In an article I posted last December, I bemoaned the lack of WinHlp32.exe in Vista. At that time the updated Winhlp32.exe was not available. This was described in KB 917607.
Re-visiting the KB - and an updated version of WinHlp32 is now available. This provides a version of WInHlp32.exe for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista. Installing the update brings back support for older Windows help files.
In a blog article posted recently, I pointed out that the SMTP service had been removed from Vista. In an article in one of the IIS Team blogs, Bill explains this as follows: "The SMTP server has always fit under the 'IIS' umbrella, but wasn't actually owned by the IIS team. The folks that owned it have decided to no longer ship it in Vista (the Windows client SKU) and instead are only shipping it in Longhorn Server."
So a team decided just to not ship it. Nice to know that this was a conscious decision. Sadly, it's yet another regression from XP, and one more reason to stick with XP on my laptop. For me, and others, a better answer would have been for IIS to take ownership of the SMTP service.
I'm dual booting my laptop between Vista and our corporate Windows XP SP2 build. On my XP build, I've installed the SMTP service to enable me to send mail on the road. I've had some problems with my existing supplier, and I was looking for a better answer and there it was as part of XP. I installed the SMTP service, and after a bit of configuration, I have it setup to send mail and not to act as a relay agent. This is working great.
I then booted back to Vista after several days using XP, and went to add the SMTP service to my Vista install. But It's not there! The service was removed in Vista's version of IIS 7.
In the meantime, I've found a replacement, a nice shareware SMTP service that works under Vista. This is the 1st SMTP Server, a shareware program. It works free for 30 days, then dies with the ongoing license costing US$49.
The package is small to download (1.2MB for the zipped version) and the installation is trivial. See the 1st SMTP Server home page for more info on the product.
Once installed, the working set is around 9.2mb at start, but it grows. The initial handle count also seems quite high (116) and it grows too. Not sure if this is handle or memory leaks, or just a program getting started. I'll watch the performance over the next day or two.
It's a shame that the SMTP feature was dropped from Vista. Maybe MS will consider adding it back in SP1. Although by that time, I'll have licensed the 1st SMTP server!
I just stumbled over a neat newly created PowerShell Cmdlet, called format-graph. This cmdlet is described on the author's blog.
Format-graph gets the data to be formatted from the pipeline. you can get the source code from SourceForge.
Some time ago, a number of PowerShell fans created the PowerShell Community Extensions project up at Codeplex. This provides a number of useful features and is part of my default install!
The team have created a new version, V1.1 which is now available for download. Version 1.1 adds a lot of new and enhanced features.
New cmdlets include:
The biggest new features are the two new providers, including an Active Directory provider that works. COOL!!!
If you work with PowerShell, you should be running these extensions.
On Monday, I published an article on an open source application called Console. This app creates a better console (cmd.exe) environment, in which you can run PowerShell.
I got a comment on the blog as to how to install it. Easy - first download the zip file from SourceForge, extract it to a folder on your local system and run console.exe. Create a shortcut to your desktop. And to get to PowerShell - just type PowerShell
PowerShell Analyzer is a rich interactive environment for Windows PowerShell. As described on the web site, Powershell Analyzer has the typical editor and IDE functionality needed by IT Pros and developers alike. A nice product.
Karl Prosser, super-star author of this cool tool, has released a public beta which you can download the beta from Karl's site.
Console is a open source application, available from SourceForge. You can use it to wrap PowerShell which provides benefits such as Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable fonts, different window styles.
Looks Interesting. Thanks to Sandip for pointing this out.
I've been traveling a lot of late. One thing that has been a nice tonic is listening to Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio hour on my iPod shuffle as I drift from airport/cab/train, to site to yet another flight.
I am of an age when I can remember Dylan from his early start. A fokie in NYC, a rebel in Newport, etc were all seminal works for me. I had all his albums and once worked with one of Zimerman's high school colleagues.
Theme Time Radio Hour is a fantastic series. Dylan the DJ takes a theme and spends an hour looking at music that supports it. Most of the music is less than mainstream, which is what makes it so much fun. This is a real look at American music, and some very interesting narrative. As a DJ, Dylan is a poet, a guru, and has great taste not to mention an incredible knowledge.
As I create this post, I'm listening to the 17th show, Friends and Neighbors (see the playlist on XM's site). The music and musicians are ones I do not know for the most part. But the music is very good. I have no idea as to the copyright situation, so I won't link to any download site. But If you search for it, there are some downloads you can find.
I hope that this entire series is sent to the Smithsonian. This is an amazing look at American music of the 20th century. There is some music from outside the US, but the bulk of the tracks are early.
Enjoy!
I am involved with delivering Exchange Unified Messaging training to MS partners around EMEA. In getting prepared, I see that the Exchange team's blog has an article about Exchange 2007 SP1.
One neat feature in Exchange 2007 SP1 is proper IPV6 support - On Longhorn Server, Exchange 2007 SP1 supports native IPv6 networks. There are a host of other updates, including updated the Exchange management console with features that did not make RTM.
In a recent blog article, I wrote about the Open Doc converter available for Microsoft Word. The converter is available from Sourceforge.net for free download and seems to work OK.
The files available from Sourceforge include:
Microsoft has now completed Virtual PC 2007, and it's available for free download. VPC represents an important update to VPC which includes many bug fixes plus support for both AMD and Intel virtulisation. MS has shipped both a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version - and both run under Vista.
Thanks to John Paul Cook for the pointer!
I'm just back from an exciting bit of Redmond time - an Exchange Unified Messaging TTT event, plus attending the OCS 2007 Customer airlift. I blogged about this over on my corporate blog at http://cacorner.blogspot.com).
OCS 2007 is really a pretty cool product. I can't wait to reveal more. I'll also blog more details on upcoming UM and OCS training events.
In a recent blog post, I wrote about random numbers and Powershell. As noted in that article, you can create a new random number object as follows:
$rand = New-Object System.Random
$rand.next()
129641862
This approach to creating the random number object seeds the random number generator with a pseudo-random number (current time). Therefore, if you try this at home, you're not likely to see the same result to $rand.next(), i.e. 129641862.
If you wanted to create a repeatable random number sequence (which is of course not actually random!), you could add a seed number as follows:
$rand = New-Object System.Random 1234567
$rand.next()
1673116976
If you try this code at home, you should get the same result to the call to $rand.next (i.e. 1673116976).
During 2005, the US Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Among other changes, this act modifies the start dates and the end dates for daylight saving time (DST). This is likely to be a source of confusion for many since new DST period is now four weeks longer than it used to be (in the US). Unless you apply some updates, it is possible that the time zone settings for your computer's system clock may be incorrect during this four week period. In particular, you must make sure that both your Windows operating system and your calendar programs are updated.
To help you to resolve potential issues in your environment, MS has published some tools and associated KB articles:
My advice: unless you do business totally outside the US, consider taking a look at the issue, and start updating your system(s).
I've just seen news over on Ars Technica that Microsoft has now released an ODF converter For Microsoft Word. This converter has been tested with Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 and currently only works on Word files. An Excel document translator should be available by November 2007.
As announced on the PowerShell Team blog, PowerShell V1.0 has shipped for Vista. Horray!
On January 24th, 15 hearty souls met at Global Knowledge's Wokingham offices for the first ever UK PowerShell User Group meeting. From what I can tell, this is the first ever PowerShell user group meeting in the world - something I'm pretty excited about.
Richard Siddaway started the Get-PSUKUG meeting off with a look at the organisation of the user group which was met with unanimous approval. In summary, we're planning on staying light on bureaucracy, and will try to have a physical meeting every two months. Our March meeting will take place at Microsoft in Reading on March 22. No word yet on the May meeting, but we're hoping to have the meeting in Nottingham.
The main part of the meeting was a presentation by me on setup and installation which was lively and generated lots of discussion. I think we ALL learned a lot, including me. I'll post the slides up to the user group's web site next week.
The meeting also included some great Pizza and beer (HOT pizza and COLD beer) thanks to those very nice people at Power Gadgets. I also managed to finesse USB memory sticks for the attendees which contained as much PowerShell stuff as I could find, including a trial version of Power Gadgets!
It is fantastic to have a group of PowerShell fans all in one place - this user group looks like being very useful to the community.
As many IT Pros know, with Vista comes new drivers - and for many devices there are no new drivers. Well not yet anyway - updated drivers will come in due course. Well, for the most part - I'm certain some vendors will simply not bother, in effect dropping support for older hardware.
Radarsync has put up a really useful Vista Drivers page, which lists the latest Vista drivers and provides direct links to downloads. They are offering this as a free service to the community.
Bookmarked!
Microsoft has formally named Longhorn Server as "Windows Server 2007", and is getting close to shipping the next beta (beta 3). If you are interested in playing with Longhorn, then it's time to pre-register to get your hands on the next generation of the Windows Server operating system. W
You can register for Longhorn beta 3 through the "Beta Central" program. This ensures you are notified when the beta is available an when he additional resources are available. These extra resources include Web forums, virtual labs, and other e-learning tools.
In the meantime, why not spend some time to learn what's new in Longhorn, New features include improvements in networking, advanced security features (e.g. NAP), remote application access, centralized server role management, performance and reliability monitoring tools, failover clustering, deployment, and the file system. And for me one of the cooler features: Server core - a GUI-less version of Windows.
