Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The Professional Developers Conference is Microsoft’s largest shindig for developer’s in the world.  I’ve attended this twice in my life and… well… it’s really something else.  Everyone there is a seriously hardcore developer of some sort – as in, this is their livelyhood. 

Occasionally, you’ll see execs or marketing folks from companies trying to court Microsoft or trying to sell to the developers there, and of course you’ll also see recruiters galore hunting down good talent, but by far and large, most everyone’s a Visual Studio trained developer.

Usually over 10,000 developers show up for the week to hear over 160 different presentations and sessions on developing for Microsoft’s platform.  And it’s not cheap – it’s basically the same cost to register as TechEd so if you don’t speak C# or Visual Basic or at least Java, this probably isn’t for you.

The registration site just went live at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/.  Why do you care?  Well, for one you can get $200 off by registering early… and Ray Ozzie is going to be keynoting the event.  Additionally, they’ve provided a number of interesting resources for people considering going, including:

Pre-conference sessions including:

Topic list, including:

• Cloud Service Development
• Building Block Services
• Advanced Workflow
• CRM/Dynamics Application Development
• Internet Explorer 8’s Rendering Engine
• Silverlight Graphics
• Data Services-based Apps
• Developing .NET/ASP.NET for Server Core
• Live Mesh Development
• Live Platform Development
• Developing for Occasionally Connected Clients
• Office Business App Development
• Scalable Storage in the Cloud
• Developing Silverlight Applications for Mobile Devices
• Large Scale Web Apps over SQL Server 2008
• COM Interop
• SQL Server Data Services
• Unified Communications Futures
• Visual Studio Team System – Software Diagnostics
• Windows 7 Graphics Advancements
• Windows 7 Energy Efficiency
• Windows 7 Touch Computing
• Windows 7 Web Services in Native Code
• Windows Mobile Location-based Services
• Windows Mobile Web Development
• Windows Presentation Services – Extensible Bitmap Effects, Pixel Shaders

And to quote Mike Swanson:

We’re doing social at the PDC this year, so be sure to join our Microsoft PDC Facebook group, our PDC2008 Twitter feed, and the Microsoft PDC2008 group on Flickr. Oh…you might also want to subscribe to the PDC blog for key information and updates about the event. Note that the PDC blog feeds the public web site, so no need to subscribe in both places.

Last, show your PDC2008 spirit! Grab some of the blog bling and wallpaper.

In case you’re on the MAP tool beta before for the version 3.0, you should already have received a notification to join the Private Beta for MAP 3.1 slated to release in June 2008. This MAP 3.1 beta will include the much anticipated Hyper-V modeling and assessment for server virtualization.

Due to massive demand, we are soon going to reach the capacity limit of this Private Beta.

If you have not joined yet, please follow the 5-step process here to apply.

• Visit the Connect site:  http://connect.microsoft.com
• Enter Invitation Code:   MP31-GT76-X98X
• Follow the rest of the on-screen instructions
• Wait for a notificiation email in the next few weeks for the Download Instructions
• Try out MAP 3.0 RTM version to take a quick test drive:  http://www.microsoft.com/MAP
  • The current release already support Virtual Server 2005 R2 assessments.

<stolen from the Visio blog>
For anyone who wasn’t able to attend the Visio Conference 2008 this February or has been itching to show everyone else the cool things coming in Visio "vNext", the wait is over!  Videos from all the conference sessions are posted on http://www.visiotoolbox.com.  Click on the conference link in the bottom-right corner of the page – or follow the links below.

Each session consists of the PowerPoint slide deck, speaker audio and video of the demos.  Use the links below to jump to the sessions for each track:

• Keynotes – http://www.visiotoolbox.com/visioconference2008/Keynotes/start.htm
• General Sessions – http://www.visiotoolbox.com/visioconference2008/GeneralSessions/start.htm
• Solutions Track – http://www.visiotoolbox.com/visioconference2008/BusinessSolutions/start.htm
• Developer Track – http://www.visiotoolbox.com/visioconference2008/SolutionDevelopment/start.htm
• End User Track – http://www.visiotoolbox.com/visioconference2008/EndUser/start.htm

For those specifically interested in Visio "vNext", here are the four sessions where we demonstrated some of the capabilities coming next release:

• Visualizing Information Work Today & Tomorrow – Jeff Raikes keynote
• The Visio Business Today and Software Development Process – Richard Wolf keynote
• Visio Future Investments – Bill Morein
• Visio Futures – API Insights – John Haug and Philippe Arida

Troubleshooting
You should be able to click on a link and then click on Play.  The videos take a varying amount of time to load – a few minutes in some cases.  If you find that the UI frame around the slides / video is missing, try refreshing the web page.  This will reload the controls but the session will resume playing where you left off.

We recently published ~17 hours of training videos for Enterprise Search on TechNet.

The 14 recorded presentations are based on training modules from a three-day, in-person training course ‘Implementing and Deploying an Enterprise Search solution’.

The presentations provide details about key Enterprise Search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

• Module 1: Workshop Overview
• Module 2: Enterprise Search Overview
• Module 3: SharePoint Search 2007 Walkthrough
• Module 4: Search Architecture and Deployment Scenarios
• Module 5: Crawl and Query Processes
• Module 6: Relevance Ranking
• Module 7: Customizing the End-User Experience
• Module 8: Developing Search Solutions
• Module 9: Business Data Catalog Search
• Module 10: Extensibility and Integration for Search
• Module 11: Search Administration
• Module 12: Security for Search
• Module 13: Performance Scalability and Capacity Planning for Search
• Module 14: Search Operations

The content is recorded in English.

<stolen from the SC team blog>
Today we release Configuration Manager 2007 SP1!  It is amazing to see that this was not a release based in bug fix, quite the opposite, there are hardly any hotfixes included in this release. 

This is a reflection of changes such as the ship of Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.  With some engineering cycles aligning, we have added some additional features that were ready to go at this time, details are as follows:

As a recap SP1 specifically contains:

1. Complete support for management of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. 
2. Support for Configuration Manager 2007 Server Site roles on Server 2008. 
3. Integration with Intel VPro technologies.  
4. Asset Intelligence 1.5 

You can find additional details, and information for download on our product homepages, located here.

• MORE INFO: 
  http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/configmgr/default.mspx
• DOWNLOAD:
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5aae62e8-4b7f-4af7-be01-aefaa4bf059a&DisplayLang=en
• WEBCAST: System Center Configuration Manager SP1 and R2 Overview (Level 300)
  https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032369054&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

The Exchange Product team has put together the following flowcharts that show the likely processes and decision making flow that might be involved in certain disaster recovery situations based on a CCR Exchange 2007 design.

These decision matrices do not provide the definitive answer and there are often numerous possible recovery paths in any given Disaster Recovery scenario.   They do, however, highlight the decisions that are likely to be made and the importance of understanding what the processes an administrator might have to follow to recover service and data to their user community.

Scenarios include:

• Recovering from total physical site failure.
• Recovering from single server failure.
• Recovering from single active database failure.

MORE INFO & DOWNLOAD:  http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/05/12/448867.aspx

The flowcharts are available as a download for you to print in full resolution.  To get the ZIP file with XPS and PDF version of those charts, please visit the link here.

Some of you may recall that the copy of “Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition” (both 32-bit & 64-bit DVDs) that was handed out to attendees at the “Heroes Happen Here” launch event over the past few months has a special DVD label on it that reads:

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
PROMOTIONAL EDITION
One Year Evaluation License
Microsoft Not For Resale

Well, it turns out that “PROMOTIONAL EDITION One Year Evaluation License” actually means something special: 

Apparently, while everyone in attendance assumed that the software was a 365-day time-bombed product that was limited by some technical element, it’s not.  There is no technically implemented time limit on the software. 

Translation:  It’s a full NFR copy of Windows Server 2008, however the “legal license” to use the software is 365 days and is not unlimited like previous NFRs.  Hence the term “Promotional Edition”.

So take heart in knowing that there isn’t any reason to worry that the software’s just going to up and "quit" on you in the future.  It’s the same software on the disc as if you’d picked up a retail copy.

Data Mining and Business Intelligence for Enterprises:

• http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/event.aspx?id=99

Links to Session Videos:

• Introduction to Data Mining– Rafal Lukawiecki, Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli Ltd
• Working with Data Mining– Rafal Lukawiecki, Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli Ltd
• Using Data Mining in your IT Systems (Part 1)– Rafal Lukawiecki, Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli Ltd
• Using Data Mining in your IT Systems (Part 1), Rafal Lukawiecki, Strategic Consultant, Project Botticelli Ltd

Have you ever wanted to execute a SysInternals tool over the web without first downloading them from the web site?  This can be particularly useful if you’re running scripts and you can’t guarantee that a tool will be available on the machine the script is running on, but you know it’ll have Internet access.

We’re excited to announce the beta of Sysinternals Live, a service that enables you to execute Sysinternals tools directly from the Web without hunting for and manually downloading them. Simply enter a tool’s Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as \live.sysinternals.comtools<toolname> or view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in a browser at http://live.sysinternals.com.

For example, a common thing you may want to do is to flush the write cache on all drives on a system to ensure that if you disconnect one of them, like a USB drive, that it won’t lose any unwritten data and leave the drive in a corrupt state.

You could run the following line:  \live.sysinternals.comtoolssync.exe 

And the SysInternals tool "Sync" would be executed from the SysInternals Live site and flush the write back caches on all drives.

One of my favorite presentation tools, ZoomIt, was revised and published to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx.  To quote the site:

"This major ZoomIt update adds the drawing color pink, adds screen blanking to the undo history, extends the maximum pen size from 9 to 19 pixels, has an option to hide the tray icon and makes it easy to save zoomed and annotated screens as bitmap files."

ZoomIt maps very well to the extra buttons on the Wireless Presenter Mouse 6000 by the way.

Weird though.  As of 1:43AM, the description of the download is for ZoomIt 1.8.  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx