ESX Free? This is going to be interesting

Just read an article over on Virtualization.info – VMware’s ESX product is to be made available for free. Apparently this news was made available during a recent Q2 2008 earnings conference call, ESX 3i will be made free – although that’s only the hypervisor itself. The rest of the product set, VMware Infrastructure, will not be give away.

There are a number of other key details about this over in the Virtualization.info’s article. We certainly live in interesting times! Clearly HyperV is making  real impact – although going forward, the real money it so be made in the surrounding management infrastructure (SCVMMN in MS’s case).

Technorati Tags: VMware,hypervisor

Thsrs – The Shorter Thesaurus

Thanks to a comment over on Twitter (by @SharnAtlanta), I stumbled upon found the Thsrs (the shorter thesaurus) site), which does what it says. You type in a word, and it finds shorter ones. Entering “glorious” returns: known, blessed, blest and some more.

Why bother, you might ask. Well first, for those addicted to Twitter, Thsrs can help you to get more bang for your  140 character tweet. If you don’t know what Twitter is, of if you don’t care, then this probably is no big deal. If yoiu are a twitter addict, then you can use it to fit more thoughts into your 140-character max limit.

The other place it’s useful is in writing and you want to find a simpler or shorter word. By using shorter or simpler words, you can make your writing a bit more accessible to the average person. This is doubly useful when writing for a global audience (some/many of whom may not speak English, or American, as their native language).

In some cases, for example when you are deliberately [NB: Thsrs suggests by design, by choice, on purpose] writing for a highly educated audience, longer words may be OK. Even if it sometimes feel like the writing is pretentious [NB: Thsrs suggests: flaunty, arty, inflated, showy, splashy] rather than educated. But for mass market, especially an international one where your thoughts are more important than the specific word, then Thsrs can be useful.

As noted on the blog entry, the source of the words used by Thsrs come from the Big Huge Thesaurus. BHT, in turn, gets from the WordNet database, created at Princeton University.

And one final thing – from the main Thsrs page (http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/), you can get a search engine plug-in for FireFox (etc) that enables you to add this site for searches. That way, you can search directly from your browser. Neat!

Technorati Tags: Thesaurus,tool,writing,FireFox

ISO Recorder – Working Great on Server 08

Working with CDs and DVDs, especially in a virtual environment often means dealing with ISO images. An ISO is in effect a single file on a system that contains a full file structure as per ISO 9660 (including data and metadata). You can also burn an ISO image to a CD/DVD and then that disk can be use in other systems (e.g. burning an ISO of Windows Server downloaded from TechNet).

Sadly, Windows does not, by default, support burning an ISO image. You can burn a disk that contains one file (the iso image), but that will not work on another system – so it’s not very useful (unless you like creating coasters).

Just over four ago, I first wrote about a really nice free tool called ISO Recorder. Built by Alex Feinman. the ISO Recorder burns an ISO imate to a disk, but also rips a physical disk to an ISO image. Alex has improved the tool over the years, first with a version that worked with the latest version of XP and Server 2003, then with a version for Vista.

Today I downloaded a bunch of ISO files that I needed to burn. But I had no tools on my recently built Workstation, which is running a pimped Server 2008 64 bits (with no built in ISO burning feature). A quick Google brought up the relevant page from which I could obtain the tool (free). A few minutes later, and the 64-bit version was downloaded and has created my first burned ISO on the new box. Neat. It works fine on Server 08 which was a pleasant surprise.

Thanks Alex – this is a very useful tool. ISO Recorder Rocks!

Technorati Tags: ISO,ISO Recorder,Alex Feinman

Reducing Vandalism on Public Wiki Sites

I’ve been reading an interesting article from the New Your times on Wikipedia’s experiment to cut down vandalism. The approach is rather simplistic: get the community to check the update for lack of valdalism before the article is made available for general use. It’s a bit more complex than that, but basically by making most posts subject to review before  general posting, vandals are much less likely to see their work. The hope is the vandals just pack up and move along. It’ll be interesting to see what success this approach has.

I contribute to MS’s TechNet and MSDN wikis (aka community contributions) where vandalism also occurs. The vast majority of what I’m seeing is pretty minor and there’s not a lot of it: 3 to 5 posts a day with what I call “non content” such as an article saying “great” or just containing an email address or a web link. I can see these posts by following the RSS feed from the two sites –but all too often, by the time I hit the actual web site, those non-content articles are gone or un-vandalised. As a result, the quality of the contrubutions is not really affected by vandalism.

I wonder if a ‘checking’ approach would improve the quality of the MSDN and Technet wiki sites?

Technorati tags: community content, msdn library, technet library, wikipedia

Microsoft Optimization – an Introduction

One big focus areas for Microsoft as noted at last week’s MS Partner Conference in Houston is Microsoft Optimization. Renamed from Infrastructure Optimization, MO is clearly something big for MS. It’s got it’s own landing page: http://www.microsoft.com/optimization and there’s a growing body of material to support MO.

In effect, MO is an attempt by Microsoft at an IT maturity model which assess an organisation’s IT systems and provides guidance in how to make it better (i.e. to optomise it!). The basic concepts of MO are not new, but MS’s focus on them is new, and good news.

In Houston, it seemed like most of Microsoft was talking MO as part of their individual messages. Although, in some cases, the individual messages were immature and lacked depth and substance. But there’s some good thinking going on and I’m sure the messages will improve as MS works out what MO really all means.

Some of the material on MS’s web site is older, and uses earlier naming. The TechNet library site, for example, talks about Infrastructure Optimization. While IO is an important part of MO, MO is more. The term MO is still pretty new, and it’ll take time for MS to get all the documentation updated and fully aligned.

Another observation is that there’s no possibility of community content around the TechNet IO/MO pages. It would make sense for MS to open up these pages for community content and to enable the community to add value to the existing MS content.

I’ll be writing more about MO over the coming weeks. I see MO as something that MS customers should understand on two levels. First, customers will start to hear MO ad part of MS’s approach to selling so understanding what MO is can be helpful if only to understand MS’s latest sales and marketing approach. Second, MO has a lot of great ideas about how to make the most our of the infrastructure you already have. So ignore the Sales and Marketing fluff and concentrate on the real depth.

If you have views around MO, I’ve posted some questions around MO over on Twitter. I’m @doctordns, come on over and take part in the conversation.

Technorati Tags: MO,Microsoft Optimization,Infrastructure Optimization

Open Geek Goodness from Microsoft

I’ve been taking some time off the road and have been seriously geeking out with all the protocol information issued by Microsoft at the Open Specification site.

There is a HUGE amount of fairly low level information about the file formats used by Microsoft products and various protocols employed byproducts including OCS< Exchange and Office. There are thousands of pages of documentation here.

Much of this documentation was produced for/by Microsoft thanks to legal requirements. You can probably Google for that – I’m just glad MS published it. It’s fun to see where the writers left their tails – I wonder who has done some of the OCS related protocols for example (e.g. Nice Job Proseware).

Microsoft could also usefully enable the wiki functions on these pages. I’ve found numerous places where the content is correct – but could be improved.Currently there’s no way to document these areas for improvements.

Technorati Tags: Protocols,OCS,proseware

Finding Your External IP address (with PowerShell)

For many of us, the IP address of our PC is not a publicly routable one.  If I run IPConfig on my workstation, I get something that looks like this:

Ethernet adapter Lan1BuiltIn:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : foobar.net
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::3955:f42b:2d1e:1423%10
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.234.12.123
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.234.12.100

But if you were to try to ping me, you’d never get to my system, since I’m behind a firewall. My IP address on the Internet, the publicly routable IP address, is quite different.

There are a lot of ways you can find out what your IP address is – there are a bunch of sites you can use:

• http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ip.html
• http://home.ipaddress.com
• http://ip-address.domaintools.com
• http://www.check-ip.net
• http://ipchicken.com
• http://checkip.org

No doubt there are a bunch more!

Recently, I’ve seen two other sites used, via PowerShell, to get your IP address. The first is http://checkip.dyndns.org. The nice thing about this site is that it returns very little data, so you can do some ‘screen scraping’ to extract your external IP address. With this site, as shown on Per Ostergaard’s blog, you could do this as follows:

$wc=New-Object net.webclient
$wc.downloadstring("http://checkip.dyndns.com") -replace "[^\d\.]"

This is pretty cool – and in discovering this, I discovered the –replace operator that I did not know about before.

The second is also interesting. The source is here.  The script looks like this:

 

## Function to retrieve external IP address.
## the external address is retrieved from the
## title header of the webpage "www.myip.dk"

function Get-ExternalIP {
    $source = "http://www.myip.dk"
    $client = new-object System.Net.WebClient
    $webpage = $client.downloadString($source)
    $lines = $webpage.split("`n")
    foreach ($line in $lines) {
        if ($line.contains("</title>")) {
            $ip = $line.replace("    <title>Your IP address is: ", "").replace("</title>","")
        }
    }
    $obj = New-Object Object
    $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty externalIP -value $ip
    $obj
}

What this script does is to first call www.myip.dk and return the page. This site is different form the earlier ones in that it puts the IP address into the title bar. The script then parses the returned page, gets the title directive, and pulls the IP address out.

Technorati Tags: script,powershell,IP address

Code Formatter for Windows Live Writer

As noted in a blog post yesterday, I’ve setup a PowerShell script blog. Sadly, the code formatting I was doing manually stunk and was hard to do anyway! So off to Google to discover Steve Dunns - Code Formatter for Windows Live Writer.

This is an excellent addin and works very nicely. It’s doubly cool that it supports PowerShell.

Technorati Tags: Live Writer,PowerShell,code formatting

The PowerShell Scripts Blog

A new blog: PowerShell Scripts. Not much there yet but so far does what it says.

Technorati Tags: powershell scripts

Windows PowerShell Reference Card

Thanks to a posting I saw in the MSDN Wiki, I’ve discovered a very neat PowerShell reference card. Written by Bruce Payette – this is a most useful reference!

Note: Registration is required but is free.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Bruce Payette

An Amusing PowerShell Script

Many years ago, when Usenet was in it's heyday, there was a funny Perl script (time.pl) making the rounds that calculated which day it was from September 1992. It was an in joke, and amusing at the time - and I've been meaning to work out how to do it in PowerShell.

Well - here is is:

# time.ps1
# based in time.pl from Usenet in days gone by
# original author unknown
$old = [system.datetime]" 1 September 1992"
$now=get-date
$diff = ($now-$old).days
"Today is the {0}th of September 1992" -f $diff

I thought it was funny - hope you do too.

Technorati: powershell, AOL, Usenet

FireFox Live Writer Trials and Tribulations

With FireFox 3, the old Live Writer add-on no longer works, as I noted last Sunday. I especially liked the way this add-on added an icon to the FireFox tool bar. It's a shame, but as written the add-on does not work.

I've since found another tool, Live WriterFox, but it's not quite as nice. But works - well mainly. Oddly, using it to reference my blog, as I did for this post, does not bring up Live Writer.

Today, I got a comment on my Sunday post from the Live Writer Team that pointed to a potential fix. However, this fix does not seem to work - I do not have the file Joe's post refers to. I'm running the LiveWriter latest CTP on Windows Server X64.

More clues gratefully received!

Technorati Tags: Live WriterFox,Live Writer,Blog this for FireFox,blog

FireFox Keyboard Shortcuts

If, like me, you use FireFox a lot, then these FireFox Keyboard Shortcuts can be valuable.

Shame this web page has a typo (shortctus)!

Technorati Tags: firefox,shortcuts

Live Writerfox for FireFox V3

In a recent blog article, I noted that the Live Writer "Blog This" add-on did not work with FireFox 3. This is the add-on from the Live Writer team that put a little icon up in the tool bar.

Over on the Coding Day blog, I see this post:   FireFox Addon (Extension) for Windows Live Writer - Live Writerfox. I looked at it and saw it was dated from 2006. But reading the comments, I see Can has updated his add-on to work with FF3. It's not the same as the one I wanted, but it works great and I've used it already - like to write this blog entry.

Neat – and thanks!

Technorati Tags: Firefox 3,Live Writer,Live WriterFox

MSDN Wiki - 1100 edits later

I've been contributing to the MSDN Wiki for a bit over a year. After an edit tonight, I see I've hit 1100 updates thus far, far in advance of the number 2 contributor!

The purpose of the Wiki is to enable the community to add content. This can be in the form of code samples, deeper explanations, or external references. I do see a bit of graffiti from time to time but thankfully the admins on the site are pretty quick to remove any vandalism (or 'non-content' as I call it).

My adventure with the Wiki started one Sunday afternoon a bit over a year ago. I was looking at a C# code sample on the MSDN site and was trying to convert it into PowerShell. Since PowerShell was built on .NET, it was supposed to be easy to just dig in and use the framework. But I just didn't get it - I was missing something. If I recall, I was trying to play around with the XML functions in PowerShell and just could not work out what was going on!

I posted a query in the most excellent PowerShell MS newsgroup and in under an hour, Keith Hill posted a reply that knocked the fog from my eyes and suddenly I was able to access a .NET Class. So I posted the sample, then a few more. It was a fun day. Then I posted some more and then more - my aim was to put the "PowerShell" tag at number 1 in the tag cloud.

Since then, I've posted just short of 300 samples showing how you can use PowerShell to access various parts of the .NET framework. Whilst working on the Microsoft PowerShell course, I delved into COM and WMI too!

I've also been updating my (and a few other) posts with better tagging. I've not been successful, yet, in the goal of getting PowerShell to be the number 1 tag: 695 posts are tagged as 'contentbug' with only 276 tagged as PowerShell so far.I probably need to check some of my posts to ensure they're tagged correctly.

I've found this most rewarding - I know a lot more about how to use PowerShell to access the core system functions, as well as knowing more about how those functions work. As a trainer, this have been invaluable in prepping up to teach PowerShell. It's also a wonderful reference for others to build on, as I've started to see.

A great challenge to trainers wanting to learn to teach PowerShell well - add a few samples yourself. Work with the examples from the course. Then find an undocumented class/method/member, etc. and develop some new samples. Carry on for a bit and who knows, your name may be in the top contributors list.

Technorati Tags: MSDN Wiki,PowerShell,MSDN,SDK,WMI,.NET,COM,scripting

Jerome’s Place - Pining for the Fjords :-(

Some time ago, I posted about a wonderful Grateful Dead related Bit-Torrent site, known as Jerome’s Place (before that known as the TMNSP site). It had a tremendous amount of Dead and Jerry material including Jerry’s full catalogue for 74-82!! As a member, I was given a few invites to hand out. I asked folks to email me and I’d get them hooked up. It was a test – if you’re smart enough to work out my email, then maybe you should be let in! Of course, as expected, I got no emails and a lot of comments in the blog. I had intended to send out the invites to the first few who send me email (I needed the email address to hook you up – but none of the requests actually included an email I could use). I got another request this week, which I published, but sadly I can’t help there  either (not including your email means I can’t sign you up).

But despite these glitches, I still can’t help – Jerome’s place is gone. Like many of these sites, it came, served and has gone away again. No idea where it went or why – but the site is no more. Such a shame as I had a great ratio there, but much more importantly, there was a great family there that had a tremendous amount of music. I think I have pretty much everything from mid 60’s till late 77, and a goodly selection thereafter (including all of Jerry from 74-82). Such a shame.

RIP Jerome’s Place.

Technorati tags: Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Jerome's Place

Live Writer “Blog This” Add-in for FireFox Not Working on FireFox 3

I love Microsoft’s Live Writer blogging tool and have used it pretty consistently since it was first release. There have been some issues (mainly caused by Blogger doing odd things), but these generally been fixed quickly. I’ve just upgraded to FireFox version 3 only to discover that the Blog This addin no longer works.

Please Microsoft Live Writer team – please please please fix this?

Technorati tags: Live Writer, Microsoft, FireFox 3

Out of Office' Automatic E-mail Replies

I was about to set my OOF greeting Outlook, when a colleague sent me a link to Some of the Best 'Out of Office' Automatic email Replies. I’d love to use the last one, but I’m not sure if other folks would get it!

Portable PowerShell – The Community Adds Value (again)

One thing, amongst many, that continually amazes me is the passion and power of the PowerShell community. Each time I see a cool trick or a cool new tool, I say to myself – this could just not get any better. Then it does.

As yet another example of this, take a look at Karl Prosser’s post: Portable PowerShell - v1 and v2 side by side - even on Server Core. WOW – side by side, portable and on Server Core – Oh My! This is almost better than Sushi at Tuna House (not quite, but close!).

Now in this post Karl does not tell you do it, nor does he offer a download. But if he can do it, it’s doable and sooner or later his secrets will become public. The truth is out there!

So PLEASE Microsoft, let us distribute PowerShell as Karl suggests. Talk to the lawyers and get a re-distributable. The ability to run PowerShell V2 on Server Core is just plain awesome.

And thanks Karl for showing the limits of the community (as in there are none!!!!!!)

Technorati tags: PowerShell, Server Core, Karl Prosser, Microsoft Lawyers

TechSmith Launches Snagit 9.0

Those great folks at TechSmith have launched a neat new version of Snagit, their excellent screen capture package. Snagit 9 was released today at TechEd US, and features a bunch of neat and useful new features including the ability to combine images and storing all the previously captured images. I have already installed this version on my laptop and will install it on my desktop at home as soon as I get back.

Snagit was a great product, now it’s even better. I wonder if Snagit will marry me? You can download a trial version from their web site. The full cost is $49.95. And for more details on the release, see Betsy Webber’s blog.

Technorati tags: TechSmith, Snagit 9

Get Sysinternals tools from http://live.sysinternals.com

Now this is pretty cool – Microsoft’s put up a single page with all the Sysinternals tools for you to download. The page http://ive.sysinternals.com features all the tools, which avoids the need to go to the Sysinternals index page, finding the individual tool then downloading it, etc.

This is now on my shortcut list!

Technorati tags: sysinternals, tools

How to order a beer in 26 languages

An important skill – being able to order a beer in many languages. I’ve just found a neat little PDF called Beer_please.pdf .

Enjoy

Technorati tags: beer

VoIP Security Web Seminar

Global Knowledge has published an online VoIP Security Web Seminar. This webcast is delivered by Stuart McLeod, a brilliant instructor. Stuart’s got a load of experience in this field – he was part of the GK team that developed Microsoft’s Voice Ignite material. This webcast, as the name suggests, examines security issues that come with VOIP

Technorati tags: VOIP, Global Knowledge, Voice Ignite

Number of Microsoft Certified Professionals Worldwide

Microsoft Learning publishes a very interesting web page that displays the number of MCPs in the world. You can find this at: https://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/certified.mspx. Perusing it recently, I was amazed to discover a new certification: an MCITP in”United States History Major”.

Fortunately, Trika revealed all in her post: http://blogs.msdn.com/trika/archive/2008/05/30/what-the-hell.aspx. Turns out to be a bit of rather unprofessional bit of sophomoric humour. I guess it must be nice to have the time to play with web sites, but if MSL folks have spare time, perhaps focusing on quality might be a better approach.

Windows Live Writer Technical Preview Available for Download

Those nice folks from the Live Writer team have released a technical preview (i.e. a beta) which you can now download. This new build has a bunch of new features, as described on the Writer Zone blog.

I'm downloading this now!

Technorati tags: writer, live writer, microsoft

Live Writer on X64 - A Solution

I posted earlier about not being able to install Live Writer to my X64 Server 2008 system. Well, a bit of digging and I discovered a simple solution to running Live Writer on X64/Server - just copy the working directory from another system and run it directly from your hard drive. The only downside is a completely 'empty' install - you need to re-add plug-ins, setup options, re-configure ping servers, etc.

But it works!

:-)

Technorati Tags: Liver Writer,X64 Support

.SHN for Windows Media Player

Some time ago, I wrote about plugin codec for WMP that supported the Shorten format. I have a lot of concerts in .SHN format (over 1000)! Unfortunately the link in that article is now gone. :-(

However, I did find an alternative location for this plugin: here. It seems to work just fine!

Technorati tags: SHN, Windows Media Player, Windows, Shorten

Windows Live Writer - No Server or X64 Support?

I just love Microsoft's Live Writer freebie blog posting tool. I post to this and my GK blog using pretty much only Live Writer. I have it on all machines!

My home testing network had been upgraded to run Windows Server 2008 (X64), with several additional servers. Several of my test workstations now run Server X64, using the "Server as a workstation" mods Ohad (a MS Program Manager) has published. 

These rock! My main workstation is a dual-proc quad core Xeon 3ghz powered system with 8gb of ram running a modded x64 Server installation. I really love the functionality, particularly running DFS.

However, today I hit a roadblock - Live Writer won't install. I get and error about it not being supported on Server or XP X64. Grrr... What's more annoying - the installation is an .exe, and ot an .MSI that I could use ORCA to hack out the check on OS version.

Full support would be nice (on an unsupported basis if necessary). But failing that, please Live Writer Team, can you give us a hack?

How about a switch -IreallyKnowWhatIAmDoing to the install? PLEASE? Pretty Please?? Pretty please with whipped cream, gum drops on top and a cherry???

 

Technorati tags: Live Writer, . x64 Support

OCS Voice Ignite - Phase 2

I'm in Copenhagen this week, running the first of the Phase 2 Voice Ignite sessions. The initial phase of VI involved re-deliveries in 6 cites (Orlando, Barcelona, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Paris and Scottsdale). These were big events at big venues mainly taught by MCS consultants and a few GK folks. Phase 2 is smaller regional re-deliveries. We've here in Copenhagen for the first of these (Reading UK, Paris and Austin Texas are the other three of these that are booked thus far).

The biggest issue with these regional re-deliveries is setup. With phase 1, we had support from Microsoft's TSG team (and 1st class they are too). For the the phase 2 deliveries, we're on our own. Like every first run of deep rich training, we've had issues (power, the wrong cables, etc) - nothing we can't and didn't solve. Just more stress!

But - with these challenges behind us, we're now steaming ahead with the training and folks seem to be pretty happy.

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, Voice Ignite, Office Communications Server 2007, Global Knowedge, Microsoft

PowerShell on Server Core

One of my true delights, as a PowerShell MVP, has been to see the incredible PowerShell community grow and attract some really super smart people. Dmitry's another of those incredible people who's brought so much to the community (e.g. the PowerShell AD cmdlets - Dmitry's from Quest!).

And now he's gone and done it again. His blog post:PowerShell on Server Core does what you expect from a title of that name - it tells you how to get Server Core run PowerShell.

This is cool. Seriously cool, albeit very unsupported. Would I deploy this to a production network? Er, no.  Do I have it running in my lab at home? Well - not yet. But only because I've not been home enough recently to actually try this. :-)

Despite the non-supported nature, well done and thanks. VERY Cool!

Technorati tags: Dmitry Sotnikov, Quest, PowerShell, Server Core

Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0

At long last! Microsoft has now shipped Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0. This is a great update to MOF that I look forward to working with this new version.

As for training, I'm not sure whether there is any training but watch this space.

Technorati tags: MOF, Microsoft Operations Framework, Microsoft

Windows PowerShell V2 CTP2 - ready for download

It's been a while, but the latest CTP for PowerShell V2 is  available for free download!!!

This is the latest 'beta' for PowerShell's Version 2.

It rocks!

 

Technorati tags: powershell PowerShellV2

2008 Winter Scripting Games: Advanced Windows PowerShell Event 6 Solution

Some time ago, I got asked to submit an answer to one of the scripting games challenges.  I agreed, thinking I'd get a meaty admin puzzle to work on. Instead, I got a more classic computing problem - calculating prime numbers. Turns out there's a very ancient algorithm, the Sieve of Eratosthenes that can be used. So after a few minutes scratching my head (to work out how the algorithm atually worked), I managed to get a solution which you can read at: 2008 Winter Scripting Games: Advanced Windows PowerShell Event 6 Solution.

This challenge was not an administrative problem, so the solultion may not be all that interesting to IT admins. What was interesting was the fact that you could PowerShell to do this sort of programming - it's a great proof point to the quality of the PowerShell scripting language.

Technorati tags: PowerShell, Scripting Games

The JPK Experience : Announcing a new collaborative project

I've just had some input that says Microsoft will be killing off all NNTP support over the next three years. Thus all those wonderful NNTP based Newsgroups will go away. In its place will be web forums. In a related vein, I also read an interesting article by a MS guy: The JPK Experience : Announcing a new collaborative project.

I've been using NNTP newsgroups for around 20 years, and have achieved my MVP status as a result of my postings in various groups over the years. I've found NNTP to be lightweight, relatively ad free, and most importantly available off line via a powerful client (in my case Turnpike). The client (and there are a bunch if you don't like my choice!) makes NNTP very easy to use, although there is a bit of a learning curve (learning how to kill threads or posters, etc).

By comparison, the web forums are slow (60+ seconds to render a page is unacceptable), and very hard to navigate. To skim read a thread of say 20 articles could take 20 or more minutes (compared to seconds with Turnpike).  Each time I try MS's latest attempts to move NNTP to the web, I feel ill. The latest attempts are just as bad.

Jonathan says this time it's going to work. Sadly, he may be right, but only because MS is taking away the option to use NNTP. He also says that as the business owner he can't deal with NNTP. What the heck? I though business owners actually owned things. Unless the mandate to kill NNTP has been delivered from on-high. I note the reaction to JK's post has been just about entirely negative.

While I'm just one MVP, I am unlikely to place much content on web forums. I use them from time to time, when I can afford to wait for the contents to trickle down. But if you really want answers to questions, then use the newsgroups as long as you can. And in the mean time, why not tell Microsoft what you think?

If you believe NNTP should remain, why not email Steve Ballmer (stevb@microsoft.com) and tell him just how much you want NNTP.

Technorati tags: NNTP, Microsoft, MVP

Beta Announcement: Project Hana (aka MOF v4)

For many years, Microsoft had a pair of technologies: MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework) and MOF (Microsoft Operational Framework). MSF was built from Microsoft's experience building tools like Office, etc. MOF was based on ITIL, with significant additions.

Both products, sadly, seemed to die a death. Perhaps as a kiss of death, they were transferred into MSL and then went from obscurity to the grave. The MCT classes were dropped over a year ago. LIke many, I just assumed that MSL and the wider MS had given up.

I was much surprised and excited by reading in the mcs.ireland.blog/infrastructure blog details about Project Hana (MOF v4), including an invite code to get ahold of the beta.

I am really pleased to see that MOF has not died a death. I am really excited that someone at MS gets it enough to not let these two technologies die. If you are an IT Pro (or a developer for that matter), you should take a look!

This is good news!!!

Technorati tags: MOF, MSF, Microsoft

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Reviewer's Guide

As with a number of earlier OS versions, Microsoft has published an in-depth Reviewer's Guide. This document provides a good technical overview of the new features in Windows Server 2008. If you are evaluating Server 2008, this document is a useful guide. There's also a short version of this document you can download.

Technorati tags: Windows Server 2008, Microsoft