Comfortably Dumb

This is the best feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2… period. The opportunities here are endless. So much so that I really can’t figure out how I want to use it at home. However, for my Microsoft laptop I’m using it to boot into Windows Server 2008 R2 so I can work with Hyper-V virtual machines. Yes, I could do this before, but I had to create multiple partitions guessing at their appropriate size and wasting precious mobile disk space. Using a dynamic VHD I’m able to give myself this capability and only lose 8 GB of space! Now, I’m thinking about creating an MSE demo VHD that I could use to run with the full power of my laptop.

I am happy to announce that the Microsoft Managed Services Engine Feb’09 CTP has been released on CodePlex. This release represents a major milestone of our solution. Not only have we rewritten the management tool from the ground up in WPF, many changes have been made in the Enterprise Service Model we are attempting to manage. The new UI presents a visual view of the Enterprise Service Model.

If you think about service providers sitting off to the right of the screen and service consumers sitting off to the left, then you quickly get an idea of how resources are organized onscreen.

Double-clicking a resource will expose the detail for that resource. You can also collapse the other panels if you need more space. Please explorer the new drop and please give your feedback.

I like to relax by playing video games. My game of choice is Team Fortress 2. So, when I started randomly crashing when entering different servers and game play became too choppy to play if I did get in I was pretty upset. This happened on Windows 7 and Vista, so I wasn’t sure where the problem laid. My gut reaction was my hardware was failing or one of the latest hardware drivers was bad. However, I realized that I had installed IE8 on Vista and that Windows 7 comes with IE8. I’m a fanatic Internet Download Manager fan and it always installed and I remembered an issue I had when Vista was first released. At that time Steam would lockup upon opening. The trick then was to disable IE integrated in IDM and what do you know that did the trick. Several TF2 servers display a home page that is HTML based when you join, just like Steam renders its content using HTML. However, the Steam issue has been long fixed (not sure by which party) so this caught me by surprise. Choppy game play was a separate issue. I recently switched from AVG to Forefront, so it was aggressively scanning my game files for viruses and the like. Simply adding HL2.exe to the list of processes and the files it uses from being scanned did the trick.

I'm super excited to say that T-Money has joined the team! Tony is at orientation this week in Redmond and will start drinking from the firehose shortly. :)

To be honest, I was skeptical when Windows Home Server was originally announced. At the time, I was already using Windows OneCare Backup for my family's computers and I was using using Acronis for the computers I personally use on a daily basis. Acronis failed me when I had a massive disk failure and it was not able to restore my backup. Talk about not being happy. After that I switched to ShadowProtect and I have been extremely pleased. I had another failure and ShadowProtect was able to restore without a hitch, including using third-party RAID drivers. They only issue with ShadowProtect is the size of backups. I have roughly 270 GB that make up my system drive and personal data. This doesn't include my virtual machines, which I don't backup. ShadowProtect does image based full and incremental backups. There is a way to make it do differentials, but the implementation was not very useful to me. I also defrag frequently, which caused the backup size to artificially inflate. When I came across the Windows Home Server Technical Brief for Home Computer Backup and Restore whitepaper it sounded too good to be true, so I decided to evaluate the product. I've been running WHS full backups daily for 3 months now. The backups for 5 computers only occupies 358 GB! And that is with every computer defragging every night. It is hard to wrap your head around how that is possible without reading the whitepaper. This brilliant piece of technology is the killer WHS app for me; everything else is just gravy.

Since the Oslo announcement at last year's SOA & BP Conference, it hasn't been really clear, at least publicly, what it is and what capabilities it provides. Now that PDC has come and gone and the SDK has been published, we are more free to talk about solutions that can be built on this type of technology. However, to explore the capabilities you need to get it installed. The installer wants a default instance of SQL Server to create the repository on. If you have a named instance you can still create the repository. To do so, you need to open a command prompt in the "Microsoft Repository" directory under the directory where you installed the SDK. Use the SqlServer argument in conjunction with CreateRepository.exe to specify the named instance.

Now that you have the repository setup, start exploring M and the Repository.

I encountered a NullReferenceException when I tried to install the Visual Studio content that comes with the WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 1. I found a work around, so I thought I'd share. Download the source package from CodePlex and in the "Futures/Visual Studio Templates Installer" directory you will find RESTStarterKit.vsi. Just double-click it and you should be good to go. When I tried to execute RunVsi.exe it just crashed.

I just finished delivering MSE training in Amsterdam to regional Microsoft consultants. These guys understand the SOA problem space really well and code like few people can. Truly impressive to see so much talent in one room. I think I’m going to end up taking many of their ideas back to the rest of the team for us to incorporate into MSE.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This is quite possibility the worst movie of the year that played nationally in theaters. Clearly, George Lucas has not been in touch with what makes a good movie in a long time… long time.

In Bruge

This immediately made me think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and that made me think of Josh Gahr and Shawn Skipper. It makes me think of Josh and Shawn, but I think Shawn and Doug actually did the skit. The dialogue was brilliant and made me laugh so hard I was waking up other passengers. The ending was predictable, but definitely Shakespearean. One of the best of the year.

Redbelt

[Contradictory statements ahead!] I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but it ended up not being what I expected. That doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense to me. Watch it.

I completely understand that this isn't the typical usage scenario, but why prevent people from installing Zune 3.0 on Windows Server 2008? The Zune 2.0 package runs just fine.

[This is not a duplicate post, it is just very similar to the Windows Live post]