Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Shipping on November 4th, looks like there’s a bundle available after all for the new Xbox 360 Console with the 250GB Hard Drive and the Xbox Kinect Sensor Controller… along with a copy of “Kinect Adventures”, a launch title for Kinect.

DON’T HAVE AN XBOX 360 YET?
This is a perfect opportunity to buy both the Xbox 360 with the latest technology in it.  It runs cool and is extremely quiet.  It’s got a smaller profile and it uses the Valhalla Chipset – with a single integrated CPU/GPU in it, meaning the console has fewer ICs and thus consumes only half as much power as previous Xbox 360s.

GET THE KINECT SENSOR
The Kinect Sensor is the single best controller I’ve used in a long time.  It watches you hands, arms, head, body, legs and feet all in real time and makes playing games with your body really fun… while getting a ton of exercise while you’re at it.

This will be the hottest ticket this holiday season.  I urge you to preorder to make sure you get one this Christmas!

• AMAZON:  Xbox 360 ‘Slim’ Console w/ 250GB Hard Drive, Kinect Sensor Controller & “Kinect Adventures” game
  http://bit.ly/95ndRy

Researching travel options can be challenging. It takes time to review all the options and determine the best time to fly, what airline has the lowest fares, and where you will stay at your destination. Bing Travel makes these tasks easier by processing large amounts of travel related data and presenting it in ways that help travellers make better decisions.

The Bing Travel add-in puts this technology in the place where many people spend a large part of their day – in Outlook. Just by clicking the Bing Travel button in the Add-Ins menu, or right-clicking in your calendar, you’ll have access to Bing Travel’s decision making tools and all your favorite online travel agencies and airlines.

• DOWNLOAD:  Bing Travel Add-in for Outlook 2007/2010 (5.85MB)
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=64ca7137-d8d8-49f1-ae42-00e9fcbf775f

(Note:  This is a Visual Studio Tools for Office extension to Office and is delivered as an Office customization.)

Holy cow.  I haven’t tried this but if Ed Bott speaks true… and he always does…

You can get all 5 eBook versions of any Microsoft Press title for just $4.95 if you already own the paper bound version.  This includes ePub, .APK, .MOBI, .PDF, and Daisy formats.  All of them.  $4.95 total.

This is no joke.  Of course the eBook version of the title needs to be available but if it is, you’re in fat city because the deal is ridiculously cheap. 

Go check out the article describing how to take advantage of this insane offer on Ed’s site.

• INFO:  Microsoft Press dives deep into the DRM-free e-book business [updated]
  http://www.edbott.com/weblog/2010/09/microsoft-press-dives-deep-into-the-drm-free-e-book-business/

Thinking about upgrading to Microsoft Office 2010?

Each upgrade brings exciting new features, but new versions of your favorite programs can take some getting used to. It’s no different for those of us here at Microsoft who create the Office programs than it is for our customers.

To ease the transition, we’ve put together six handy Office 2010 migration guides to help you step up to the newest versions of Microsoft Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. 

Whether you’re coming from an older version of Office and just want to find the most frequently used commands in a program, or you’re entirely new to Office and want a quick overview of how the ribbon works and how to get to the most important things, each guide provides helpful information that we’ve based on direct feedback from you — our customers.

All six guides are available as a separate download, so you can grab just the ones you need:

1. Install the free Adobe Reader or the free FoxIt Reader (if you don’t already have it on your computer)
2. Browse and download our free Office 2010 migration guides.

While you’re viewing any guide, you can save a copy of it to your computer for later viewing, navigate through all of its pages (each guide has 7-8 pages in total), zoom in to get a closer view at any of the screenshots, or search for feature names or keywords to quickly find something in the text.

[Taken from http://blogs.office.com/b/office_blog/archive/2010/09/07/download-our-free-office-2010-migration-guides.aspx]

Windows user state virtualization helps IT find the right balance between centralized management of business-critical data and a rich user desktop experience. Follow the stepwise approach in this IPD guide to gather relevant user and IT requirements. Then compare and contrast Windows USV technologies (Folder Redirection, Offline Files, and Roaming User Profiles) in light of scenarios that are relevant to your business. Also, leverage the subjective real-world guidance based on analysis of Windows USV deployments in mid to large organizations, and interviews with domain experts.

Reduce time and planning costs by following the processes in this IPD guide to design a successful Windows USV strategy. Additional Infrastructure Planning and Design Series guides are available as beta releases on the Connect Web site. They are open beta downloads.

To join the Infrastructure Planning and Design beta, do the following:

1. Visit the Microsoft Connect Web site. If you have not previously registered with Microsoft Connect, you might be required to register before continuing with the invitation process.
2. Sign in using a valid Windows Live ID to continue to the Invitations page.
3. Scroll down to Infrastructure Planning and Design.

LINK:  Windows User State Virtualization Guide
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff877478.aspx

DOWNLOAD:  Windows User State Virtualization Guide
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=200543

This learning plan is intended to help IT generalists, CIOs and other IT decision makers learn about the latest line of Microsoft server technologies; including:

• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Exchange 2010
• Microsoft Forefront
• Microsoft System Center
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010

A Learning Plan is a set of learning resources that are designed to provide training on a specific skill. Learning Plans provide a recommended step-by-step learning process, but with the freedom to complete the steps in any order that you want. Additional Learning Plans can be found here, including those for Office 2010.

• LINK: Learning Plans for the IT Generalist, CIO or Decision Maker
  http://learning.microsoft.com/manager/LearningPlanV2.aspx?resourceId=1d1a7c24-999b-41ef-9f47-f29e3fbfcd24&clang=en-US&cats=d4e8e42c-3d5a-4a6e-915d-d99556a49bd7

To say that I’m disappointed that Twitter Sidebar Gadget from BuildAGadget hasn’t been released with oAuth support (now a mandatory requirement for any Twitter client) would be the understatement of the century.   Not only have they had ample time to engineer the support but they’ve not communicated much in the way of where they’re at dev wise via EITHER their blog OR their Twitter feed.  Being someone that depends heavily on Twitter, I can only respond with one comment:  SONNAFAB-TCH!

So off I go to find a replacement tool. 

SO WHAT AM I USING NOW?
Tweetz from BlueOnion Software seems to be a viable alternative although I wish the font size could be made even smaller than it’s current version.  Tweetz features (in no particular order):

• Home timeline
• Mentions timeline
• Direct Messages
• Favorites
• OAuth authentication protects your twitter account
• Search
• Single click access to user profiles
• Click #tags to search
• Follow/Unfollow
• Number of unread tweets shown in header
• Reverse lookup of shortened links (for most services)
• Docked and undocked sizes
• Reply/Retweet
• Link shortener (uses http://is.gd for the shortest links)
• Optional font sizes
• Audible notification of new status updates (configurable)
• Configurable intervals
• Uses new twitter 2.0 API for increased security
• Clean, concise UI with small desktop footprint
• Adjustable height
• On demand refreshes
• Hot keys to shorten links and send tweets
• More funner to use than version 1.5

Because tweetz is a Windows Sidebar gadget it stays on your desktop where it’s always available. And if you’re a fan of Windows 7’s Aero Peek, you’re going to love tweetz. Simply move your mouse over the "Show Desktop" bar at any time to reveal your gadgets, including tweetz, and read your tweets.

Tweetz also respects the gadget guidelines. The docked version (pictured right) is 130 pixels wide and plays with other "docked" gadgets correctly. Want more real estate? No problem, the undocked version is wider and also displays the user’s picture.

I found a couple interesting posts that highlight why Windows 7 is a far superior operating system for customers considering VDI deployments.

Here’s a post about Task Priority Registers and how they are handled within Windows XP such that Hypervisors, ours or other vendors, are overtasked in handling them relative to Windows 7.  In fact, Intel designed a feature in SOME of their processing chips called vTPR which you really have to have to use Windows XP in VDI scenarios.  Without it, Windows XP performs too poorly so if you’re going to use Windows XP as a VDI OS, be really really sure you have an Intel chip w/ vTPR.

• Windows XP guests exhibiting poor performance when running under VDI
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2010/07/23/windows-xp-guests-exhibiting-poor-performance-when-running-under-vdi.aspx

Here’s a post that talks about the value of RDP7 for customers that are considering deploying Windows in VDI.  RDP7 is designed to redirect various visual technologies like video, audio, high end graphicsl like Aero effects, and multimonitor sessions.  Windows XP does not have this technology and instead resorts to using RDP 5.2, a 9 year old protocol.

• Windows 7 with RDP7: Best OS for VDI
  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2009/11/02/windows-7-with-rdp7-best-os-for-vdi.aspx

I know many of you have tried this – replicating user profile data between geographies for the purposes of improving the end user experience during log in while still providing geographic synchronicity for execs and other users that move between two different sites.

Well, lo and behold, we have an official statement about folks that do this and there are supported scenarios and non-supported scenarios because things can obviously get squirrelly.

Here are the scenarios that are described.

• Deployment scenario 1: Single file server, replicated to enable centralized backup
• Scenario 1A: DFS Namespace is not configured [SUPPORTED]
• Scenario 1B: DFS Namespace is configured – single link target [SUPPORTED]
• Deployment scenario 2: Multiple (replica) file servers for geo-location
• Scenario 2A: DFS Namespaces is configured – multiple link target configuration [UNSUPPORTED]
• Scenario 2B: DFS Namespaces is configured – multiple link targets, read-only replica on central/hub server [UNSUPPORTED]

To read the details behind these scenarios, you really have to read the entire post.  It’s a doozy.

• FULL ARTICLE: Microsoft’s Support Statement Around Replicated User Profile Data
  http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/09/01/microsoft-s-support-statement-around-replicated-user-profile-data.aspx

You can find a series of new step by step videos for both Advance Group Policy Management (AGPM) and the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) on the MDOP video page. 

If your new to AGPM or DaRT, or just looking to get up to speed on a particular feature check them out.  We have broken them down into small, feature by feature bites so you can either watch them all or just consume the ones that you want when you want to.

STEP-BY-STEP:  Advanced Group Policy Management

• Part 1: AGPM Overview
• Part 2: Installing AGPM
• Part 3: Configuring AGPM
• Part 4: Controlling Group Policy Objects
• Part 5: Delegating Roles
• Part 6: Editing Group Policy Objects
• Part 7: Reviewing Group Policy Objects
• Part 8: Approving and Deploying a Group Policy Object
• Part 9: Rolling Back a Group Policy Object to a Previous Version
• Part 10: Deleting and Restoring Group Policy Objects
• Part 11: Using Templates
• Part 12: Advanced Search Features
• Part 13: Migrating Group Policy Objects

STEP-BY-STEP:  Diagnostics & Recovery Toolset

• Part 1: DaRT Overview
• Part 2: Creating Boot Media
• Part 3: Starting the DaRT
• Part 4: Resetting Passwords
• Part 5: Analyzing Crash Dumps
• Part 6: Disabling Device Drivers
• Part 7: Recovering Files
• Part 8: Repairing Disks
• Part 9: Exploring the PC
• Part 10: Repairing System Files
• Part 11: Scanning for Malware
• Part 12: Removing Hotfixes
• Part 13: Wiping Disks