works for .  A few people have taken him to task over it, including Aidan . I’ve covered all the points he made, most...

One of the popular giveaways at our events this year has been the feature poster for server 2008-R2 – which is now available for download. I think the prints were A2 size, although at 300 DPI it is closer to A1 dimensions – the paper copies have all gone although I’m told more are being printed if you...

I saw something recently – it must have been in the discussion about Google’s bootable browser new “operating system” which talked about it taking hours to install Windows. I didn’t know whether to get cross or to laugh. Kicking around on youtube is a video I made of putting Windows 7 on a Netbook from...

For a little while I have had a beta version of a project I call PSCONFIG on codeplex. I’ve changed a couple of things but from the people who have given it a try, it seems that it is working pretty well. It’s aimed at servers running either Hyper-V server R2 Or Core installations Windows Server 2008...

When I was at school my father gave me a copy of an article he’d seen at work. I remember nothing of the article itself, but the title has stayed with me: “You can’t be a 20th century man without maths”. I think even then “You can’t be a [time] [person] without [skill]”  was a  Snowclone -...

I’ve had plenty to say about the uses of VHD files on different occasions. They get used anywhere we need to have a file which contains an image of a disk. So from Vista onwards we have had complete image backup to VHD, we use VHD for holding the virtual disk to be used by a Virtual Machine (be it hyper...

For the last few weeks, on and off, Andrew and I have been working on a set of Videos on Windows 7 and Server 2008-R2 , which are now available  on youTube. When we were kicking ideas around we came up with the idea of filming Andrew drawing cartoons of what the Screencasts will cover. Like most...

Some while back I wrote about boot from VHD. To re-cap, in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 (including core, and Hyper-V Server R2) the boot loader is capable of mounting a VHD file and booting from it as though it were a physical disk. There is no virtualization going on, just the necessary smarts to use...

There’s a phrase which has being go through my head recently: before coming to to Microsoft I ran my a small business; I thought our bank manager was OK, but one of my fellow directors – someone with greater experience in finance than I’ll ever have – sank the guy with 7 words “I have a professional...

It’s third time lucky for this post… a couple of weeks ago I was at our big training event “tech-ready”, and my laptop blue screened on me, citing memory as the cause. On my return I started to write this post and came back to find the laptop had rebooted after a crash. Within 24 hours it had done it...

Mary-Jo has a post about the release of our Hyper-V drivers for Linux entitled Pigs are flying low: Why Microsoft open-sourced its Linux drivers , it’s one of many out there but the title caught my eye: I thought I’d give a little of my perspective on this unusual release. News of it reached me through...

It’s official. Windows 7 has released to manufacturing. http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-22Windows7RTMPR.mspx   It’s official. Windows Server 2008 R2 has released to Manufacturing http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx It’s...

I have been working on some PowerShell recently to handle the initial setup of a new machine, and I wanted to add the activation. If you do this from a command line it usually using the Software Licence manager script ( slMgr.vbs ) but this is just a wrapper around a couple of WMI objects which are documented...

Last week I taught a PowerShell class – the first time in ages I’d gone back to my old role as a trainer, and of the first things we do explaining PowerShell is explain that (a) When PowerShell’s own commands are piped together they pass object with properties – not a text representation of the objects...

Brandon has a post on the Windows team blog Windows 7 will be in stores beginning October 22nd. I was talking a group of people a little while ago who said “In the stores in time for the Holiday season means what ? A reason margin before thanksgiving in the US ?” So this fits nicely with that enough...

The last post I made talked about customizing windows image (.WIM) files, and the post before that talked about creating Virtual hard disk (.VHD) files. So the last step is to look at putting an image onto a VHD and making it bootable So the steps are Identify your WIM file and if it has multiple images...

In the initial release of Windows Server 2008 one of the the questions which always came up was “how do I add X” – the answer was we had tools named OCSETUP and OCLIST. These have been superseded in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 with the new Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool (DISM.EXE). The...

Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files have been given greater importance in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. They’ve always been used for hosting virtual machines (from the earliest Virtual PC through to Hyper-V) , and in Vista the complete image backup began to use VHD format, the iSCSI target software in Storage...

In my post a couple of days ago I talked about configuring my servers from the command line and one of my interests at the moment is finishing off some powershell tools to handle the configuration of Server Core and Hyper-V server. I mentioned in passing that I was going to do something to wrap round...