I had a surprise exchange of text messages last night with Andy Westgarth. Sadly, one of the people who was to speak in one of the first session slots has had to pull out. Andy did the thing all the best conference organisers do – he called his friends! As a result, Richard and myself will be presenting a session about …

One of the most useful features of Windows 8.1 for me is the native support for Miracast (which is compatible with Intel Widi) for connecting to a wireless projector or display. Being able to wander around with my tablet whilst speaking is really handy. Sadly, whilst this worked for a little while during the preview, …

DDD North 2013 is almost upon us and I hope you’re all converging on Sunderland for what should be a great for devs. I’ll be helping out during the day, and I will also be doing a short Grok Talk on how Generation 2 Virtual Machines in Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 are new, different and cool. Come along and heckle, why …

A quick tip, this one. I downloaded the latest firmware update to my Surface Pro this evening. It rebooted and promptly requested my bitlocker unlock code. I don’t keep those to hand – they’re stored in our Active Directory. Fortunately I had another laptop with DirectAccess so I could find the key. Be ready with your …

CPC who managed to send two resistor-capacitor balances for LED lights, which as about 1cm in size in a box as shown here Other than loads of that inflatable packing material there was a huge CPC catalogue, with the interesting sticker So an online electronics company, that provides free shipping (a really good thing …

It’s autumn again, and that means event season is upon us once more. In the next few months I’m getting around a bit, so this post is a plug for the events I’m either attending or speaking at. October 1st is VMUG Leeds. I’m registered to attend, but chances are I’ll be spending much of the day helping the Microsoft …

In the world of DevOps it’s all about the scripts: I’ve seen some great work done by some clever people to create complex environments with multiple VMs all from scratch using PowerShell. That’s great, but unfortunately in the world of Lab Manager it just doesn’t work well at all. We’ve begun the pretty mammoth task of …

Thanks to all who attended the ReBuild and TechEd revisited event today. I promised that I would post the links from the final slide to this blog so you can all start evaluating Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. Download and evaluate the Preview software …

I have recently been automating TFS admin processes such as creating a new team within an existing team project. The TFS team is now our primary means we use to segment work so we need to create new teams fairly often, so automation makes good sense. As far as I can see, there are no command line tools, like TF.EXE or …

I posted a while ago about the problems with DHCP using a Hyper-V virtual switch with WIFI and an Ubuntu VM, well I never found a good solution without hard coding IP addresses. I recently tried using Mint 15 and was please to see this did not suffer the same problems, it seems happy with DHCP over Hyper-V virtual …