Archive for the ‘Windows IT’ Category

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 returns objects. [...]

January 28, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: .NET, Windows IT  No Comments

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 problem tickets, [...]

December 11, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Windows IT  No Comments

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 system [...]

December 10, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Windows IT  2 Comments

Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 VM halts with code 0×7B, 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034

It was finally time to install Windows Server 2008 SP2 on a bunch of test machines on my home server. Why two of them never came up, but instead hit me with a BSOD right on boot?
As usual, everything is simple once you know what to look for. A 0×000007B halt code indicates an inaccessible [...]

November 30, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Windows IT  One Comment

Summary of PDC09 announcements

The two keynote days of PDC09 are behind, and the crowd has mixed reactions. At any rate, the most substantial launches seem to be over now, so it’s a safe time to write up some quick notes. Later on, it’ll be time to delve into each of these in more detail. The following list is [...]

November 19, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: .NET, Cloud, Web, Windows IT  2 Comments

Moving the Outlook OST file to another directory (Outlook 2010)

I would’ve thought this was already solved, but no. Moving Outlook data files is still ridiculously complex. And Outlook 2010 doesn’t seem to help it.
This page gives you nice instructions for the task, but could use some augmentation. Here goes:

First, where are Account settings in Outlook 2010? The answer lies behind the renewedly square Office [...]

August 8, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Windows IT  No Comments

Moving Windows Help .hxw files ain’t easy

After all these years, wouldn’t you think all the system-generated data could be easily moved away from the boot partition?
Let’s say your C: drive gets full. Windows Vista and beyond make repartitioning a snap, but it only helps if said disk has space available on another partition. If not, you’re in for some exercise [...]

June 23, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Windows IT  No Comments

Backing up cloud data (and the cost of mistakes)

Backups are useful for two major purposes: full recovery of everything lost in a hardware failure and partial recovery of something lost due to an user – or developer – error. Cloud providers have strong incentive to do everything to eliminate the first kind of problem, but I fear the second case more.
From what one [...]

June 5, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Cloud, Windows IT  One Comment

"An error occurred accessing the website application data folder" in Virtual Server 2005 R2

I had a pretty grueling duel with a fresh installation of Virtual Server 2005 R2. The error message mentioned above popped up on the administration web site even though the installation was completed flawlessly. I also had "You do not have permission to access the event viewer" on the same page. All Google matches returned [...]

September 18, 2006   Posted in: Windows IT  7 Comments