Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : Misc

Laptop Hunters and Apple

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:25:00 GMT

I have to confess that I never got to see any of the advertisements that Microsoft has been running (I saw a couple on YouTube out of curiosity, but never on TV) where they give something like $1500 to a person and tell them to buy the best computer that they can with that money. The adverts take a dig at the colossal prices that Apple charges (dubbed the ‘Apple Tax’) for their computers because basically you can’t get an Apple computer for that same amount of money, but you can get a computer running Windows (and be a far better buy in my opinion).

Well, it seems that the advertisements irritated Apple somewhat because someone in their legal department called Microsoft complaining about them only two weeks after they started running. Basically they asked Microsoft to stop running the ads because they were no longer true, they had lowered their prices. All $100 of it…

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Kevin Turner, who received the call, said:

"Two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey -- this is a true story -- saying, Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I've ever taken in business."

If you don’t believe me, read it here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/elop/07-15-09WPC2009.mspx

Saving The World, Printer Ink First

Daniel Oxley — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:08:00 GMT

Saving something seems to to be the big thing in I.T. at moment, which is never a bad thing. The current big thing is the Green Computing initiatives, particularly with the prominence now of virtual computing and power saving features in new operating systems (hint, hint: Windows Vista and Windows 7). Another very common one I see is the footer that a lot of people include on their emails, looks like this:

Well, a new one has appeared which on face value might seem a bit unbelievable, but the authors reckon that it actually really works. An open-source font has been created that looks like Swiss cheese!

The creators claim that, because the font is full of holes, you will save around 20% of the ink in your printer; thus saving money and resources. When I first saw it I was sceptical, but according to the website all those holes really do make a difference. I’ll give it a try to see how useful it is.

Note that, if your document has a lot of bold text then all those little holes will pretty much disappear, as you can see below:

Also, although it is called EcoFont, it doesn’t actually appear in your font list under that name which was a little confusing. It took me a while to find it (maybe this is in the documentation…) listed as Sprang eco sans.

You can get the font and read more about it here: http://www.ecofont.eu/splash_en_pro.html

Obviously, the better way to save ink in your printer (and paper as well) is to only print something when you absolutely have to. Countless times I have been onsite with clients and they have printed ALL of their documentation for me to read, which is such a waste as I could just as easily read it on screen if they simply email it to me. Also, when I submit documentation for review by customers, it is often printed out several times so people can go through it for reviewing; I know it is less comfortable to read off the computer screen, but still…

He-Man on YouTube

Daniel Oxley — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:05:00 GMT

This has absolutely nothing to do with IT, nor Microsoft, but I thought I’d post it anyway seeing as today is Friday :-) Some people have too much time on their hands! It’s an extremely funny video (for me, anyway!), especially from 3:00 minutes and onwards.

He-Man used to be my favourite TV program when I was a kid, it looks kind of shoddy now though when compared to what Pixar is churning out these days. He-Man really does have the lamest haircut I have ever seen, I noticed that when I was 10, but seeing him now really confirms it.

p.s. Is it me, or does the dude in the metal hat look like Bruce Grobbelaar in his younger days? I always wondered that…

IKEA-fying my computer

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:50:00 GMT

I have had this blog post in the pipeline for a while now, but I have been waiting until all the pieces fell into place, to make it something actually worthwhile to read! Be warned though, this is a rather long blog post – but please stay awake!

Having access to earlier builds of Microsoft operating systems is great (and pretty important for my job given that I specialise in deploying them!) as I get to play with new technologies long before everyone else :-). The only downside to this though is that, seeing as I only have one company laptop, it means that every few months I am constantly formatting and reinstalling my computer. This is a task that everyone knows is painful; no matter how great the setup process of Microsoft Windows and then all the applications, it is still a couple of days work afterwards getting everything just right. Also, it is not as simple as just reinstalling Windows and applications as I always had to realise the following process:

Back up user data
Back up Outlook PST files
Back up Internet Favourites
Export all certificates for my user account
Export Bitlocker recovery keys
Burn DVD with latest version of Microsoft Windows
Format hard drive
Install operating system
Join computer to domain
Install all patches
Activate license for Windows
Install all applications, i.e. Office, FOXIT PDF, Anti-Virus, Visual Studio, Visio etc. etc.
Install more patches
Move user data, favourites, Outlook files, certificates and everything else back to internal laptop hard drive
Activate Bitlocker on hard drive (and re-encrypt C: partition)

It is such a tedious task that it would often put me off of changing the OS, particularly if I was away from the office travelling or did not have the time to do all of the above at home. And, after I had a Homer Simpson moment, I became paranoid that my backups were safe, so sometimes I made two copies of everything! What I wanted/needed was something a bit more ‘IKEA’-like; something modular that would allow me to swap pieces in and out easily without affecting the rest...

One day, on the way home from Barcelona on the train (trains are incredible in Spain by the way. From Madrid to Barcelona at 300 km/h without even noticing it) when I realised that, with a new feature in Windows 7 this was now possible! I have now been playing around the idea for a while and I wanted to blog about it, not so much that someone else might follow the steps (because it is far from painless at the moment, improving though) but because it shows the potential of what can be done right now with Windows 7 and existing software, and it might also be a common configuration one day in the future, who knows?

With Windows 7 a computer can boot using an operating system that is installed inside a VHD file, but the operating system is using the physical hardware of the computer – this feature is called “Boot from VHD” and has nothing to do with virtualisation apart from that it uses the VHD disk file format. What this means is that you can prepare a Windows 7 virtual machine in Hyper-V, execute sysprep and then copy the VHD file to a different computer and configure it to boot. The operating system inside the VHD file runs using all the physical hardware of the computer, but all operating system data remains inside the VHD file (think: container file, nothing more). Now, if my operating system is all contained inside a single file on the disk, here is the first step to making it modular; to change the operating system, I just need to copy a new VHD file to my hard drive and delete the unwanted VHD file or make it dual-boot.

This leaves me then with the problem of having to back up all user data before changing the operating system, and then restoring the data afterwards. But what if I configured Live Mesh to maintain a copy of my data in the cloud? By doing this, all I have to do is change the operating system, install the Live Mesh client agent and then sit back while all my user data reappears on my computer from the cloud. I won’t have had to make any backups, nor recover any files. My data is pulled down automatically from the online backup that Live Mesh maintains for me automatically and I can eliminate this pain from the process as well.

Now then, what about the reinstalling all of the applications every time? This is an easy one: if I package all of my applications into App-V “bubbles”, then I no longer need to reinstall any applications at all, all I do is just launch the application inside it’s bubble and I am up and running – no more application reinstalls and no need to worry about compatibility issues with a new operating system

In figure 1, I have represented the idea with a diagram. Every piece of the problem is contained inside it’s own module and can be swapped out easily, without affecting any other module – I can even change the underlying hardware, i.e. move to a new physical computer, with minimal effort now :-)

Figure 1: Welcome to the Oxley-verse

In figure 2 I show my drive partition schema, so that you can see that I have no operating system actually installed, it is all inside a VHD file (note the blue colour for icon on disk 1). Disk 0 has 2 partitions, excluding the initial RAW partition, the first (the D: drive) is the partition that holds the VHD file. It is not a bootable partition, and contains only a single file, the VHD file. In the M: drive partition on disk 0 I have all of my user data, application files, etc. This is important as, in order for this to work, the VHD must only contain the operating system and nothing else.

Disk 1 is the VHD file that is mounted at boot time, containing only my Windows 7 install.

Figure 2: Drive schema

Finally, by redirecting my entire user profile to the M: drive, I am not using the C: for anything other than the operating system. All of the user data, such as Favourites, documents, even temp files, etc. are redirected to M:. I have it all working great now, but it took an awful lot of work to get there. However, now that it is done, I can change my operating system (simply swapping out the VHD, fixing a few registry keys etc.) and be working with everything again within a couple of hours, as opposed to a couple of days. Beat that for efficiency!

Lessons learned:

As with all experimenting I learnt plenty of lessons, the hard way. Also, it is not totally modular yet, as certain pieces can’t be abstracted from the operating system; an example of this is the anti-virus software that still needs to be installed inside the VHD file and certain applications insist on writing to C:\Users\USERNAME. Below, I have listed the biggest problems that I came experienced, as well as some issues that need to be considered. The biggest issue I have seen though is not actually a technical one; some of the configurations are very very very likely to be unsupported by Microsoft and/or third party vendors. This doesn’t concern me too much because I am my own helpdesk, but it may be an issue in different environments.

Microsoft company policy states that any disk partition that contains confidential information must be protected with Bitlocker. As you can see in the drive schema above, M: is encrypted, and so is C:, which is inside the VHD file. Unless things change between now and the release of Windows 7, a Bitlocker’d “Boot from VHD” file is an unsupported configuration.
Likewise, I am pretty certain that Windows 7 in VHD on a computer that has no operating system installed ‘normally’ (i.e. the files on the disk rather than wrapped up in a VHD file) is also an unsupported configuration.
There is no 64 bit App-V client available yet.
Sequencing applications in App-V can be a fiddly job, and also not all applications can be sequenced.
There is allegedly a very slight loss of performance for Windows 7 running inside a VHD file when compared to a ‘normally installed’ Windows 7 computer. I would argue this point because, in my opinion, any performance degradation is either negligible or unnoticeable – but I am not refuting what Microsoft has published regarding this issue.
By default, the installation of Windows 7 will not create a paging file if it detects that a VHD file is being used to boot. It took me a while to work out why I couldn’t start any virtual machines on my computer due to lack of memory because of this. You can create a paging yourself, but you’ll need to create it on a partition outside the VHD file, in my case it is on the D: drive as it is the only partition not encrypted with Bitlocker.
Using standalone App-V packages requires a hefty amount of disk space because the packages are often larger than the space that a normal installation of the application would consume. Also, by carving up the local disk into partitions, I limited myself to the amount of space available.
App-V applications can take a little longer to start (unless caching is used) compared to an installed application.

After reading this, the obvious questions is “why not just put the OS into a different partition?”. My answer to this though is simple; doing it this way I can prepare the VHD file using Hyper-V at leisure without loosing access to everything else while I am doing it. If it takes 3 weeks, then that is no problem! Also, and importantly, I can put all the operating systems I want to boot into VHD files that all reside on the same partition. I am currently running a dual-boot configuration with Windows 7 in one VHD file, and Window Server 2008 R2 (with Hyper-V enabled of course) in another VHD file, with both VHD files on the same partition (D:).

If you try any of this on your computer, please don’t later on phone Microsoft support for help. Not unless they publish a support statement clarifying that the configuration is a supported one! This is simply an experiment I have been working on that works extremely well for me as I often reinstall my computer.

p.s. for those that don't know. IKEA is a mega super store that sells modular furniture that you take home and try to build yourself.

Yes, I am still alive...!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

I know posts here have been sparse recently but I haven't neglected the blog, honest! Firstly, I was in the Canary Islands for a week’s holiday and since then I have been swamped with preparation work for the upcoming release of Windows 7. Consequently, I will have some great Windows 7 topics to blog about, as well as plenty of other things.

In the meantime, you can check out some of the shoddy marketing attempts that VMWare is using to try and discredit Hyper-V R2. Frankly, for a billion dollar company like VMWare, they should be able to do better than this. Anyway, the responses from Jeff Woolsey (Microsoft) should help to dispel some of the baseless fud that my anti-Microsoft VMware-obsessed brother has had drilled into him by his VMWare sales rep.

Get the full story here: http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/hyper-v-winning-daily-vmware-fud-reaching-new-heights.aspx

If this is the best that VMWare can do, and if this is their latest hard thought out Hyper-V killer strategy then they are clearly worried about what Hyper-V R2 will do to their marketshare.

Stay tuned...

Network Issues prevent certain Installations (otherwise known as 0xc000000f)

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:28:17 GMT

I have recently been setting up a Hyper-V laboratory for a Windows 7 project. I had all the machines installed, and I was configuring them using an RDP connection rather than using VMConnect (the reason is that it is nice and easy to get access to files that are outside the VM this way, simply use \\tsclient\c (or any other drive letter) in order to get access to the C: drive of the local computer from the VM).

So, I popped the Microsoft Office 2007 DVD into the drive on my laptop in order to install it, but upon running setup.exe I was getting the below error:

As is sometimes the case, the error message was pretty useless. “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000000f)” doesn’t really mean that much to me, and my first thought was that it was a problem with a scratched or dirty DVD. However, when I then tried to install some anti-virus software, I got the same exact error message, but this time I had launched the setup file from my local C: drive, thus eliminated dodgy media as the cause. A search on the web turned up no results at all (it seems that when Windows Vista fails to boot right it also displays the error 0xc000000f) apart from non-related issues.

In the end, I worked out that it seemed to be a problem with running the install over the network, because by copying the files inside the VM, all the applications installed correctly with no further fuss. Now, there is normally no issue at all with running an installation over the network (think SMS/SCCM) so I suspect that this is something specific to using the \\tsclient paths from RDP inside a virtual machine – either that or I completely did something wrong – this is always a possibility :-(

It ain’t me

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:35:00 GMT

Given the prominence of the internet nowadays, it is no surprise that there are other people with the same name as me on the internet that also publish on the web. So, seeing as I get asked this often, the answer is “NO”! I don’t have any other websites, facebook profiles, Wikipedia pages, trumpet playing religious websites, relation to the Sarbanes-Oxley act, art galleries nor any other website whatsoever. This is me, this is my site, and any resemblance to other people is purely coincidental!

You’ll see what I mean by clicking here: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Daniel+Oxley&form=QBLH

Of course, some co-incidences are humorous. An old colleague of mine in London, Andy O’Neill, discovered that there is a whole gay dating website bearing his name – much to his embarrassment! I won’t publish the link to the site here, but it is fairly obvious to work out the URL. Of course, he denies that it is his site but no-one believes him.

Just fix it for me please…

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:33:58 GMT

Articles on the Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) sometimes contain pretty straightforward solutions, such as changing a single value in the registry or running a simple command. They are often so simple that I always wondered why Windows could not just fix it for you, saving you the hassle of finding out what the solution is in the first place! Well, it seems that my thoughts are now being auto-magically implemented somewhat on select KB articles!

Just look for the “Fix it” badge on the article to see if there is an auto-fix available.

More details are on the blog: http://blogs.technet.com/fixit4me/default.aspx

I didn’t even know that this blog existed until I got an e-mail internally about it the other day. It is a great idea, and something that has always bugged me because it has always been such an obvious thing that Microsoft should be doing.

Translating TechNet instantly

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:25:59 GMT

Here’s a little something I discovered the other day which I have found to be super useful.

As anyone who is not a native English speaker knows, English is the predominant language on the Internet; and in the world of IT, this seems to be especially true. Product documentation often gets released in English first, and then localised later on, if at all.

The other day I was writing some documentation (in Spanish) for the project I am currently working on, and I was basing my document on some pages from TechNet, which I could only find the English versions of. I was just about to accept that I’d have to translate the relevant parts I wanted to use into Spanish (which can be a very time consuming task) when by chance I noticed that the URL for the TechNet page contained the location and language. This gave me the idea of changing this part of the URL to see what would happen…

So, I changed this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303280.aspx to this: http://technet.microsoft.com/es-es/library/cc303280.aspx and low and behold, the page appeared in Spanish! (notice the change from en-us to es-es)

After further playing around, it seems that this works for most of the languages, assuming that you know the codes. I have created a rather short list below of the codes that I could work out.

en-gb - British English
en-us - US English (I am not sure why you’d want to use this version though, the previous one in this list is a better choice…)
es-es - Spanish (Spain)
fr-fr - French (France)

Note that this does not seem to work for all TechNet pages, especially the ones for Windows Server 2008. I guess this is because the localised versions have not yet been finalised, or the URL mappings have been changed.

Big fat TechNet discount

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:18:00 GMT

Want a 20% discount on your new TechNet subscription or renewal? A rather rhetorical question actually as I am sure that you do! Just click here to buy it online, and use the promotion code: TNPAN09. The offer expires on the 30th of June 2009, and is only available in EMEA (Europe/Middle East/Africa) countries.

With this discount code you can qualify for the following prices:

€296 for new subscriptions
€216 for renewals

For those that don’t know what the benefits are, here are just a few…

Access to more than 70 full-version Microsoft commercial software products, including Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Windows Vista, and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Downloadable for evaluation without time limits, including Beta versions available before their official launch.
Premium Microsoft e-Learning courses.
Two (2) free professional support incidents.

Job/Life/Reputation protector 2.0

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:58:00 GMT

Back in January I posted some simple VBA code for adding an “are you sure?” type question to the Reply To All button in Outlook. Since then I have received a few suggestions for improving the code, one of the most common of which was to add to the question box the list of names that the mail will be sent to. So, as requested, you can find below the updated code!

Just place this code in a module in Outlook (you can get to the VBA editor by pressing ALT+F11) and then assign it a button on the toolbar:

Sub ReplyToAllGuard()

    On Error GoTo ReplyAllErr
    Dim myOlApp As Outlook.Application
    Dim myFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
    Dim myItem As Outlook.MailItem
    Dim ReplyMail As Outlook.MailItem
    Dim i As Integer

    Set myOlApp = Application
    Set myFolder = myOlApp.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder

    iCount = myOlApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Count

    For i = 1 To iCount

        Set myItem = myOlApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)
        Set ReplyMail = myItem.ReplyAll

    Next i

    Dim mymsg As String
    Dim strRecipients As String
    Dim ReplyQ As Integer

    For Each strRec In ReplyMail.Recipients

        strRecipients = strRecipients & strRec & Chr(13)

    Next

    mymsg = "You just clicked Reply to All. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? The following recipients will receive this mail:" & _
            Chr(13) & Chr(13) & strRecipients

    ReplyQ = MsgBox(mymsg, vbYesNo, "Job/Life/Reputation protector")

    If ReplyQ = vbNo Then

        Set ReplyMail = Nothing
        Exit Sub

    Else

        myItem.UnRead = False
        ReplyMail.Display

    End If

ReplyAllErr:

    If Err.Number = -2147467259 Then

        MsgBox "The sender has prevented you from being able to reply to all recipients.", vbOKOnly, "Job/Life/Reputation protector"

    End If

    Exit Sub

End Sub

I also made one another change to the code in order to prevent receiving the error “A program is trying to access e-mail address information stored in Outlook”. This error is generated because Outlook has detected a possible security risk because some ‘unknown’ VBA code is trying to harvest the e-mail addresses from an e-mail; in this case though, we actually want it to!

Basically, instead of initiating a new Outlook session in memory, the code now reuses the existing instance of Outlook, thereby not generating a security problem as the message box is suggesting.

Edit: I amended the code to fix an oversight by me where the code did not clean up after itself! Also, the mail now marks itself as read after you reply - Thanks JP for pointing it out.

A good and bad end to the Formula 1 season

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:41:47 GMT

Yesterday the Formula 1 season finished with quite a nail-biting last 20 seconds, I really thought Felipe Massa had won (even the commentator had started congratulating Massa as well) until Hamilton stole it in the last possible second.

The good news for Formula 1 is that Ferrari has installed a new cluster of Microsoft High Performance Server 2008 (HPC) servers so that they can analyse in real time the data from over 200 sensors on each of their F1 cars. These sensors gather everything from the tyre temperatures, how hard the driver is pressing on a pedal to how much fluid remains in the drivers water bottle! Each lap the F1 car generates over a gigabyte of data, and an entire race will create around a terabyte of data for each car. All this data will now be processed by HPC in real time so that the team can act on the data the moment it arrives.

For those that don’t know what HPC is, it is a special high-end version of Windows Server 2008 that runs as a cluster, where each node processes data in parallel with its peers. As information arrives it is divided up amongst the nodes so that each piece can be simultaneously processed by separate machines, meaning that it can be processed at a far superior rate to ‘normal’ servers. Although obviously it is a little more complicated than I have tried to explain!

Oh, by the way. I said that there was also a bad end to the Formula 1 season… Lewis Hamilton won. Not good news at all for me as I am not a fan; I can’t say that I am particularly proud of his on-and-off track attitude, regardless of whether he is a fellow Brit or not. Next year Fernando Alonso will be king!!!

Mark Russinovich presents...

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:04:08 GMT

Mark Russinovich is presenting another live virtual conference over the Internet, this time titled "Under the Hood: Windows Vista Performance…Need Answers?". Judging by the success of the last one, this event should be pretty popular so make sure that you don't miss it.

Mark and other "industry experts" will be discussing performance issues, common misconfigurations, and giving tips on how to fix them. They will also be covering areas such as system boot times, disk performance, extending battery life, how to optimise Windows Vista, and what you can do to improve overall system performance. You will be able to ask questions live to the panel during the event. You can also submit your performance questions in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com.

So, if that interests you, just go to HTTPS://MS.ISTREAMPLANET/SPRINGBOARD on the 24th of September at 17:00 GMT (9:00 AM Pacific Time) and sit back and watch it!

Throwing your own eggs at Steve

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:25:00 GMT

Some people seem to have far too much time on their hands, so it was only a matter of time before someone created a game where you could throw virtual eggs at Steve Ballmer! So, with reference to the recent incident in Hungary, you can either play as Steve or as the person throwing the eggs. Go try it out here www.egg-attack.com if you have some time to kill.

I have to say though, that when you play as Steve the rapid fire of the egg thrower makes it almost impossible to keep your suit clean! Also, it does not help to just cower under the table as you get pushed back into the line of fire.

Call me crazy, but the Hungarian student really picked the wrong way to voice his concerns about Microsoft. He was in a room with the head of Microsoft standing in front of him, what better platform to start a debate and air his opinions? He'll never ever have that opportunity again to discuss his views of Microsoft with Steve Ballmer so it seems to me that he was not really that serious about his objections, nor did he really believe in them.