As most people working with Microsoft products, I was not able to attend the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 unfortunately.
These sessions have been recorded though and are available now at Channel 9 and a great overview of sessions can be found here. This means you can watch them wherever and whenever it is convenient for you.
You can also use this great PowerShell script created by Stefan Stranger to download the MMS 2013 videos.
Enjoy.
In the beginning of June, the new Intel Haswell CPUs will be available. Besides the regular improvements like being faster, having better energy efficiency and having better graphics capabilities, these new CPUs will also include VMCS shadowing (Virtual Machine Control Structure Shadowing).
Basically it’s a feature that allows you to run a hypervisor (like VMware, Hyper-V, Xen Server) and create another hypervisor as a VM beneath it. This is also called nested virtualization.
Some of you might say, “Hey this is not new, I’ve already done this with VMware!”. The difference however is that the current method uses some sort of emulation that does not directly access the hardware. And even though it’s great for testing purposes, the performance is suboptimal.
With the embedded hardware supported VMCS shadowing in the new Intel Haswell CPU the nested hypervisor can directly access the hardware, which should improve performance. Also, it might even make it possible to use non-VMware hypervisors in a nested virtualization scenario.
Of course as always, we’ll just have to wait and see how the performance will be in real-life. It’s also not clear to me yet if hypervisors need to be updated to be able to leverage this option. Nonetheless, to me it sounds very promising and I look forward to playing around with it.
For more information read this great article by Gabe Knuth called “Could VMCS Shadowing (a.k.a. nested VMs) from Intel’s new Haswell processors be what Bromium needs to work in VMs?”. When you use the links in the article you will be able to get more information about the Intel Haswell CPUs including benchmarks and more detailed information about VMCS shadowing and use cases.
If you’re planning to build / buy an Intel Haswell based computer or Home Lab, be sure to look into the confirmed USB3 bug in the chipset. Also unfortunately the DDR3 prices have increased substantially (almost 50%) over the last half year.
In yesterday’s blog post I mentioned that I was looking forward to being upgraded to the new Office 365 in the next 4 weeks.
I did encounter an issue however that I was not able to open files on SharePoint using the desktop version of Office 2013. I kept on getting the message: “call us overprotective, but we need to verify your account before opening this document”. This never succeeded and I couldn’t modify my file using Office 2013. The Office Web App version was working fine though.
After googling around a bit, I found out that this was a common issue for people that are planned to be migrated (pre-upgrade). The solution/workaround for this issue is described here:
Office 365 pre-upgrade users cannot open or synchronize SharePoint files after the Office 2013: March 12, 2013 update is installed
It’s a pity we often have to wait for new products like the Surface Pro, but at least it’s coming to the Netherlands. And the waiting will also be over pretty soon, since it will be available before the end of May.
Personally I’m not a big fan of Windows RT, but I really love Windows 8 tablets. Since I’ve gotten my Windows 8 tablet, I have been using it as my main device. And apparently I’m not the only one as you can read in this great article:
“Two months with the Surface Pro and how it replaced my notebook”.
If you’re considering a tablet and are not yet sure if a Windows RT, Windows 8, Android or Apple tablet best meets your needs, read the comparison from one my previous blog posts.
Roger Osborne has posted a great article with a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V best practices checklist.
I especially like the fact that it’s not just a checklist, but it also explains what it does and why it is considered a best practice to do it this way (in specific situations).
Additionally you might also want to take a look at “Top 20 Hyper-V Performance Metrics You Should Care About” and System Center Advisor.
Up until now in Windows 8 and Windows RT, the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 would only run flash on websites that were whitelisted in the Internet Explorer Compatibility View list. Even though you could add websites to the whitelist (I even made a script for it), most people didn’t knew it or just aren’t that handy with computers to fix this themselves. This ofcourse leads to a bad user experience.
Now Microsoft has decided to allow all flash websites and only blacklist some that don’t meet the standard (apparently less than 4% of the tested websites). You can read more about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/03/11/flash-in-windows-8.aspx
I think this is a good move, because it gives an advantage over other tablets. I think this should’ve been this way from the start, but better late than never.
In the past I’ve heard numerous people mention they couldn’t get the Windows 8 Store from behind a proxy on the corporate network. Many even thought it was a design flaw by Microsoft and that it wasn’t possible.
A colleague of mine Kuo Wei Lau informed me about this article that specifies how to configure the proxy for metro apps in Windows 8.
So it is possible to use Windows 8 apps from behind a proxy, but I have to admit that in my opinion the configuration is hidden in a not very obvious location. Nevertheless, it is possible 
Apparently there are also other solutions and apparently there are also some issues to take into account. So you might want to take a look at these articles as well:
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/setup-proxy-metro-application-windows-8
http://drdebmath.blogspot.nl/2012/11/use-proxy-windows8-iitg.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2778122
For those looking to get familiar with SQL Server 2012 SP1, Microsoft has updated the Virtual Labs for SQL Server 2012 SP1.
This way you can easily learn and play around with it without having to set up your own lab.
Enjoy.
I run Winaudit on each server/system and save it to a central location named <computername>.csv This way I have access to a lot of information about each system. If you need a specific subset of information for each system however, you don’t want to have to open each file manually to get this information.
This script will parse each <computername>.csv to extract specifc information and save it to one new file containing this info for all parsed separate files.
Like many other people nowadays, I have a network share containing my photos, videos and documents. I prefer to access these over the network, which is possible using explorer.
The problem however (especially on my Windows 8 tablet), is that this method in general does not work (properly) for Windows 8 apps. Instead they extensively use the Windows libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos).
So my first thought was to simply add the content on the network share to the Libraries. Apparently this is not how Microsoft wants it to be used, since I got an error stating: “This network location can’t be included because it is not indexed.”
I don’t need/want it to be indexed though, so I went to look for other solutions and found elaborate step-by-step guides. I also found the Win Library Tool, which simplifies adding an unindexed network location to the Windows libraries.
I still hope Microsoft will make it easier to add unindexed locations to the library though.
