Who is Jason Zander

I'm the corporate vice president for the development team of Windows Azure in the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.  I've worked on lots of products in twenty years at Microsoft with the unifying theme of building platforms and tools for developers to do great work.  I love writing code!  And I love working on a team where developing software and helping others build and deliver their own software is a core mission.

What will the interview cover?

When Jason Zander came over last year I got a chance to put together a series of interview questions and grill him about Visual Studio 2012.  At the time Jason was directing the Visual Studio team and since then he has gone on to head up Windows Azure.

In this interview we covered everything from key features to the process that the Visual Studio team take for software development and testing.  I even asked those awkward questions around how do developers feedback to the development team and get noticed!

Here’s what happened!

Useful Links

If you would like to find more about what Jason Zander is up to you can take a look at his blog and follow him on Twitter.

• Visual Studio Developer Center
• Visual Studio UK Blog
• Visual Studio: Application Lifecycle Development
• Download Visual Studio Ultimate Trial

And remember to take up our latest offer!

TechDays Online is returning for 2013 and we want you to get involved in the process of choosing the topics, speakers and content so that you get the most out of your time with us.  Last year we ran TechDays Online as a 2 day event and focused only on Server and Cloud technologies but this year we are also going to include a developer track and add a third day!

Save the Date: 23rd – 26th March April 2013!!!! and fill out the poll below.

Feel free to share the event poll and date with your colleagues and friends who you think may also be interested in attending this event as well by using the social sharing  buttons.  We know that many of you haven’t been able to attend our in person events so we are hoping to consolidate those events to bring a really useful 3 day event.

Guest Post by Rob Fraser, Cloud Services CTO, Microsoft Ltd

A new study from Forrester, commissioned by Microsoft Ltd, has found that cloud computing is empowering ‘change agents’ from all corners of an organisation to deliver business innovation and drive positive business change.

Essentially, it shows that where there are certain types of people who are willing to push boundaries and innovate within their organisation, with applications and services delivered via the cloud acting as catalysts for positive change.

You might expect then that the study would reveal a sort of ‘wild west’ of IT, with un-sanctioned projects popping up all over the place and creating an unmanageable IT environment, what is often referred to as shadow IT. But the reality is quite the opposite. It shows that the most successful cloud deployments are those with strong alignment between business and IT and that all projects from those interviewed had engagement from IT.

This is clearly good news to ensure IT environments remain secure and adopt the correct rigour towards governance and privacy. But Forrester did make some bold recommendations to IT as cloud adoption becomes more widespread.

IT to evolve

The study suggests that IT departments could consider becoming ‘cloud brokers’, offering a marketplace of services and applications which the business can call on to innovate and deliver value (see how Microsoft is supporting this at www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com)

Skills to change

Forrester suggests that cloud computing is accelerating the shift in skills requirements for the IT function from technology to business management. One of the study contributors, the head of IT at a UK University said: “We will have to start having people with different skills. 80% of the [IT] department today consists of technical resources, 20% is business. We will shift to more business management skills when managing multiple [cloud] services.”

Maintain the close alignment between IT and business

Independent of the origin or executive sponsorship of a cloud project, successful initiatives require strong collaboration between business and IT. Forrester states that “The vision of ‘swiping a credit card’ and getting a complete, functional cloud solution is a fairy tale in most cases.”

Ultimately, we think that cloud computing will provide the impetus for IT leaders to become agents of change within their organisations and fulfil a long-promised role. IT is sometimes said to be 80 per cent focused on ‘keeping the lights on’ – the day-to-day operations that keep essential services up and running. However, the cloud means IT can start to find a way forward to providing new capabilities, adding new value and working with the business to create new offerings.

What do you think? Has cloud driven innovation in your organisation and how have you kept control over shadow IT deployments? Please share your examples with us or join the discussion at http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Cloud-Computing-Microsoft-UK-3837607/about

To read the full report, visit www.microsoft.co.uk/changeagents

New years resolution: must blog more!  It's only taken me to the end of January to start my resolution but I'm going to try one blog article per month.  

We're bringing back Tech.Days Online on the 24th/25th & 26th of April.  This time with more days and more topics.  Simon and Andrew will be back and we'll be introducing some new faces as well!   We will also be providing free MVA points for the learning! 

If you can't spare the time to get out of the office or have a travel restrictions, then this is a great opportunity to learn from your browser!

-       Learn online from the comfort of your own desk

-       Register once and dip in and out of the sessions you want to attend

-       Half an hour, bite size sessions on the topics you most want to hear about

-       Dedicated sessions for IT Professionals and Developers.

-       Ask the experts questions throughout the three days

-       50 free MVA points for anyone that attends

-       Plus the opportunity to win loads of cool prizes!

Day One: Visual Studio 2012 - 24th April

Dedicated to developers and testers, learn more about Visual Studio 2012 ‘the tool for developing for Windows 8’ and hear from our experts and ALM Partners.  We will cover Agile development with Team Foundation Server 2012, testing capabilities of VS and the new Team Foundation Service.  We also welcome your views on what additional development content you would like us to include.  We will update the agenda nearer the time, so you can choose which sessions are of most interest to you.  Link to the survey to have your say.

Day Two and Day Three - 25th & 26th April

Two whole days solely devoted to IT Professionals, but there’s a twist; we want your help to set the agenda. Complete our short survey and choose the topics, speakers and content that you want to learn more about, so you get the most out of your time with us.

Register for your place now, and we’ll confirm the agenda in a couple of weeks-time based on the results of our survey. Once we’ve confirmed the agenda, you can then choose to attend the sessions that are of most interest to you.

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I'm going to try and keep to my new years resolution of one blog article per month to complement the articles the rest of the team are regularly writing.  I do need your help, if you don't see an article by me in a month, send me an tweet, ask me where it is :)

Thanks for reading, we look forward to seeing you online at Tech.Days in April

Dan

@danpi 

In my last post I showed how easy it is to create virtual desktops in Windows Server 2012, and while that’s now a core part of providing remote desktops to your users there is still the good old fashioned terminal services, or to give its modern name Remote Desktop Services (RDS). RDS also changes quite a lot in Windows Server 2012 and so I have made this short screencast to show how to set it up..

Notes:

VDI and RDS are designed to compliment each other:

• The client is using the same protocol (RDP - Remote Desktop Protocol) to interact with a remote desktop or a virtual desktop
• They share services for example; the remote desktop web access portal for users to access remote desktops and applications, and the remote desktop broker that controls access to the resources on offer.
• You can create RD RemoteApp applications from both an RDS Pool or a VDI Pool.  If you aren’t familiar with RD RemoteApp it’s a way of delivering an individual application over RDP so it looks like it’s on a users desktop but actually its executing server side. I have seen it being used for providing legacy applications or those that need to run in a secure environment.

So when to use what?

I think this comes down to efficiency and manageability.  You can support far more (typically 12x)  remote users with RDS than with VDI running on the same server hardware.  So if possible use RDS complimented with technologies like App-v to virtualise application delivery to delegated users.  That way you’ll just have to maintain the few servers providing RDS and secure the users profile disks. 

It may be that some or of all your users can’t use RDS because they applications they want don‘t ‘like’  being run from and RDS server.  In that case the next most efficient option is pooled VDI where a virtual desktop is shared rather than being dedicated to a particular user. In this scenario you just have manage one virtual desktop, and then control the deployment of revisions to that (which may just include patches or whole new applications). Your final option is to give your users personal virtual desktops which means that each of these needs to be managed in exactly the same way as if they have real desktops.  What’s good about VD/RDS in Windows Server is that the users get a good experience either way with multi touch support, smooth video streaming and USB redirect so they can use webcams, dongle, card readers etc.

To celebrate the launch of Microsoft Office 365 in the UK we are holding a unique event taking place based on and around the specially created Route 365 bus. The 365 will travel through London for a day, playing host to a fascinating selection of speakers sharing their personal stories of how technology supports and improves their day to day lives.

Highlights include Tess Daly, Will Greenwood and Sally Whittle all giving their personal accounts of how technology is enhancing their working and personal lives. Members of the public are invited to join the bus and get involved both online and in the real world, to ask them about their experience. Attendees and members of the public will be joined by artists, musicians and entertainers as the bus moves through London, with the whole experience being streamed live at http://catchthe365.com

The entire journey is being used to show how Office 365, including OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel and Word allows you to work and stay connected, even while you are on the move.

Far be it for us to succumb to hype and bombast when we're launching a new product such as Office 365. However, when we challenged ourselves to discover all the truly unexpected ways that people weave Office into their daily lives, we couldn't have expected such a variety of imaginative solutions to everyday problems. From using OneNote as a shopping list to sticking Excel to the fridge door as the family diary, Office has become part of the fabric of modern life. So we set ourselves the challenge of seeing just how far we can push Office 365, with connectivity and the cloud built right in.

We said we wanted to dream up a way that would show people the real power of Office. That's why today, we're asking thousands of people to Catch the 365. The Route 365 is a specially kitted out Routemaster bus that's travelling the streets of London (you can follow its journey live here: http://catchthe365.com). On this bus, we've invited special guests to give highly personal presentations on something that's close to their hearts, either in their working life or personal life or both. Microsoft Ambassador, Former British Lion, Rugby World Cup Winner and Sky Sports analyst, Will Greenwood has agreed to step onto the Route 365 to talk about how he uses mobile technologies and software such as Word and Excel to stay on top of his busy work schedule as a rugby analyst and journalist, especially during events like the British & Irish Lions tour, which kicks off this summer.

Founder of Tots 100 and the Mum and Dad Blogger awards, Sally Whittle will use PowerPoint to share her experience of running a successful business while bringing up children.

Bridget MacPherson, of the Phoenix School in Leicestershire will share her passionate position on change in education. And Juliette McMullen will give us her unexpected insights into bringing up toddlers with the help of OneNote and Excel. And to top it all off, Tess Daly has promised to become a surprise passenger, to talk about how everyday technologies have helped her build her media and business careers, whilst being a high-profile mum.

The speakers will be using the Ignite format for their talks, which means they will use PowerPoint to do a five-minute presentation, with 20 slides auto-forwarding every 15 seconds. If you've never watched an Ignite talk, this is worth seeing as it is a high-energy way to tell a personal story. And if you want to ask our speakers questions that they can answer live, online, please do so by tweeting your question using the hashtag #catchthe365

The entire bus-based experience will be streamed live, including musical moments and tablet art from Paul Kercal, to Catchthe365.com. But if you're in Central London, why not check out our live location using the Bing Map on the website and come down to try out the new Office and get involved with all the fun of the day.  We will be taking over Leicester Square in central London from 12pm to 3pm today. We will also be running competitions throughout the day, so please check out the website or follow us on Twitter to find out how you could win yourself a copy of Office 365.

In some smaller organisations virtual machines (VM) often run on local storage DAS – Direct Attached Storage on the hosts whereas in bigger businesses many if not all production VMs are hosted on shared storage (e.g. a SAN) , so the virtual machine executes on a given host but the virtual hard disk and VM metadata resides elsewhere.  In either case there might be times where you would want to move the storage for a virtual machine but leave it running on its current host.  For example you might want to move a virtual machine from DAS to a SAN as it becomes more critical to a business, or you are upgrading or replacing a SAN.  This is no a simple process in Windows Server 2012 and you can leave the machine running while you do it as you can see in this short screencast..

where my poor SQL Server 2012 VM gets moved around my demo rig while running a complex query again and again.

Things to note:

This screencast moves the VM to a highly availability file share, which I created in an earlier post in this series.  Note that that file share is specifically designed to host running VMs using the new SMB 3 capabilities in Windows Server 2012, and configured to do so as opposed to storing conventional files or to run as an NFS file share.

Permissions to that share are granted to the hosts running hyper-V in my case I created a group called Hyper-V Servers to put my hosts in and assigned permissions to that.

If licensing has been a pain point for a long time or if you’ve ever wanted to gain knowledge on Microsoft licensing then the new simple and effective MVA licensing courses would be an exceptionally great place to start. This training can be taken at any time and at no cost to you which is not bad for becoming a Microsoft Licensing Expert!

The Microsoft Virtual Academy’s new Licensing Training and Accreditation will help you build foundational knowledge on licensing programs and solutions, and enable you to maximize the value of your software investments.

Take the first Microsoft Licensing – Programs Fundamentals course to begin your licensing discoveries and put to rest any niggling queries you may have on licensing. This course provides a comprehensive but simple overview of Microsoft's licensing programs and licensing models. Topics covered include the benefits of volume licensing, ways to purchase licenses, and the various licensing programs and models available. Descriptions of license types such as device licenses and client access licenses (CALs) are also included, as well as overviews of Software Assurance benefits.

Whether you are beginner, intermediate or more advanced you are sure to find the course extremely useful. Not only that, but the course is extremely valuable no matter the size of organisation you work in. For those who work in organisations with more than 5 but fewer than 250 devices or users you may be keen to gain knowledge about the different choices of Open Agreements. For those in larger organisations with 250+ devices or users you will learn all you need to know about Select Plus Agreements and Enterprise Agreements.

Learn about the benefits of standardization from Volume Licensing Agreements such as savings for deploying standard sets of products across the organisations. Volume Licensing Agreements also has other great benefits including software assurances, pricing advantages and a range of offerings such as program choices for organisations of varying sizes which are covered in the module.

The Microsoft Licensing – Fundamentals course also breaks down in simple terms the basic application of CAL’s (Client Access Licenses). Take the course and listen to the great scenario and methodology that the presenter uses to explain why, when and how you would need a CAL when you are accessing the services of a server.

Also find out the fundamentals about the two levels of CAL’s (Standard CAL’s and Enterprise CAL’s) depending on the level of functionality that you need your users to access.

We view other licensing options for Microsoft Cloud Services and understand how to use Volume Licensing programs to license Microsoft Cloud Services including Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune, Windows Azure and Dynamics CRM Online. In addition you can realise how the key benefits from Software Assurance can help you plan, deploy, use and manage your Volume Licensing purchases in ways that can be less time consuming and costly.

These courses really are a great chance to stand out from the crowd, become a trusted advisor in your organization, build expertise on Microsoft volume licensing and match your organization's needs with the right licensing solution.

Start here

Server virtualisation is all about decoupling the operating system form the hardware it’s running on, and one of the benefits of doing this is to ensure that a virtual machine (VM) can be made resilient to any underlying hardware failure.  In the world of Hyper-V this is achieved by building a Windows Server cluster and adding the VM as a role into that cluster.  From Windows Server 208 R2 this also gives the benefit of moving the virtual machine around  nodes on the cluster without stopping the virtual machine (known as live migration).

In Windows Server 2012 you still need to use a cluster to make virtual machines highly available, but you also have the option to build a cluster without any shared storage using a file share to host the virtual machines storage and metadata.  This screencast shows how that works..

Things to note.

This builds on two other posts in this series:

• High Availability Files Servers where I build a cluster to create a file share to host virtual machines
• Storage Migration where I live migrate a VM onto that file share.

What I have done here illustrates the technology for high availability in Windows Server 2012  and is not a high availability solution itself – the high availability file server is running on two virtual machines but these are connecting to an iscsi target that isn’t highly available itself and I have no redundant network infrastructure.

As with several of my screencasts it’s a SQL Server 2012 VM that's is being migrated around.  I run my Resource Governor demo application on the VM while it’s being migrated as this enables me to max out the CPU on the VM to show that migration doesn’t significantly slow this process and certainly doesn’t stop it.  I also use remote desktop to connect to the VM because if I used the VM console it would drop during migration because the console is connecting to the VM via the host and of course the host changes during the migration.

To try this yourselves you’re going to need at least two physical hosts (laptops/servers etc.) as well as Windows Server 2012.