Years ago I had the privilege of doing some SDR’s with the team developing a toolset code name “Oslo” using a new language named ‘M’. The concept was to bring modelling of data and visualisation of data to all. Sadly the retirement of Oslo the day before a presentation I was to give was a sad day and the passing of the …

On the 5th of February I will be presenting at Microsoft’s online Techdays event. My session is entitled ‘How are you going to deploy that? A look at configuration as code’ “It does not matter what platform you are developing for, you are going to have to deploy your product in the end. Too often in the past the …

The first firmware update is out for Microsoft Band. To get the update you will need to update your Microsoft Health app. In the UK this means the set region to US, go to the store, check for update. Run the Health app and it should offer a firmware update to the Band. The update is done over Bluetooth and so I made …

I have posted in the past that we have a number of agent based deployments using Release Management 2013.4 that point to network isolated Lab Management environments. Over Christmas we did some maintenance on our underlying Hyper-V servers, so everything got fully stopped and restarted. When the network isolated …

The lovely people in the IT Pro team have announced their IT Pro Honours list and I am privileged to be on it. http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet/archive/2015/01/05/new-year-s-honours-list-2015.aspx A great set of professionals and Me and Rik. Me an IT Pro who would have thought. I suddenly feel the urge to help Rik …

I have been very fortunate to get hold of a Microsoft Band. Bands are currently in short supply, but thanks to an Angel in Minnesota I have one. Currently there is no expected release date for the UK, but a quick look at EBay will turn up enough units to buy, remember the retail price is $199. CAUTION – Check The Band …

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies. In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of …

If you are trying to use Release Management or any deployment tool with a network isolated Lab Management setup you will have authentication issues. Your isolated domain is not part of your production domain, so you have to provide credentials. In the past this meant Shadow Accounts or the simple expedient of running a …

The DCS two step When working with DSC a difficult concept can be that your desired state script is ‘compiled’ to a MOF file that is then ‘run’ by the desired state manager on the target machine. This is a two step affair and you have no real input on the second part. This is made more complex when Release Management …

Don’t worry, Nokia are not planning to revive 70s nostalgia aftershave, Denim is the new update for Lumia's providing better low level support of the hardware. Denim offers several key updates Camera – for the 830/930/1520 updates specifically for HDR, Dynamic flash and 4k video and speed fixes for the 1520. as a user …