VMM Beta 1 has a dependency on Windows PowerShell RC 1.0. You can find the bits on the Connect site (which requires registration) at: https://connect.microsoft.com/vmm/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=2492

The newest version of Windows PowerShell is RC 2, you can find the install points listed in this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925228

Or, do not pass GO, do not collect US$200 and go directly to:

Some great resources in this article on Microsoft.com, including:

the fantastic, FREE  Graphing Calculator software in Microsoft Student 2006

the Equation Writer in the Education Pack for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

and nifty Excel charting tips and templates

Oh, and if your student, like mine, is crazy for Sudoku, try this and this. If you have Vista - there is a Windows Live Sudoku gadget, and a Sudoku Assistant.

A few months ago, internal discussion revolved around IT Pro customer perception of the information in blogs (specifically blogs.technet.com and blogs.msdn.com) in relation to KB and other "official" sources. Was it "valuable"? Was it "authoritative"? Could it be "trusted"?

Looking over the IE7 release notes here, what do I see? A product release notes page refers customers to a blog 5 times for solutions to technical issues. Of course the blogs are the IE and RSS blogs, but how long until one product is refering to another product-based blog?

Have tech blogs "tipped"? I'm thinking... if it walks like a duck and quacks like it a duck...

Leave comments.

The business model for www.msdewey.com seems to be...uh, I'll have to get back to you on that.

Wait, it involves something about watching an attractive actress like Janina Gavankar do pythonesque sketches before returning your search query. For example, try these:

the Fool

Earthquake preparedness

Schrodinger’s Cat

Windows Vista

Camelot

Algebra

What is your favorite color?

The Who <ms. dewey seems to confuse them with Pink Floyd>

Hunchback of Notre Dame

Linux

Eddie Izzard

Power Tools

Microsoft Office

Bruce Campbell

A problem of type 2049 has occurred

What is the average air-speed velocity of an un-laden swallow?

Private Ryan

Does it rain in Seattle? <Try this one three times>

Wake up call

Ms. Dewey ringtones

CSI ringtones

I mean - can you figure out who even runs the site? Or what marketing purpose may be behind it? Do you care? Knowing a little about the production side I can tell you that the amount of money that it takes to put something like this up is, well, staggering.

If this is viral marketing, exactly what are we supposed to be catching?

Virtual Machine Manager requires .NET Framework 2.0. If you have trouble installing .NFW 2.0, you may find this KB Article helpful: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908077/en-us?spid=8291&sid=global

The most common fix BTW is:

Unregister and then reregister Windows Installer

This action corrects most situations. Additionally, this action does not affect any currently installed programs that use the Windows Installer.

This worked for my XP install.

Check out the Microsoft Scalable Networking Pack (KB912222) for ways to improve the networking performance of certain workloads and configurations in your virtual server environment.

Caveats:

1) you must have supported HW - the KB states "This feature pack requires hardware that is capable of supporting offload technologies as specified in this article. Without the appropriate offload hardware, no performance gains will be seen by using this feature pack. "

2) Reghacking required - the KB states: "The Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack updates the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS). After you install the update, there is no user interface to configure the options that are associated with the Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack. By default, the options are turned off. You can configure the options by using the Netsh.exe tool or by using the registry."

3) No worky with firewalls - the kb states: "TCP Chimney offload and NetDMA will not work with the following features:

• Windows Firewall
• Internet Protocol security (IPsec)
• Internet Protocol Network Address Translation (IPNAT)
• Third-party firewalls
• NDIS 5.1 intermediate drivers

If any one of these features is turned on, TCP Chimney offload and NetDMA will not work regardless of the registry settings.

By default, the IP NAT and IPsec Policy Agent features are turned on when certain components such as bridging and routing services are enabled. Therefore, TCP Chimney and NetDMA will not function in such a scenario. When the bridging and routing services are disabled, IPNAT is not turned off. Therefore, TCP Chimney or NetDMA is not re-enabled. The IP NAT and IPsec Policy Agent features must be explicitly turned off before TCP Chimney or NetDMA can function."

However, if you have the right hardware, don't need firewall 9and other above exclusions) - such as in some dev/test/training scenarios, then the Scalable Networking Pack may be just what you need :-). For example, this recent problem may be solved with the Pack:

Host OS: R2 64bit Windows 2003 w/SP1

Host NIC: Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II GigE (NDIS VBD Client)

Guests

Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 w/SP1

Windows 2003 Standard R2 w/SP1

Windows XP SP2

Q: The host browser cannot reach any Internet sites nor can it renew its IP address but all the guests can surf the net and renew IP addresses. When the NIC on the host is repaired it can then surf the net and renew its IP but all the guests show network disconnected.

A: Install Microsoft Scalable Networking Pack (KB912222) on the host machine.

This may be related to the TCP offloading on the host NIC (KB888750).

Helpful? leave comments.

My manager attended a conference for technical content creators last week and brought back some interesting insights on tools, techniques and people issues. Her observations dovetail with some other recent conversations and reflections. For example, I sometimes struggle to explain to upper management why blogs are important to IT Pros.

I decided this week to think of it as:

”Communicate with customers in a way that is meaningful and valuable to them."

It is the "to them" part that continues to be problematic. Some folks know only one way to communicate. Blogs can help them hook up with the particular audience for whom that communication style "clicks". My advice for those writers is "write about what you know, and write in the way that feels comfortable to you." It is not reasonable to expect them to do anything other than this, and really, they don’t need to do to any thing else to succeed under this definition.

But, if we dumped all the content from blogs.technet.com and blogs.msdn.com into buckets and analyzed it, what percentage of total content would be able to identify as "audience-specific"? How would we calculate the return on investment for the cost to develop and publish that content? If we could perform such a calculation, we could compare it to, say, the cost to produce the fabled 5 inch thick user manual for a server product that no IT Pro ever reads.

Perhaps we should assume that only IT Pros can write effectively for IT Pros? "Programmer Writers" are the only ones who can write for developers?

Is it reasonable to expect that Microsoft can hire enough IT Pros or Devs who are also good writers to fill the need?

Wel the, who should write the help text for a product-specific Windows PowerShell Command Shell? An IT Pro, a developer? Or perhaps, since it is a new shell and the majority of folks using command-line help will be new to it, a writer with experience in education?

Leave comments.

The Microsoft.com operations blog has a fantastic post here describing how they put together a VBscript to check servers for the MyDoom.B Virus when it first came out.

This is a case study on things you can do in the ops room to put out the fire. Worth the read for both Ops types and scripters.

Where else but Microsoft can you get this kind of insider info?

No, seriously, if you know of some place, please leave a comment. Thanks in advance.

Kevin pointed out a new service that lets you check the "juiciness" of your blog at http://www.text-link-ads.com/blog_juice/ .

According to them my blog is 4.7 juicy. So, like, what does that mean?

Well, it compares to a juice score for all technet blogs of 8.2, or eileen's blogjuice of 6.6.

Hrm, do I need to do something to increase the juice? Leave feedback.

My old boss Ron Markezich has moved into the same group as my new boss, Bob Muglia. According to this CRN.COM article today:

"Ron Markezich, vice president of managed solutions and co-CIO at Microsoft, is relinquishing the CIO role and, along with 500 Microsoft IT people focuses on managed services, is moving into the company's Server and Tools division. Markezich will report to senior vice president Bob Muglia. "

The article quotes an anonymous source saying: "the software giant's shift of managed solutions into what is essentially a product group shows that the company wants to make these solutions deliverable via channel partners. "

Comments?

My team has access to a Windows Server 2003 server in the test organization that is built daily/weekly by script with the new product bits.  In order to meet our content deadlines, we need to run the GUI as it changes during product development and try to stay current. Well, as deadlines get closer, more writers try to remote into the server to do stuff. Often they are getting the error: "The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections". Typing this phrase into live search gives you this. Too-typical technical content- accurate, yet at the same time not remotely useful.

When you get this message while logging on remotely to a Windows Server 2003 server, it means that two RDP sessions are running on the server. This means that either two people are logged in and doing work, or one or more are not doing work, but still logged in. By default, you can have only two remote sessions and one console session.
 
To solve this:
Preventive: Get everyone in the habit of "log off" (not just close the remote window) when done working on the server. Play nice.
Reactive: If you need to get on right now you can force a logoff of the current user using the following command:

mstsc /v: yourservername /console

using credentials for a member of the local Administrators group or the Domain Admins Group
 
To delete existing connections:
Start > Administrative Tools > Terminal Services Manager.
Expand the This Computer node.
Click on your server name. 
Click on the Users tab and you should see all existing connections.
Right- Click on any session with a greyed-out icon (indicates that the session has expired) and select "Log Off" to kill that user/session and free up the connection.
 
To change the default behavior (limit of 2 sessions, no time out):
Start > Administrative Tools > Terminal Services Configuration
Select the Connections folder.
Right-Click RDP-Tcp (Microsoft RDP 5.2) and select Properties.
Select the Sessions tab and check the ‘Override user settings‘ option and set ‘End a disconnected session’ and ‘Idle session limit’ to 15 minutes. Set the ‘Active session limit’ to Never.

To avoid this problem in the first place and limit to one user at a time connecting to a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 terminal server in Remote Administration Mode remotely or at the console:-)

Came across this today, handy little script for stopping a VM:

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

'PowerOffVM()

'this function powers off a Virtual Machine

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Function PowerOffVM (VirtualMachineName)

  Set virtualServer = CreateObject("VirtualServer.Application")   

  Set vm = virtualserver.FindVirtualMachine(VirtualMachineName)

  PowerOffVM = vm.turnoff()

End Function

My team recently conducted a "post-mortem" analysis of our recent milestone performance. There are lots of ways to conduct and publish PMs, but we chose to use the SWOT analysis method. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You can find a template for applying SWOT to a competitive analysis here.

Read this microsoft.com operations post to get inspired about how using the SWOT methodology can help to start turning things around in your org.

A colleague asked for resources recently to help prepare for a presentation to school kids about neat things they can do with technology. Replies included the gems below from Coding4Fun:

        Hardware

·         DIY Dance, Dance Revolution machine

·         Home Automation (X10) and .NET

·         Programming LCD Display to display music

·         Programming GPS Devices

·         Programming USB Hardware

·         Programming Web Cams

·         Programming Motion Detection in Web Cams

·         Programming Web Cams to send pictures to your Live Spaces Account (Photo Booth)

·         Programming an IM client to do Home Automation using Skype

 Web

·         Programming Flickr

·         Programming Google

·         Programming Amazon

·         Programming eBay

Games

·         Windows Forms old school arcade games like  Tiny Tennis , Space Blitz  and  Crusaders (includes videos)

·         Mobile Games like Pac Man on a Smartphone

·         3D managed DirectX games like Rocket Commander (RC includes videos) and Tank Wars

·         KPL Games including Pong, Asteroids, and Missile Command

·         WPF Puzzle Games including Sudoku and FreeCell

AnFinally - there is a very cool demo here on youtube of the brilliant physics illustrator.

Here are some resources to get you started learning about PowerShell:

 Materials to read

  PowerShell User Guide

 Scripting with Windows PowerShell

Task-based Guide to Windows PowerShell Cmdlets

 TechCenter Sample Scripts

 Blogs

Windows PowerShell Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell

Arul Kumaravel's Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/arulk

Lee Holmes' Blog: http://www.leeholmes.com/blog

 Marc van Orsouw's Blog: http://mow001.blogspot.com

 Abhishek Agrawal’s Blog: http://abhishek225.spaces.msn.com/PersonalSpace.aspx