During the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard chatted with Jeremy Moskowitz about the new group policy features in Windows 8. The discussion starts out with a digression talking about how to influence features in the Microsoft stack before steering back on the subject of Group Policy, specifically Group Policy Preferences with Server 2012 and Windows 8. Jeremy digs into some of the new features available, as well as talking about how his product ...
Nov 28, 2012•34 min•Ep. 292
While on the break week of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Steve Evans about his experiences with Hyper-V in the field. Steve talks about a company he's working with that uses Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V (effectively version two) and runs down a number of specific tuning elements around networking, VM sizing, CPU allocation, hardware and software redundancy.
Nov 21, 2012•37 min•Ep. 291
While on a break from the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Clint Huffman about some of the internal changes to Server 2012. The discussion starts out talking about better utilization of multiple cores, including new NUMA architecture and Performance Monitor counters. Clint also talks about scheduling of threads in relation to NUMA, memory fragmentation and processor allocations. Finally he talks about the new Automatic Memory Dump feature that deals with huge amo...
Nov 14, 2012•33 min•Ep. 290
During a break on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talks to Jeff Stokes about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Jeff digs into the differences between running a desktop in a virtual environment and a physical environment, especially when the environment resets on shut down. He talks about a script originally developed by Jonathan Bennett of Auto IT Script. This script is modified for the latest features, you can get it on Jeff Stokes Blog. The conversation also tal...
Nov 07, 2012•34 min•Ep. 289
During a break on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard chats with Steven Murawski about web farm management in the Microsoft space. Steve helps to organize the thinking around an array of free Microsoft products including Web Platform Installer 2.0, Web Deploy v2.0, the Web Farm Framework and the Windows Management Framework 3.0.
Oct 31, 2012•37 min•Ep. 288
While on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip Richard chatted with Mark Minasi about some of the new features in Server 2012 - and ended up focusing on the new storage services. Mark explains that with Server 2012, Microsoft has taken software-based storage to a whole new level. No need for expensive SANs (at least at the low end) or even fancy RAID controllers, Server 2012 Storage Services will do it all for you!
Oct 24, 2012•35 min•Ep. 287
While on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard sat down with Robert Bogue to talk about ten of the most common mistakes made with Sharepoint. The conversation covers the gambit of Sharepoint infrastructure challenges including SQL Server, disk storage as a whole, networking, monitoring and more!
Oct 17, 2012•46 min•Ep. 286
Richard chats with Rob Gillen about the myths and realities around WiFi security. Rob talks about how the release of passwords in the wild has weakened WPA2-PSK. You need to use an original SSID and long passwords to have a chance to keep your WiFi secure. The conversation also digs into the challenges of open WiFi access as places like coffee shops. Rob also talks about how WiFi Protected Setup has exploits like reaver-wps that can break into a home WiFi network in a matter of hours. He also de...
Oct 10, 2012•33 min•Ep. 285
Richard chats with Mario Hewardt about what IT folks need to know about debugging Windows. Yes, that's right - IT folks should be able to debug Windows. Not the same way that programmers do, but rather focused on how Windows actually works so that they can solve program interaction problems. Mario talks through a scenario he ran into involving an occasionally crashing program and how he used the Debugging Tools for Windows tool kit from the Windows SDK and SysInternals Process Monitor to solve t...
Oct 03, 2012•33 min•Ep. 284
Richard chats with former PFE Joe Sack about his work helping queries go faster in SQL Server. Joe talks about his techniques for figuring out what to fix as well as how to fix it, starting with studying wait statistics in dynamic management views - SQL Server knows what it's waiting for! From there the conversation digs into the ways that SQL Server fools itself to perform badly, including cardinality estimate issues and other problems with statistics. Joe also looks at the potential of column ...
Sep 26, 2012•35 min•Ep. 283
Mark Russinovich returns to the show to talk about his new book Trojan Horse and discuss the world of cyberwarfare and malware in general. After scaring the heck out of us with the potential exploitation of computing out there today, the conversation turns to solutions. Mark points out how the white listing approach of iOS and the Apple App Store has been so effective in keeping malware off iOS devices that it is being emulated everywhere, including Microsoft. Richard also pokes at Mark's role a...
Sep 19, 2012•36 min•Ep. 282
Richard chats with Glenn Berry about SQL Server hardware. Microsoft changed the licensing of SQL Server in 2012 to per-core rather than per-socket, suddenly making SQL Server much more expensive if you've gone to lots of cores. Glenn talks about how to assess your workload to know if you need as many cores as you currently have, why you shouldn't upgrade in place and use old hardware for SQL Server 2012 and the differences between Intel and AMD CPUs in this new world. Lots of geeky hardware spea...
Sep 12, 2012•34 min•Ep. 281
Richard talks to Michael Steineke about the new clustering features of Windows 2012. Michael starts with the latest version of Network Load Balancing for clustering and goes from there - looking at how all the major products Microsoft makes, like SQL Server and Exchange, work with clustering. The conversation focuses in on the importance of the new file share clustering capabilities, combined with SMB3 to create awesome high performance shared storage with commodity equipment. Server 2012 change...
Sep 05, 2012•40 min•Ep. 280
Richard chats with Microsoft's Stephen Rose about Windows 8 in the enterprise. Does it make sense? Stephen talks about the specific features available in the enterprise edition of Windows 8. It's not just about tablets!
Aug 29, 2012•32 min•Ep. 279
Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Kamal Abburi about his experiences putting together hybrid implementations of Exchange and Office 365. The conversation starts out focusing on why Exchange in the Cloud at all, and the challenges of making a full migration to Office 365. Kamal mentions some of the regulatory hurdles that some countries put in place requiring some mailboxes to remain in the country of origin. He then digs into the challenge of hybrid implementations, covering th...
Aug 22, 2012•36 min•Ep. 278
Richard talks to Victor Mushkatin from the System Center team at Microsoft about Operations Manager 2012. Victor is the former CTO of AVICode, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2010. AVICode's technology has been added to OpsMan to provide detailed instrumentation of .NET applications. The conversation explores how OpsMan 2012 can instrument web and client-based applications end to end to detect reliability and performance issues. Victor also digs into how OpsMan 2012 is a key part of Microsoft...
Aug 15, 2012•37 min•Ep. 277
Richard chats with Justin Morris about the recently announced Lync 2013 Preview. The preview is available for download now, but the product itself is still several months away. Justin talks about how quickly Lync has evolved as an enterprise SIP phone technology into the concepts of presence, integrating email, instant messaging, voice/video calling and desktop sharing together.
Aug 08, 2012•32 min•Ep. 276
Richard chats with Jeffrey Snover about DevOps at Microsoft. The concept of DevOps goes back to a talk that John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did at Velocity called 10 Deploys Per Day. DevOps focuses on having developers and operations working closely together to make rapid deployments possible. Jeff discusses his blog post on the subject of Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps. DevOps is coming to the Microsoft world, are you ready?
Aug 01, 2012•39 min•Ep. 275
Richard talks with Bhargav Shukla about some of the issues he encounters with Exchange 2010 out in the field. The conversation starts out with a long discussion about the impact of mobile device, especially the tendancy today to bring your own device to work. Most users have several devices now syncing with Exchange, not just one or two. This leads to a great knowledge base article on issues with Exchange Active Sync and third party devices. Bhargav then moves onto issues around mailbox size, th...
Jul 25, 2012•38 min•Ep. 274
Richard chats with Jeff Stokes about Microsoft's Windows Assessment Toolkit. Download the ADK here. Another amazing free tool from Microsoft, the Assessment Toolkit gives detailed evaluations on performance, reliability, compatibility and functionality across multiple operating systems, software, low level and application level behavior. Jeff talks about testing new hardware with existing software, with new versions of software, any combination you like. Also mentioned is Performance Analysis of...
Jul 18, 2012•31 min•Ep. 273
Richard talks to Steve Goodman about mobile mail solutions. Steve starts out talking about getting iPhone to work well with Exchange. Turns out that much of what makes iPhone work well applies to other smart phone devices like Android as well. The conversation also explores the role of the cloud, tablets and where the market is headed. Who knew so much innovation is still coming around email?
Jul 11, 2012•37 min•Ep. 272
Mark Minasi is back! Mark and Richard get into a debate about the role of ARM-based and Intel-based tablets. Mark references a couple of articles he authored. The first discusses how ARM tablets cannot join domains. The second digs into the idea domain joining isn't that big a deal. From there, the conversation turns to the hardware differences, how Intel is making moves to be more competitive with ARM from a power and performance perspective, perhaps eliminating the need for ARM in the enterpri...
Jul 04, 2012•46 min•Ep. 271
Richard chats with Steve Murawski about how Server 2012 affects file sharing. Server 2012 includes SMB3, which allows NIC teaming to allow commodity 1GB NICs to work together to create awesome file transfer rates. But how far can we go with that? Steve talks about how clustering and other services in Server 2012 create a world where you may never need a SAN at all - everything can be a file share!
Jun 27, 2012•34 min•Ep. 270
Richard chats with Rhonda Layfield about the now shipping version of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012. Rhonda describes the relationship between MDT 2012 and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager - what MDT does and what SCCM does. The conversation continues over to how Group Policy packs are deployed by default in MDT 2012, which might surprise some IT folks. Rhonda also talks about Security Compliance Manager and how it can help you understand where your Group Policy is at, as well as prov...
Jun 20, 2012•34 min•Ep. 269
Richard talks to Robert Bogue about his Nine Keys to SharePoint Success. The conversation starts off with an acknowledgement that a SharePoint implementation, like any business-related project, needs a shared vision that creates value for a business for there to be any chance of success. After all, if you don't define success, how can you know when you've achieved it? From there, Robert discusses the impact of culture change on SharePoint implementations, honestly evaluating how the project is g...
Jun 13, 2012•41 min•Ep. 268
Richard and Mark Minasi go off the RunAs Rails a bit to talk about geek health. At the beginning of 2011 Mark embarked on a diet and exercise regime that a year later reduced his weight by 30%. The conversation is geeky, but that's what we like - Mark has learned how to get his body recalibrated to burn fat rather than carbs, take the weight off and keep it off. Here's the list of links talked about in the show: Nutrition Made Clear, Tap and Track, MyFitnessPal, FitBit, Withings, Zeo and Polar....
Jun 06, 2012•44 min•Ep. 267
Richard chats with Eric Shupps about the process of improving SharePoint performance. Starting with the single-server implementation of SharePoint, Eric walks through each point of tuning SharePoint including database tuning, separating web front ends from application servers, separating off services, etc. Microsoft has a great site on Best Practices for SharePoint Server 2010.
May 30, 2012•37 min•Ep. 266
Richard chats with Steve Murawski about the new features in Powershell V3. V3 comes with Server 2012, but should also make an appearance in 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Steve talks about how V3 is utilizing .NET 4 and the DLR for improved performance and flexibility. The new Command Source Adapter uses CDXML to create Powershell proxy commands against WMI API calls, which has made it possible for Server 2012 to ship with 1200 cmdlets, up from the 400 in 2008 R2. Steve also talks about workflows in V3,...
May 23, 2012•38 min•Ep. 265
Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes about his tools and techniques for improving boot performance. Jeff points out that it doesn't matter what version of Windows you're using, all of them can suffer from bad boot performance for a variety of reasons, including third party tools, logon scripts and even group policy. The first tool on the list for diagnosing boot performance problems is xperf, specifically xbootmgr which is part of xperf. You can get xperf at the Window...
May 16, 2012•33 min•Ep. 264
Richard talks to Richard Hicks about the new features of DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012. DirectAccess first made its appearance in Server 2008 R2 as a way to make VPN connectivity to the network less painful for users. But the server requirements were arduous, to the point that many IT folks could not deploy DirectAccess at all. Richard talks about how this second version of DirectAccess solves many of those problems. Windows Server 2012 isn't here quite yet, but when it is, you're going to...
May 09, 2012•43 min•Ep. 263
