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If you read this blog, you know about the TechNet Wiki I helped start a while ago. The wiki represents many kinds of awesome. The best of which is the people who care enough about technology, and the wiki, to contribute content. The wiki has been nominated for an internal Microsoft Engineering Excellence...

Many of you saw this app at TechEd NA and TechEd Europe and asked "When can I get it?" It's heeeere: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-US/app/server-posterpedia/f988071c-66dc-4281-8028-637ac0f09061 Free-as-in-beer. This YT vid shows how it works http://youtu.be/o5tWAPWJ720 . Seeing it in...

Folks, Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell RC has released. Script Explorer helps scripters find Windows PowerShell scripts, snippets, modules, and how-to guidance in online repositories such as the TechNet Script Center Repository , PoshCode , local or network file systems and Bing Search...

Increasingly, you don’t need a GUI to get your IT Pro job done. Everything you can do in the GUI, you can do in PowerShell. This is even more true in Windows Server “8” Beta. Not just because there are >2300 cmdlets. Now, you don’t even need mstsc.exe ( Remote Desktop Connection...

Hyper-V PM Eric Bahna recently recorded a video demo of the new Hyper-V Windows PowerShell cmdlets in Windows Server "8* Beta . The complete demo is about 21 minutes long. Windows Server 8 Hyper-V PowerShell Demo Uncut For convenience, I also made three shorter versions currently available...

In Brain Rules for Meetings John Medina tells us: "you've got 30 seconds before they start asking the question, "Am I going to pay attention to you or not?"" This advice holds true for new UIs as well. If you have installed the Windows Server "8" Beta , and you come upon the new Metro UI in the course...

The business case for changes to the TechNet Wiki is complex. On the "fit for purpose" side of the equation, I try to explain the numbers thusly: 1. There are orders of magnitude more readers than contributors 2. There are orders of magnitude more contribute-once users than there are contribute...

According to our IT Pro customer feedback the number one dis-satisfier is finding the technical information they need. When they find technical content from Microsoft, they general review it favorably. Finding it is the chief frustration. I was taught that one strategy for improving performance is...

The new www.answerdesk.com service offers free support 24/7/365 with the option to upgrade to paid support right there if the free session does not suffice. * *Currently for English-speaking customers, however some Answer Techs do speak other languages, and you can filter/select those ones if you...

Symptoms and error messages for corrupted Hyper-V VHD files are numerous, from the VM refusing to start, to failures to attach the VHD with messages like "Failed to open attachment 'C:\ directory \MyVHD.vhd'. Error: 'The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.'” There are many possible...

Ninjas in lore specialize in not being seen. However, here is a group of community supporters inside Microsoft who are building community around the the TechNet wiki . Inside Microsoft, the employees working on this are called TechNet Ninjas. They are not so much into the hiding. They have a blog . ...

IT Pros have longed asked for a way to understand “what changed in this information that you just updated”? A change log. The diffs. On the TechNet Wiki you can see this by using the History tab. Example, we just updated the Hyper-V: Update List for Windows Server 2008 R2 . It us around 2k words, in...

Like a lot of people in technology, I call myself an auto-didact . This means I like to fool myself into believing that I am largely “self-taught.” It is part of the mythical life of Americans in particular that the individual can succeed as a lone-wolf. I say mythical not in the sense that it doesn...

There is a new feature on the TechNet Wiki. Push a button, generate a Table of Contents (TOC) for your article. Before: Click Edit, add [toc] and then save After: Check it out, let us know what you think.

The TechNet wiki shows two RSS feeds: Home (for the home page) TechNet Articles (for the TechNet *WIKI* articles – both new and updated) There is also a feed for a tag in the the tag cloud: I use Outlook 2010 to feed each of these into a folder . I then write filter rules on the folders to show me stuff...

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a visual representation of all the event IDs for a service, let’s say for example the Microsoft Windows Active Directory Domain Service, and when you clicked on one of the IDs, you could “drill down” into more info on that event? Let me wiki that for you . Kudos to colleague...

My gear-fixation probably started when I was a Boy Scout. There was a tool called the Woodsman’s Pal that I *had* to have. It just looked, well, way more Ninja than the puny “hatchet” I used for years. Turns out, the hatchet worked just fine, still does today. And as an adult...

You can find some common TNWIKI tags at: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/wiki-common-tags.aspx Internet pundit Clay Shirky said “The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody.”   The idea behind a tagging taxonomy, or “tagsonomy” as it is implemented on the...

There is a new page on the TechNet Wiki “ What's Considered Quality Technical Content ?” that offer you the opportunity to help define the metrics the community will use to judge “quality” attributes of technical content. It is easy to sign up and contribute on the TN Wiki . Pile on!

If you don’t read French, I can explain that the title of this post “ordinateur virtuel stocké “ translated into English (according to the Microsoft Language Portal ) is: “ An inactive virtual machine that has been saved to the Virtual Machine Manager library. The virtual machine's virtual hard disks...

Some Hotmail users have recently been confused by fake login pages, like this one: How to spot a fake Hotmail log in page: 1. The real Hotmail sign-n page does NOT host Ads. 2. The URL of the login page MUST be login.live.com and nothing else Please drive awareness so that folks do not get taken in by...

James McIllece has posted two new TN Edge videos demonstrate how to deploy a BranchCache server in hosted cache mode . Part 1 , which is six minutes long, demonstrates how to install the BranchCache feature, configure the BranchCache service mode, and create a self-signed certificate using Internet Information...

Hackers, such as the one that posted this YouTube video “ How to Hack any Hotmail, ” are going after your Hotmail account in increasing numbers. NOTE: You SHOULD NOT click on links on video pages, especially this one, as they often do bad things . In this case, the link downloads malware...

The case of the pending merge. Guest post from reader Jeremy Hagan Recently I had a virtual machine stop responding. Upon investigation I noticed that the machine was paused. This usually happens when the underlying disk has run out of space and it was the case in this instance as well. I thought this...

Do you need a script to validate that a virtual switch is configured correctly? Using WMI you can get the virtual switches like this: $VSwitches = Get-WMIObject -namespace "root\virtualization" -class "Msvm_VirtualSwitch" You can get the adapters like this: $Adapter = Get-WMIObject...