Archive for the ‘Windows IT’ Category

Devs vs. IT pros: Who runs all these Azure apps?

Last night’s PDC10 keynote sparked a few ideas overnight. One of them is a concern regarding the IT professionals’ role in running Windows Azure based software. This idea was born of the fact that PDC, traditionally and so statedly a Developer conference, announced technology that was reasonably deep in the IT Professional space. I mean, […]

October 29, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · 3 Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Cloud, Windows IT

Moving users between domains in BPOS

You can attach several domains to your BPOS account. For example, if you’re running a corporation called Contoso, you might want contoso.com and contoso.net. Your user accounts would then be created under one of these domains, e.g. joe@contoso.com. But what if you need to move users between domains? The unfortunate fact is that you can’t […]

September 18, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Cloud, Windows IT

Windows Azure Appliance – Your private corner of the Microsoft cloud

The “private cloud” concept (i.e. the idea of running the cloud-designed applications on your premises) can be implemented in a variety of ways. Not surprisingly, each cloud vendor also provides its own notion of “private cloud”. Now Microsoft adds yet another approach to the mix by launching Windows Azure Appliance. Before looking into the appliance […]

July 13, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Cloud, Windows IT

Getting AD users in a group with PowerShell

PowerShell rocks, but a part of the rockiness comes from the great third party additions. For example, enumerating the users in an Active Directory Group is somewhat painful with the basic PowerShell… but throw in Quest Software’s excellent free ActiveRoles Management Shell extensions, and things get a lot smoother. The goodness can be downloaded from […]

June 11, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · 4 Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Windows IT

.NET officially becomes a Windows component

Microsoft is making some aggressive moves by slashing support of .NET 3.0 and 3.5 (without SP1) a year from now, on April 12th 2011. But the real deal is that .NET is no longer a “major product”, but rather a component of Windows. Earlier versions of .NET were shipped as major products by the support […]

May 3, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET, Windows IT

PowerShell Basics #5: Manipulating services

Although you can start and stop the Windows services on your computer with the net.exe, PowerShell makes it far easier to do more complex manipulations. Start by doing a Get-Service – or just casually called gsv. PS D:\PowerShell> gsv Status Name DisplayName —— —- ———– Running AEADIFilters Andrea ADI Filters Service Running AeLookupSvc Application Experience […]

April 29, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: .NET, Windows IT

Enabling MSI installations on Windows Server 2008 via PowerShell

Did you know that by default, there are limitations on installing MSI packages on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2? Neither did I, but you live to learn. MSDN documents this quite well if you know what to look for. According to the page the server OS default is to disable MSI for […]

April 7, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Windows IT

PowerShell Basics #2: Dir for power users

You would think the standard dir command in cmd.exe would do its job adequately, but it’s still surprising how much more functionality can you pack into it. Here’s an introduction to power-using Get-ChildItem, also known by the aliases of dir and ls. Leveraging FileInfo and DirectoryInfo For starters, it is important to remember that dir […]

January 28, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · 3 Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: .NET, Windows IT

Opalis acquisition adds more automation to the System Center family

Microsoft is boosting its System Center family of products by acquiring a Canadian IT automation company called Opalis Software. What does this mean? Opalis does IT automation. Taking a look at the material on the Opalis site, the key components seem to be: A workflow platform that enables easier automation of IT tasks (responding to […]

December 11, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Windows IT

Security problems with downloaded .NET assemblies

Have two copies of the same file with exactly the same content on a bit-to-bit level, yet one works and the other one fails with a security error? Yeah, that could happen. In this post, I will discuss two features of Windows that may not be familiar to you. First, files in the NTFS file […]

December 10, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 4 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Windows IT