You can now try out Windows Phone 7 on your PC.  Check it out.

From the link:

Anticipation has been building for the new Windows Phone 7 Series ever since Microsoft unveiled it at the Mobile World Congress in February.  Now, thanks to free developer tools, you can get a first-hand experience of the basic Windows Phone 7 Series devices on your PC.

Let me know what you think.

Clint

Mark's Hyper-V Guest Clustering Step-by-Step Guide is a great read.

Enjoy!

Clint

Go to https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565807.aspx and find a TON of technical documents with regards to Planning, Pre-Deployment Tools, Installation, Guidence, Deployment, Management, Workload specific info, and Benchmarks.

Awesome resources.

Clint

Mark Russinovich. MinWin. Read it.

https://www.betanews.com/article/Mark-Russinovich-on-MinWin-the-new-core-of-Windows/1259792850

Sounds very cool.

Clint

From the Core Configurator 2.0 homepage:

Core Configuration tasks include:

• Product Licensing
• Networking Features
• DCPromo Tool
• ISCSI Settings
• Server Roles and Features
• User and Group Permissions
• Share Creation and Deletion
• Dynamic Firewall settings
• Display | Screensaver Settings
• Add & Remove Drivers
• Proxy settings
• Windows Updates (Including WSUS)
• Multipath I/O
• Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails
• JoinDomain and Computer rename
• Add/remove programs
• Services
• WinRM
• Complete logging of all commands executed

Enjoy!

I just came across some job aids that cover a lot of the common tasks that you perform on Server Core, and the associated commands.

These can be found on our downloads site.

Enjoy!

However, I recently was in a situation where I needed to write a PowerShell script (.ps1) that included some pauses while I demonstrated some results.

You can acomplish this by using the following:

Write-Host "Press any key to continue ..."
$x = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")

Of course, you can substitute the "Press any key to continue ..." with any text you want.

Enjoy!

I was bulilding out a new Windows Server 2008 R2 lab machine today. Instead of using an answer file like I normally do, I decided to enable the ADDS Role post-install using servermanagercmd.

I was surprised to find the following statement staring at me in the Command Prompt:

"Servermanagercmd.exe is deprecated, and is not guaranteed to be supported in future releases of Windows. We recommend that you use the Windows PowerShell cmdlets that are available for Server Manager."

So, I did a quick Bing search, and found that the cmdlet I should be using is Add-WindowsFeature.

More info can be found at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731774.aspx.

Have a great day!

Clint

My laptop is of course running Windows 7 RTM and is running BitLocker per a corporate requirement for mobile employees.  In the past few months, about 90% of the time when I would either reboot or shutdown the OS would appear to shutdown, but the laptop would still have the fans running and be draining the battery.  I would have to manually kill power to the laptop.  When I powered back up, the OS would load like normal (meaning no indication that there was a "dirty shutdown").

I assumed that this was some strange hardware/BIOS issue with the particular laptop I am using.  I talked to a few co-workers, and they were seeing the same issue.  But, they were running different models and manufactorers of laptops than I was.

Uh oh.

So, it just so happens that earlier this week, we released a hotfix that resolves this issue.

The hotfix can be found at https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=975496.

From the link above:

Assume that you enable BitLocker for the system drive on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Then, you shut down the computer. You notice the computer intermittently stops responding during shutdown. Additionally, the operating system seems to have already shut down, and then the screen turns black. However, the computer does not turn off completely. Therefore, you may notice that the computer fan and other devices are still turned on.

This problem does not occur if BitLocker is completely disabled, or if BitLocker is enabled on a data drive but disabled on the system drive.

Note When this problem occurs, the functionality of the operating system is shut down. However, the computer hardware is not signaled to power off.

Well...there you go! So, for anyone that is running BitLocker on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (which I STRONGLY recommend doing), please download this hotfix, test it, and apply it as soon as possible.

Enjoy!

Clint

Well, this new tool is going to make that process much more simple.

Introducing the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.

From the link above:

The ISO file contains all the Windows 7 installation files combined into a single uncompressed file. When you download the ISO file, you need to copy it to some medium in order to install Windows 7. This tool allows you to create a copy of the ISO file to a USB flash drive or a DVD. To install Windows 7 from your USB flash drive or DVD, all you need to do is insert the USB flash drive into your USB port or insert your DVD into your DVD drive and run Setup.exe from the root folder on the drive.

Enjoy!