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I delivered an instructor-led lab on Windows Server 2012 Storage at MMS 2013 yesterday (4/8), with a repeat scheduled for tomorrow (4/10) at 2:45 PM. You can find the details on this lab at http://www.2013mms.com/topic/details/WS-IL303 I used a few slides to comment on the contents of the lab, with...

We had a great time showing Windows Server 2012 at TechEd North America and I wanted to share that the recording for our team’s sessions are now publicly available. That includes our sessions on SMB 3.0 and a number of demos, many of them using one of the Cluster-in-box configurations we were...

If you're planning to attend the TechEd 2012 North America event in June, here are the scheduled sessions with speakers from the File Server team: Code Title Speaker(s) Day Time Track Level WSV328 The Path to Continuous Availability with Windows Server 2012 ...

Robert Smith (Platforms Field Engineer) has recently posted a new blog that cover one important area of Windows performance that few people understand well. In his blog post he talks about how to use Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) in general and the XPerf tool in particular. Xperf.exe is the command...

I just discovered this interesting book on "Programming Windows Phone 7", by Charles Petzold (yes, that's the author of the famous "Programming Windows" series of books). This Microsoft Press title is available as a free PDF download and is over 1,000 pages long. Here's the table of contents: ...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 6th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 14th. This event is also co-located with the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest. For those working with storage technologies...

I was reading the news on the release of Windows 7 and stopped to think of the early days of my IT career and what an OS looked like then. I thought way back to one of the first microcomputer disk operating systems I ever used: CP/M. I actually remembered the few resident commands we had back then in...

Earlier this year (or last fiscal year :-), I participated in a grueling three-week training and passed four exams (one of them a lab exam) to become one of just a dozen Microsoft Certified Masters on SQL Server 2008 worldwide. This was certainly the most demanding IT certification I ever attempted...

I was glad to see the first bits of info about the upcoming “Windows 7” product being shared through this new blog by Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven are two senior engineering managers for the “Windows 7” team and the blog, called “Engineering Windows 7 blog” or simply ���E7”, is located...

Rodney Viana (a friend from Brazil) just shared with me two very well crafted videos describing in great detail the process to install and configure Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Rodney is working with Alfredo Fortenboher on a Video Book on Sharepoint for a project called LabClasses and was...

As I mentioned in a previous blog post , I am delivering a private, newsgroup-based, Microsoft-sponsored training for Microsoft MVPs. We are reaching the end of the second of five parts of this training, covering Course 6043: Implementing Active Directory Domain Services in Windows Server 2008 (see course...

As I mentioned in a previous blog post , I am delivering a private, newsgroup-based, Microsoft-sponsored training for Microsoft MVPs. We are reaching the end of the first of five parts of this training, covering Course 6042: Windows Server 2008 Installation and Management (see course description ). At...

I will be starting an MVP-targeted course on Windows Server 2008 on August 1st. This is something Microsoft offers to the MVPs and I will be monitoring that class. If you're interested in the MVP program, there are details at http://mvp.support.microsoft.com . The course uses Microsoft eLearning, plus...

In a previous blog post I mentioned an MVP training on Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 based on the eLearning Collection 5403 - Implementing Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . I posted the questions I posed at the end of each course in the collection in that previous post, but never published...

It's becoming a habit. Every time I take a vacation in Brazil (more specifically in the city of Fortaleza, where I spent most of my life), the nice folks from Evolucao Informatica ( http://www.evolucao.com.br ) there invite me to deliver a presentation. This time I chose to talk about the Microsoft Technology...

As I mentioned previously, I have started an MVP training on Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 based on the eLearning Collection 5403 - Implementing Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. During the class, I posted a few questions at the end of each course in the collection. Here are those questions...

I will be starting an MVP-targeted course on Implementing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on April 23rd. This is something Microsoft offers to the MVPs and I will be monitoring that class. If you're interested in the MVP program, there are details at http://mvp.support.microsoft.com . The course uses...

Q) If you set up a database with 3 files, will SQL Server fill the first file before using the other 2 or will it store data in all 3 files right from the beginning? Is it related to the initial size or the growth setting of the file? What if data is deleted? What if it’s three filegroups with one file...

Q) I noticed in SQL Server Configuration Manager|Network Config|TCP/IP|Properties|IP Address that the SQL server instance grabbed it's own address from DHCP server. What is the advantage of the SQL server using it's own address? How would one make this static rather than dynamic? This TCP/IP configuration...

Q) Is there a good reason for having more than just a single (default) instance of SQL Server on a server? Does there have to be a default instance or can you just have named instances? Can you later change which instance of SQL Server is the default instance and what benefits are there for being the...

Q) In connectionstrings I often see server=localhost. Where is this "localhost" name coming from? Is it in a file somewhere? Is it true that the server must be using TCP/IP for this to work? I also see server=. and server=(local) in connection strings. Do they work the same way and is there a different...

Q) How do you know if an instance of SQL Server 2005 has been upgraded to SP1 and what do you do to assure all SQL Server Services are shut down prior to installing the service pack? I attempted to install SP1 and got some lock violations and kept shutting down all services I could think of under Computer...

Q) I specified the SQL Server service to run under LocalSystem, but noticed a domain user account is recommended. Can you talk more about best practices? Does the service run as its own user in its own group? Does it belong in the Administrators group? I also notice that when I looked at the configuration...

Q) When installing SQL Server 2005, do people just accept the collation defaults? Is collation a big decision? This setting will define, for instance, if SQL will consider lowercase different from uppercase or if characters will accents will be considered different from the same characters without...

Q) For the SQL Server 2005 training, should we use SQL Server Standard or SQL Server Enterprise? There are a few differences between what's available in each version of SQL Server 2005. You can find a nice comparision at: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx Q...