Polychrome Pass

Last week I was walking past a colleague’s desk, and did such a double-take that a couple of other heads popped up to see what was so interesting.

Satish had downloaded a new Windows 7 theme, Bing’s Best, that has what someone at Microsoft picked as the best photos from the amazing collection displayed on a daily basis at Bing. The particular photo is of a hiker standing on a point, looking out at a stunning collection of green tundra, multihued (polychrome) rocks, snow-covered mountains, and a cloud-dotted blue sky.

I saw it when it first came out and was transfixed by it. It’s an interesting photo with great colors, and a perfect example of why you want to put the point your eye moves to – the hiker – well off to one side instead of in the center. Where on earth was it?? Poking around on Bing, I saw it was called Polychrome Pass, deep in Denali National Park in Alaska. Huh, what are the odds of getting to THAT in my lifetime.

I was never able to get a clean JPEG of it, so it faded into that netherworld in your head where the eye candy of amazing photos goes. Little did I realize when I first got to see this photo I’d be standing in that very spot six months later.

Alas, I wasn’t able to duplicate the exact shot because I didn’t remember by then what it looked like exactly. This is what all of Polychrome Pass looks like, after a harrowing drive in a Park Services bus on a narrow dirt road.

The hiker’s point is in the bottom center. The Bing photo’s viewpoint is off to the left of the camera, so the photographer was actually comfortably standing on the road :). But the picture is just as stunning even with that knowledge.

We had a really terrific day ourselves, a very rare day when Denali was perfectly clear instead of being covered in clouds (it’s so big it has its own weather system), but it didn’t look as nice as that. Might be sour grapes, but I think a little Photoshop work might have been applied to it. Or at least that’s my story :).

Technorati Tags: Denali,Polychrome Pass,Alaska,Denali National Park,Bing,Windows 7 Theme Pack

Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components Poster Available!

In a previous entry I’d mentioned the cool AD Reference posters put out by technet. Well, there’s now a Windows Server 2008 R2 poster available. It’s incredibly detailed, something any IT pro would love to have on their wall. And a magnifying glass on a string nearby.

Thanks to Paul Thurrott for pointing it out to us.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=64a5cc28-f8a1-4b30-a4a2-455c65bda8d7&displaylang=en

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2008 R2,R2,poster

The REPADMIN Reference

REPADMIN is the main utility Active Directory administrators use for checking replication. It’s very powerful and can provide a ton of insight about what’s going on between your domain controllers as they merrily pass those little objects and attributes amongst each other. However, as any less-than-experienced or part-time AD admin can tell you, there are a number of pain points around working with it:

• It’s huge. REPADMIN has 69 possible commands between its old (deprecated) command set, current ones, and expert “we warned you not to break your AD” advanced ones. And most commands have a stack of switches and parameters. Even the help on how you can specify a list of domain controllers for the command prints out to three pages!
• The syntax is byzantine – even the help is. There are three levels of help within the utility, and the syntax is different for each and can change between the product releases. I mean, who ever heard of /?:<command> ? Oh, and it falls into that special category of command line utilities from hell where if you don’t get the syntax exactly right, it simply spits the general help file back at you with no hint as to what you’ve done wrong. This is clearly a case where a few hours spent by the developer will save thousands of hours administrator’s time across the globe.
• The output is equally complex and takes experience to understand.
• There are few scenario-based examples on how to use the tool – which is the handiest approach. After all, most REPADMIN users are using it to solve a specific problem.

This is okay-ish for dedicated, experienced AD admins; they can impress their geek friends at TEC with their superior knowledge :). But the majority of AD admins in the world aren’t dedicated; they have other things to do as well. (Microsoft’s TAGM – technical audience global marketing – says the majority of IT pros are generalists that have to do many roles.) These people visit REPADMIN occasionally as needed, and can remember two or three commands. They have to look up the rest, either from their own notes, an article, general searching, or trial and error. And there’s so much REPADMIN can do, even the dedicated AD admins can usually find new cool things to do.

After whining about this on a Directory Services MVP conference call with the DS team, I learned that back in 2008 Microsoft published a comprehensive (111-page!) reference document on REPADMIN, including various scenarios. The document is available on Microsoft Downloads at http://bit.ly/16xir3; every AD admin should have a local soft copy they can CTL+F their way through.

It does not include Windows Server 2008 updates, but it’s a huge help to those of us used to squinting at syntax in command prompts.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,repadmin,Active Directory,replication,Active Directory replication,replication troubleshooting

Tip: Retrieving the Prodigal Window

Have you ever worked with an external monitor on your notebook, with the desktop and applications spread out across both monitors,  then undocked the notebook and half your apps are “off the screen”? You can’t move them back on the screen because you can’t see where to place the mouse cursor to drag the windows back to the visible desktop. And if you quit and re-launch them, they go right back to where they were! Very annoying.

I helped out a coworker with this tip today and thought I’d document it. It dates back to Windows 3.1 / 3.11, back when the menu in the upper-left corner of a window was used much more. It’s still there in Windows 7, but no one seems to know about it any more.

To move a window back to where you can see it:

1. Use Alt-Tab to bring the wayward window into focus. (Even though you can’t see it, it’s still in focus.)
2. Hit Alt-Space to activate the upper-left menu.
3. Hit “m” to select the Move command. The cursor, if you could see it, turns into a four-way arrow.
4. Using the cursor keys only, move the window back to where you can see it. Use any other key or mouse click to return the cursor to normal.

Technorati Tags: moving window,cursor,use cursor to move window,hidden window,alt-space

Active Directory Reference Posters

In trolling through Microsoft downloads for some upcoming presentations, I happened across an updated version of the original Windows 2003 Active Directory Component “Jigsaw” poster published by TechNet Magazine in their March-April 2006 issue. The updated version, published in July 2007, contains the various AD feature components available in Windows 2008:

• AD Lightweight Directory Services (aka ADAM. Yes. Still.)
• AD Federation Services (ADFS)
• AD Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
• Group Policy (not strictly a feature component, though the Group Policy Management Console – GPMC – is)
• AD Management (sort of a grab bag of new AD features in W2K8, including fine-grained password policies, GlobalName zones, restartable AD, and auditing changes)
• AD Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) – the most heavily promoted new AD feature in W2K8

If that’s not enough information to cram onto a 20” x 30” poster, one side has a list of acronyms and their translation while the other is a legend of all the pretty icons being used. This is a poster to put on the wall and stare intently at, for a while.

For you non-AD people that occasionally read this blog…yeah, it is complicated :).

TechNet Magazine Active Directory Component Jigsaw Poster

Windows Server 2008 Component Poster 

Technorati Tags: active directory,ad components,AD poster,AD jigsaw,technet,technet magazine

Upgrading Windows 7 RC to RTM

If you’re like me, when you had Windows 7 beta on your system, you more or less expected to have to rebuild to move to the release candidate. With the release candidate, based on past history you fully expected to be able to upgrade from RC to RTM.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case. I don’t know the whys and wherefores of this decision, but I do know I don’t want to go through it. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to upgrade to Windows 7 RTM from RC, courtesy of Ron Schenone. Note that, strictly speaking, this scenario is not supported by Microsoft (though I highly doubt the question will ever come up). I’ll summarize the procedure here:

1. Mount your legal copy of Windows 7, either with the physical DVD or by using MagicDisc to mount the ISO.
2. Copy the contents to a writeable location (network file share, usb key / drive, etc.). I used a network file share that was available to all clients.
3. Browse to the \support folder.
4. Edit cversion.ini.
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the build you’re running. If you’re running the RC, lower the number from 7100 to 7000.
6. Save the file.
7. Run setup from this modified copy, and the version check will be bypassed.

A few other notes from my upgrade experience:

• Log off all other users on the computer.
• Deauthorize any iTunes accounts for the computer. You can easily re-auth them when the upgrade is complete.
• I don’t know this last one for sure, but I believe the upgrade goes MUCH faster if you offload non-essential files from the system during the upgrade. When I upgraded my desktop computer that had a replicated file share with about 100 GB of data, the upgrade took forever. When on my second upgraded system I moved this kind of data off, it ran much faster. I do know that the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 upgrades are actually a sort of wipe-and-load upgrade compared to the previous overwrite-in-place upgrade method, so it’s plausible.
• Use Treesize Free to compare (and clean up!) your disk space before and after the upgrade. You may find you’ve burned some space that can be reclaimed.
• You can also reclaim space after a successful upgrade by going into Disk Cleanup for the system drive (Right-click on the drive letter in Windows Explorer, Properties, the Disk Cleanup button by the pie chart). The list of of items that can be cleaned up will include “Files discarded by Windows upgrade”, but it will NOT be checked. In my case it saved about 1.4 GB of space.
• Before you copy all those files back (and you’re in the disk properties dialog anyway), go to the Tools property sheet and defrag your nice new upgraded system!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,upgrade,RC to RTM,MagicDisc,TreeSize Free

W2K8 Metadata Cleanup without NTDSUTIL

I just learned that when you aren’t able to normally demote a domain controller in Active Directory and have to perform a metadata cleanup, if you’re running Windows 2008 or R2 it’s become much easier.

The classic method for cleaning up the DC’s metadata in Active Directory has been to go into NTDSUTIL and running through a sequence of commands to point at the right computer object representing the domain controller, then removing it. What I just learned from one of the Microsoft directory services guys is that

…you can use Active Directory Users and Computers to clean up server metadata. In this procedure, deleting the computer object in the Domain Controllers organizational unit (OU) initiates the cleanup process, which proceeds automatically.

The only place so far I’ve found this documented are those two sentences in this TechNet article. Simple! Just delete the computer object! Now I need to go try it in my test lab…

Technorati Tags: Windows 2008,Windows 2008 R2,Active Directory,DCPROMO,metadata cleanup

A Really Interesting Look at W2K8 R2 Seven Days Before Ship

Windows IT Pro has just aired an interesting interview (if you’re an IT pro that focuses on operating systems – aren’t we all?) of the daily “ship” meeting for Windows Server 2008 R2, a week before it went RTM (released to manufacturing). The overall program manager Brian McNeill is the main interviewee, and the always colorful Iain McDonald also has a cameo.

My colleague Karen Forster, who handled the project, has a good blog post about it.

For those of you that still have old doubts about how reliable the Windows server product is, check out these numbers:

Those reliability statistics McDonald was looking at were noteworthy. The Microsoft study shows that the new release significantly exceeds the reliability goal that was set for its predecessor Windows Server 2008 (WS08) at its RTM. As the graph in the video shows, WS08 R2 RC demonstrated availability of 99.9987 percent (~ 7 minutes of down time per year), which exceeds WS08’s RTM availability of 99.9978 percent (~12 minutes of down time per year)."

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/102593/exclusive-video-inside-the-windows-server-2008-r2-ship-room.html 

Technorati Tags: Windows Server,Windows Server 2008 R2,R2,Microsoft,Windows IT Pro

Native OS Boot from VHD: The Windows 7 Way

Those of us that need to use a server OS from what’s normally perceived as a client (e.g., demonstrating a Windows Server feature or application on our notebook during a breakout session) have had to work with different ways to achieve it, and none were all that convenient.

Usually it entailed taking a SWAG* at the amount of disk space you needed for your primary OS, then splitting the volume to leave room for the second OS. In the days of small notebook disks, these estimations were precious indeed. Another option was to install a second hard drive – usually requiring you to lose the CD/DVD-ROM drive. (Hey, you usually worked rather than watched movies on the airplane anyway, yah?) The more daring of us simply installed the server OS and used it as we would a client OS, generally sacrificing device support and power management in the process. I could never quite do that; I valued the notebook-specific features too much when I traveled.

The situation has gotten a whole lot better with Windows 7. (What hasn’t?) With Windows 7 on virtualization-compliant hardware like my ThinkPad T61P, you can boot directly to a .VHD file.

What does this mean?

• No more partition guessing. Your second (or third, or fourth) OS simply resides in a .VHD file on your primary partition.
• It’s flexible. You can add and remove OSes as easily as moving the files around and modifying the boot menu with BCDEDIT.
• It’s fast. I’ve not run any tests, but it sure seems to be as fast as right off the metal. I wouldn’t have known the difference from a “real” boot. (What is real any more, anyway?)
• Your other partitions appear as  D:, E:, etc. on the VHD-booted OS. All your physical disk volume data is visible; I change the location of My Documents on the secondary OS so it points to my primary documents folder.

Steps to book a second OS from VHD

1. Create a .VHD containing an OS of your choice. I probably wouldn’t bother with Windows XP, because if you’re running Windows 7 you can install Windows Virtual PC for free and have a bootable XP image. You can build your image on either Hyper-V or Virtual PC.
   
2. Make a copy of the VHD in case something goes wrong!
   
3. run SYSPREP:
   
   %windir%/system32/sysprep/sysprep.exe /generalize
   /shutdown
   
   to create an image that will customize itself according to the new hardware it finds itself on. If you don’t run SYSPREP, be sure to remove the integration add-ins from your VHD before you copy it over.
   
4. Copy the VHD to your notebook.
   
5. Configure your boot menu to recognize the VHD. For this, I lifted – er, “reused” -  the following from a TechNet article:

To add a native-boot VHD to an existing Windows 7 boot menu

If you are deploying the VHD to a computer with an existing Windows 7 or Windows Server® 2008 R2 installation, you can use the BCDedit tool to make the new VHD bootable and add it to the boot menu. For more information about using the BCDedit tool, see this Microsoft Web site.

Note : Before you begin, you can back up your BCD store using the BCDedit tool with the /export option. For example, at a command prompt, type: bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup

1. Copy an existing boot entry for a Windows 7 installation. You will then modify the copy for use as the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /copy {default} /d "R2 VHD Boot"

   Where “R2 VHD Boot” is what will appear in the boot menu. When the BCDedit command completes successfully, it returns a {GUID} as output in the Command Prompt window.
   

2. Locate the {GUID} in the command-prompt output for the previous command. Copy the GUID, including the braces, to use in the following steps. (I recommend enabling QuickEdit in the window’s properties so you can easily cut and paste the GUID. )
   
3. Set the device and osdevice options for the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   

   or whatever you’ve named the VHD. Note the syntax for the VHD location.

4. Set the boot entry for the VHD as the default boot entry. When the computer restarts, the boot menu will display all of the Windows installations on the computer and boot into the VHD after the operating-system selection countdown completes. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /default {guid}
   

   (Being conservative and not familiar with BCDEDIT, I went into the System properties on my Windows 7 boot and made sure that Windows 7 was the default, in case something went horribly wrong.)

5. Some x86-based systems require a boot configuration option for the kernel in order to detect certain hardware information and successfully native-boot from a VHD. At a command prompt, type:

   bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on
   (I did this on my x64 system too.)

   
   

That’s it. You should now be able to shut down and reboot into your secondary OS. It will complete its installation from the sysprep, and you’ll be ready to go.

There’s one more really useful step if your secondary OS is Windows 2008 R2. Even though it’s from the same code base as Windows 7, R2 doesn’t seem to automatically recognize range of hardware. So, when you open up Device Manager (devmgmt.msc from the Run menu for the lazy like me) you’ll probably end up with a collection of yellow exclamation points for hardware that isn’t recognized. You can correct most of these errors with this trick: Right-click on them, choose Update Drivers, and point the update location to d:\windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository. This is where the Windows 7 drivers for your hardware are stored. If the hardware works on Windows 7 you can make it work on R2 with this trick. You can also update drivers that did load on R2 – but with the generic Microsoft drivers -  with the manufacturer-specific drivers automatically downloaded from Windows Update while you were booted in Windows 7.

* Scientific wild-assed guess.

** Update ** Boot from VHD will only be available in Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

Technorati Tags: Boot from VHD,Windows 7,VHD,Windows Server 2008 R2,R2

Analyzing your Windows 7 Notebook Battery Performance

One of the many nice features of Windows 7 is its increased energy efficiency. (Anything that lets me finish a movie on a long flight is goodness!) What I didn’t know until now is that you can actually generate a report that outlines your exact power usage and how to improve it (though somewhat cryptically).

Just run

powercfg -energy -output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\Energy_Report.html

from an elevated command prompt (I created a batch file, then a shortcut to it with the Run As Administrator option checked). It will run for 60 seconds, then drop a very detailed energy report on your desktop in HTML format. 

I haven’t analyzed the report other than to see that I’m burning electrons at a good rate. But it’s on purpose as I’m running in high performance profile at the moment. Thanks to http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4569-power-efficiency-diagnostics-report.html for this tip! For more information on Windows 7 energy efficiency, please see

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-energy-efficiency.aspx

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,power efficiency,battery efficiency report

3.74!

…out of a possible 4.0 in the evaluations for my session yesterday. 74% were “very satisified”, 26% were satisfied, and no one was anything less. One comment was that the title should have been “Activation and Licensing Demystified” (good idea), another said “Thanks for that session. Finally got it.” 91 attendees for a session on (zzzzzzzz) volume activation!

On the strength of the session, the track chair verbally invited me back next year on the spot :).

Technorati Tags: volume activation,Windows 7,Windows Server 2008,Vista,R2,Windows Server 2008 R2,microsoft

IT Manager panel discussions at Tech Ed

I had a chance yesterday morning to participate in a great IT Manager track on real-world challenges around virtualization. It was great to be able to simply sit on the panel with Edwin Yuen (aka “Ed-V”) from the virtualization team, Baldwin Ng for solution accelerators, Kevin Remde (all-round technical evangelist),  Peter Meister from Microsoft working on cloud computing efforts, Art Wittman from InfoWorld Analytics, and all the audience members that participated in the back and forth conversation. Great insights, and great fun as well!

Technorati Tags: Tech Ed,Edwin Yuen,Baldwin Ng,Kevin Remde,Peter Meister,Art Wittman,virtualization

Recession Tech (Ed)

I've gotten lazy about blogging in the last few weeks, and it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that duh, this week probably merits some comment. I'm spending the week at Tech Ed 09, Microsoft’s main conference for IT professionals.

Attendance is understandably down; there are supposedly 6,000 attendees – about half of a good year’s population. The Los Angeles Convention Center is big, and though there are a lot of people here it definitely doesn’t feel as packed as in the past.

For the first time at a conference I'm wearing three different hats. Usually nowadays I’m at a conference because I’m presenting, and this week is no exception. I’m doing a session on volume activation. (It’s not my main area of expertise, but I had to do it for Intel, it’s confusing at first look, and people really need to know about it.) For the first time, I’m working with a Microsoft product team, Technical Audience Group Marketing (TAGM), to assist them in meeting with and talking to IT pros and IT managers in sessions and roundtables. Finally,  I’m also acting as an attendee and trying to get in as many System Center and virtualization sessions as my other duties allow. So it's a busy week!

I also always try to take time to reconnect with my professional colleagues and friends - Gil, MarkM, MarkR, Rhonda, Brian, Ulf, Laura, Karen, Jeff, Sheila, Kim, Kevin - that's I'm lucky enough to know and new friends that I make while here. Probably the biggest, but least appreciated benefit of speaking at conferences is that you can develop a network of really interesting, world-class people you'd never meet otherwise. I'm a person that's perfectly content working without the minute-to-minute in person people interaction that happens in an office; I've been working from home full time for the last nine years. My circle of colleagues doesn't necessarily communicate a lot with each other in between functions. After all, they're similar personality types as I am: kinda schizophrenic because they do long periods of working by yourself, interspersed with bursts of very public presenting to hundreds of people and visiting with your friends. But we do have a great time when we get together!

Technorati Tags: Tech Ed,Microsoft

Proximity doesn’t confer talent…

Today’s an interesting day. I’ve over on Microsoft Campus in Building 99 to help review Tech Ed dry runs for the IT Manager track. 99 is a new building, with a floor-to-ceiling atrium and large stairwell. It’s the new home of Microsoft Research, which is one of the largest (in terms of $$) pure research divisions of any company in the world. That may be, but today I didn’t see any human powered helicopters or levitating Segways or the like (jet belts are SO passé).

What I did see is the former president of India giving a speech and having a Q&A session, via webcast, on an enormous movie-theater-sized screen and projector in the atrium. So interesting here on Microsoft campus, with little Priuii shuttle cars flitting about providing transportation between the little city here of buildings.

Microsoft reveals its plans for the next generation data center

...and it's way bigger than most of us are used to thinking. Have you ever stopped to consider the amount of computing power that goes behind these online search, blogging, and services that are becoming more and more of a part of our virtual landscape? I have, because I've been lucky enough to be working with Microsoft's Global Foundation Services Active Directory team. This sort of thing redefines the term "big". And not only big - highly flexible, with the ability very quickly add or remove hundreds or thousands of servers. What's not being talked about right now is how the software infrastructure (like Active Directory) must be designed to cope with this new way of "industrial scale IT". I hope to be able to shed a little light on this soon.

Here's a video about their Generation 4.0 data centers. Note in the European data center there isn't a roof!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,data center,microsoft data centers,cloud computing,generation 4.0 data center,active directory,global foundation services

Outward to Bali

As of this writing, I've been traveling for 36 hours nonstop on about 3 hours of sleep plus catnaps. I'm waiting in the (anemically) air conditioned departure lounge for my Air Asia flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Denpasar, Bali (which is also Indonesia). I'm in Indonesia and Malaysia to give some Microsoft training, and am taking advantage of my proximity to Bali to visit that fabled island.

The low-cost airline canceled my earlier flight for an unspecified reasons - probably not enough people on it - and delayed my flight to 7:50 PM. So unless the driver for my hotel checks that the flight has been cancelled, he'll have probably given up and I'll have to find a taxi to take me to Ubud, the little cultural village in south-central Bali. None of my gadgets, including my supposedly world-enabled GSM 3G AT&T Tilt phone, has any kind of signal at all to call the hotel. This means I won't get to the hotel until probably midnight for a total of 42 hours, obliterating my previous personal record of 28 hours to Singapore. Hope they leave the light on.

Of course, that would be IF I actually had the hotel's address and phone number. Hey, I had a LOT of details to put together!

All things considered, the outbound trip has gone really well. The big things like my rollaboard showing up in the Jakarta airport after following me about 8,000 miles. And I haven't left any of those little important things - passport, wallet, camera bag - at any of the thirty places I've probably sat down. The fact I'm traveling business class really does make a difference over the long haul of a 14 hour flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong. The upper deck of a Cathay Pacific 747 is very futuristic; I feel like Yeoman Rand (I'm dating myself here) should be serving me a coffee or something. It's like a narrow little cubicle farm, only with personal video and really good wine.

I suspect Friday will be a low-key day for me!

*Update* Total time to my hotel: 46 hours. All but 2 hours was waiting for Air Asia, which was delayed another hour. This caused me to be a total of 3 hour's later than the hotel was expecting to pick me up. So more waiting ensured to get that straightened up (image: sitting at the Bali airport pickup area at 1:30 AM, chatting up a taxi driver to kill the time). You can bet I'll never fly them again.

The good news is that the night sounds at my room - which overlooks hundreds of acres of rice fields - are amazing. I recorded 10 minutes of it last night with the teeny Belkin iPod recorder plug-in and will edit it into an MP3. A chorus of frogs, crickets, thunder in the distance…I could put it on a CD and charge for it.

*Update to the update* And Friday wasn't that low-key a day. I recommend using melatonin for timezone-shifting.

Technorati Tags: Bali,Ubud,Cathay Pacific,Air Asia

Good ISP!

I was shooting a video (yes, my ugly mug on camera) at the Microsoft Lincoln Square building in downtown Bellevue today, a really amazing money-is-no-object-for-good-working-conditions kind of place. Just for fun, I ran a speed test on their internet connection. The results were so amazing I immediately took a screenshot of it:

Just in case you can’t pick out the numbers, that’s almost 10 Megabits/sec up, and 81 Megabits/sec down. That’s OVER 10 times the bandwidth any of us (non-FIOS) people get. I resumed some FTP downloads I was doing, and man, those little download progress bars were flying! Note the ISP is Microsoft itself, with a ping time of .4 ms J.

Speaking At TechEd 2008

It's been a very busy week here down in Orlando at TechEd 2008 IT Pro, Microsoft's conference for IT professionals.

I gave one session on the new, deeply-disliked Volume Licensing methodology everyone has to use to deploy volume versions of Vista and Windows 2008. Despite the dryness of the material, the DISLIKE of the material, and the lateness of the hour (5 PM), the session was well received! 223 people (about an 85% full room) with an overall rating of 7.75 of a possible 9. (The top rated sessions are getting 8.4's and 8.5's.) From the comments, demos would have pulled it higher...but there's just about nothing to see in volume licensing. I'll have to work on that.

I spent much of the rest of the time running around doing odds and ends and occasionally hitting sessions in between. A few interesting (to me, anyway) anecdotes:

• Picked up lunch for Mark Minasi as the poor guy had been blowing and going all day; he had no time at all between his sessions. By the time I'd hiked out to his breakout room, the session - a roundtable on security with him, Mark Russinovich, Steve Riley, and a couple of other folks - was so full it was locked out. (They're the conference stars and get very high ratings on their talks.) So, I sat outside, did some work, until the session was nearly over. When it finished, Minasi bolted out for his next session before I could give it to him. Before I could chase him down, I said hi to Russinovich, and HE ate it!
• On MarkR's advice, I found and introduced myself to Michael Leworthy, the Windows Server Infrastructure session chair, to express my interest at speaking at IT Forum (Tech Ed in Europe), and it was a productive discussion. Who knows, maybe I'll make it over there...
• Got a Vista question answered. (The only way to turn hibernation back on after you've deleted the hibernation file is to run powercfg /hibernate on - works like a charm)
• Helped connect some people together, always a feel-good kind of activity
• Got to hang out with my friend Guido Grillenmeier a little bit, always looked forward to as he's based in Frankfurt.
• And of course, got to spend time with my MVP buddies Gil, Joe, Brian, Laura, and catch up with my Intel friends Derek, Alix, and Roy. Gee, this makes me sound like more of a social butterfly than I really am! You see, 95% of my time is spent working out of a home office where my audience is usually just two dogs :).
• Received a cache of uber-schwag for MVPs only, told by secret MVP word-of-mouth-net. I knew there was a reason I was an MVP!

Tonight is the conference party at Universal Studios; Microsoft rents out a large chunk of the place, and there's food, drinks, and beer & wine right out on the sidewalks (at least there was the last time I was at one of these shindigs). Plus the magazine is throwing something too. Decisions, decisions...

Technorati Tags: TechEd 2008,volume licensing,VA 2.0

MVP Summit 2008

I and many of my fellow MVPs are up in Seattle this week for the 2008 MVP summit. It's split between the Washington State Convention Center Center, and the Microsoft campus. This year most of our time has been spent on campus with the various product groups, Directory Services in our case.

It's been a good week so far, though a new cold knocked me down hard for the first few days. I literally snuck out to my car in the parking structure and took a short nap to get me through the day! (And no, I hadn't had a drop to drink the night before.) Nothing like feeling bad to make you appreciate feeling good.

This morning's session is on the design planning for the AD implementation of PowerShell. AD missed the boat on PowerShell for the release of Windows 2008, to the chagrin of AD administrators around the world. The good news is that Dushyant Gill is running through their ideas before the MVPs now and getting great feedback...and they're apparently early enough in the design cycle to incorporate a lot of our feedback into their design. So some of the flexibility of the final AD PowerShell implementation will be as a result of MVPs like Joe, Dean, and Joe Kaplan.

My friend Nick Whittome called me last night to tell me he just passed both the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Knowing Nick and how much he likes his drink (and the fact he said he'd had a few), I was initially skeptical, but it turns out they were both in town for (a different!) conference. I was disappointed that NIck hadn't charged up and done the old "arm's length photo" op, like he'd done with Steve Ballmer.

Technorati Tags: MVP,MVP Summit,Powershell,AD,Nick Whittome

Town Hall Meeting...In A Very Nice Town

Earlier this year, I received a mysterious invite to spend a day at Microsoft to talk about the IT Pro* community and Microsoft. It was sufficiently off the wall - phone call from some admin with a followup email - that I pursued it. I found they wanted me to be one of three panelists to talk about data center consolidation - and the other two were Microsoft Vice Presidents! I backed away from that panel in a hurry, being both unqualified to speak about datacenter consolidation (even without VPs) and on the express train to an RGE (resume generating event) by being an Intel employee pontificating with MS VPs! So many of my professional colleagues I know from speaking and writing were invited - Mark Minasi, Darren Mar-Elia, Gil Kirkpatrick - we began joking about them closing the doors and turning on the gas :). There were also prominent bloggers from ZDNet, university people, and journalists present.

They let me go despite my panel decline, and the trip even tied in nicely with an already planned campus trip for the Longhorn (now W2K8) Technology Adoption Program. It was held in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center, a very posh place - all the free espresso drinks you could want. And the "conference room" we were in was filled with leather sofas for seating; not a task chair in sight.

One of the day's discussions centered around Microsoft's involvement with IT Pros and what they could do to improve their relations. This was a worthwhile discussion because for most of its history Microsoft - being a company full of developers - has been much more developer focused than IT Pro focused. What really made it special is that the 50 or so of us invited guests shared the discussion with Steve Ballmer (CEO in case you didn't know), Bob Muglia (Senior VP), and Ron Marsevitch (VP). They listened, asked a bunch of good questions, and took down notes to follow up on. Well, what was interesting is that they themselves didn't take down notes; they had minions from their entourage in the back that took a note whenever they raised an eyebrow :).

To round off the day, we went to dinner with the VPs at Columbia vineyards in Woodinville just north of Redmond. My friend Mark Russinovich, who had recently joined Microsoft as a Technical Fellow, showed up for the free food and drink :). I shared a table with Bob Muglia, Gil Kirkpatrick of NetPro, Karen Forster of Windows IT Pro, and a couple other interesting folks. Gil was able to give Bob visibility to Gil's DEC (Directory Experts Conference), the premier industry conference for directory service people. Many of Bob's own employees are regular attendees; in fact the conference has a huge attendance from Microsoft. It's not often you get to have dinner with such an interesting group!

*IT Pro is one of the two major categories Microsoft splits its customers into. (The other is Developer.) IT Pros generally don't write code; instead they evaluate and deploy Microsoft products in the enterprise.

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