Now that the veil of silence has been lifted with the release of Windows Server “8” beta , I’m able to tell you a little more about what I’ve been working on for 5 years now. An inside joke is that it’s a feature with two...

I use this quick-tip frequently to determine if I'm a local administrator. The trouble with some tips is that you just know them, they're so simple so you don't bother to tell people as you're under the assumption they "must have known that". This exact...

This article walks through updating an WDS infrastructure such that Hyper-V RTM bits are “slipstreamed” into the operating system installation. Given that Hyper-V has reached RTM (release to manufacturing), it was time to refresh my test deployment environment...

I've been asked this so many times, hence oo save me keep looking up the link each time, I've book-marked it here - it's part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools which are freely downloable (around 12MB). There's loads of useful utilities in...

As so many of you emailed me directly after previous entries who found it difficult to get hold of the Virtual Machine additions hotfix from KB 900076 (which is still unfortunately out of date), I'm relieved to say the version of the virtual machine additions...

Gilles Vollant of WinImage fame contacted me a few weeks ago to have a look at the latest beta of WinImage. I've been playing with it for a while now and it's been acting flawlessly. Why would this be of particular interest to me? One very good reason...

Woohoo!!! I'm suddenly one very happy person. The killer feature I've been hoping to see in Windows XP Pro is present in Windows Vista Beta 1. No guarantees for the future, but it shows the boys in Redmond have the capability. Here's what it is and why...

So over the weekend, I found myself with a few spare hours, and got back to “playing with technology” – something I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on recently. What I ended up with was something which I classify mostly as “because...

My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets this morning. I was discussing this very problem with some colleagues only a couple of weeks ago and pretty much concluded that this is a very difficult problem to solve easily . Low and behold though, into my...

Once you install Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 1, you'll notice a check box on the properties page for a virtual machine as shown below - it's as simple as checking the box (on by default). Have fun - and remember, this is Beta code - only install...

Update: 26th June 2008. Hyper-V RTM is now available. This post refers to pre-release software for Hyper-V, formerly known as Windows Server virtualization. However, there is no difference in the guidance provided in this post. I had many questions emailed...

When managing a large number of virtual machines, there is often a need to tag it in some way with one or more properties uniquely identifying it for administrative purposes. One example would be to identify a virtual machine as belonging to a person...

I have to admit, I'd never given a second thought to the origin of the use of "contoso". Contoso is one of a handful of domain names used in many Microsoft demonstrations. One question asked me this morning was where the name came from, with a suggestion...

So after some 22,000 downloads (thank you) in the 8 months since first released, HVRemote has undergone a refresh to make it even easier to configure Hyper-V Remote Management and diagnose issues. The major change in version 0.7 is the ability to perform...

A cautionary note for those of you performing an in-place upgrade of a machine running Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled, to Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate. During the installation, you will see the following compatibility...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only...

As promised, here's the last blogcast installment walking through a VSMT migration of an NT4 server into a virtual machine running under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. This blogcast walks through deploying the disk image into the blank VM and seeing the...

I was asked a question about how to write to the Windows Event Log in a script following my TechNet session yesterday evening. Using the Windows Scripting Host wscript.shell object, the LogEvent method provides one way of achieving this. There are lots...

I was asked by a customer, or rather a colleague of mine took the query who passed it on to me, how you could use group policy to affect the Windows Explorer setting to hide file extensions for known file types. This isn't a setting which is directly...

Back in my developer days when I was building DLLs and OCXs, I was constantly registering and unregistering DLLs using the command line (find me a dev who isn't a command line junkie - I still have two prompts open as I type this). As time's gone on,...

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials. The final part to the RPC/HTTPS series shows you how to alter the configuration we have such that Outlook 2003 can move seamlessly between external and internal connectivity through the use...

So now Windows Vista and Office 2007 are here, I've been upgrading to the RTM build on my home machines over the weekend. One little foible I've found is with running the UK edition of Microsoft Money 2005 under Windows Vista. Once Microsoft Money is...

As you are probably aware from KB949219 (RC0 release of Hyper-V), the Hyper-V Integration Services in our RC0 release require Service Pack 3 to install on Windows XP 32-bit. The final build of SP3 was released to microsoft.com yesterday. Here's the links...

While working on the next version of HVRemote yesterday evening, one of the things I wanted to address based on feedback from various people was to have the tool (written in VBScript) detect whether it is being run from an elevated command prompt. While...

So after numerous emails about this, and some comments on my previous blog post back in June , I spent a couple of hours this afternoon improving the backup script (which although was written as a generic Exchange backup script, is suitable for file system...