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• Urban Turtle is such an awesome product !

  - by Vincent Grondin

  Mario Cardinal, the host of the Visual Studio Talk Show, is quite happy these days. He works with the Urban Turtle team and they received significant support from Microsoft. Brian Harry, who is the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, has published an outstanding blog post about Urban Turtle that says: "...awesome Scrum experience for TFS.” You can read Brian Harry's blog post at the following URL: http://urbanturtle.com/awesome.

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• The Jack LaLanne School of Sysadmins

  - by rickramsey

  Two of my childhood heroes were Tarzan and Jack LaLanne. Tarzan was an obvious choice: what boy wouldn't want to spend his days bungee jumping through the jungle with his own pack of gorillas? Jack Lalanne had a disturbing habit of wearing stretch pants, but he was so damn fit for an old guy that you couldn't help but be impressed. Especially back then, when nobody knew what a dumb bell was, much less Cross-Fit. Here's what he did to celebrate his 70th birthday. Sooner or later we all face a choice in our careers: surrender to the life of a has-been like Bruce Sprinsteen's baseball player or become an unstoppable sysadmin like Jack Lalanne. If you'd rather keep on fighting like Jack, give these resources a look. Brian Bream's blog provides specific suggestions for keeping your skills up to date. The video interviews describe the types of technologies that are challenging what you used to know. Blog: The Old School Sysadmin - A Dying Breed? by Brian Bream "The sysadmin role has been far too dependent on performing repetitive tasks and working in a reactionary mode ... the sysadmin must grow a much larger skill set to be successful. Don’t grow vertically in one technology, grow horizontally amongst many technologies." Just one of the suggestions Brian Bream provides in this excellent blog post. Video: Freeing the Sysadmin From Repetitive Tasks Interview with Marshall Choy Marshall Choy, Director of Optimized Solutions at Oracle was once a sysadmin. And a Solaris engineer. He explains what optimized solutions are, how they are developed and tested, how they handle patching, and how these vertically integrated systems impact the job and duties of a sysadmin. Video: The Oracle Database Appliance Interview with Bob Thome Bob Thome, Senior Director of Product Management, explains what makes the Database Appliance simple, reliable, and affordable, and how it could change the economies and processes of the data center. Video: Why Pinellas County Chose Oracle Exalytics Interview with Gautham Gautham (pronounced like Batman's Gotham) recently led an effort to refresh the Pinellas County hardware systems. He'll explain what they were looking for, why they chose Oracle Exalytics, how they became convinced it was the right decision, and how it changed the way they managed their data center. Video: DTrace for System Administrators Interview with Brendan Gregg This video interview will give you an idea of some of the value-add tasks you can perform when you are freed from the reactive mode that Brian Bream describes in his blog. Brendan Gregg describes the best ways for sysadmins to tune deployed applications to get more performance out of them in their particular computing environment photograph of Ford Mustang GT 500 taken at Gateway Museum copyright by Rick Ramsey -Rick Follow me on: Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Personal Twitter | YouTube | The Great Peruvian Novel

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• Play Your Position Until the Play Breaks Down&hellip;then Do Whatever it Takes.

  - by AjarnMark

  If I didn’t know better, I would think that K. Brian Kelley (blog | twitter) has been listening in on conversations with my boss. In his recent blog post Successful Teams: Knowing When to Step Out of Your Role, Brian describes quite clearly a philosophy that my boss has been trying to get across to everyone in the department.  We have been using sports analogies, like how important it is to play your position, until the play breaks down (such as a fumble) and then do whatever it takes it to cover each other / recover the ball / win.  While we like having very skilled people who could do a lot of different tasks, it is important that you first do your assigned tasks, and only once those are complete, or failure of the larger mission is probable, do you consider walking away from them to help someone else with their responsibilities. The thing that you cannot afford, especially on a lean team, is the really nice guy who is always trying to help out other people, but in doing so, is never quite getting his own responsibilities taken care of.  Yes, if the Running Back drops the football, you want any member of the team in the vicinity to jump on it, whether that is the leading blocker or the Quarterback.  But until the fumble happens, you want the leading blocker to focus on doing his job, and block for the Running Back.  If the blocker is doing any other job than his primary responsibility, you’re probably going to lose. This sounds logical enough, but it is really easy to go astray with the best of intentions.  This is especially true on a small, tight-knit team, where it is really easy to get sucked into someone else’s task or problem, doubly so if you think you can do it better or faster than them.  Now you are really setting yourself up for failure.  The right thing is to let the other person do the job, even if it seems less efficient in the short-run, so that you can focus on the tasks which require your expertise.  Don’t break formation…don’t abandon your assignment, until it is clear that mission failure is imminent, and even then, as Brian writes, it should be with the agreement of the mission leader. Thanks, Brian, for putting it so well.  This has been distributed throughout our department.

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• Google I/O 2012 - What's New in Google Maps

  Google I/O 2012 - What's New in Google Maps Brian McClendon, Dylan Lorimer, Thor Mitchell There is a lot of exciting things happening in the world of Maps at Google. Come and join us as we kick off the Maps track at Google I/O 2012 with a dive into the cutting edge of online maps with Google's Vice President of Google Maps and Earth, Brian McClendon, For all I/O 2012 sessions, go to developers.google.com From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 4780 54 ratings Time: 51:32 More in Science & Technology

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• Toronto SharePoint Camp 2011 - Thank-you!

  - by erobillard

  The 5th Annual Toronto SharePoint Camp was last Saturday and it was another terrific success. Thanks to the TSPUG executive committee and the small army of volunteers who made it happen, and to the smiling faces of this year's 200+ attendees for making it all worthwhile. BIG Congratulations to the recipient of our first ever Toronto SharePoint Community Champion Award : Brian Lalancette . Brian was nominated by members of TSPUG and selected from all nominees by the TSPUG Executive for his tireless...(read more)

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• SharePoint Saturday Charlotte 2010 Recap, Slides and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (SPSCLT) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my fourth SharePoint Saturday attended and third I’ve spoken at.  The event was very well organized, attended, and a pleasure to be a part of along with many other great speakers.     At SharePoint Saturday Charlotte I had the opportunity to give two presentations.  First was “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” and second was a new one “Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell.”  I want to thank everyone who attended either of my sessions and for all of the feedback given.  Below you will find links to my slides, demo scripts, and pictures taken throughout the event.  If anyone has any questions from the slides or scripts feel free to drop me a line.   Pictures SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr '10 Pictures on Facebook (recommend these with comments and tagging)   View Full Album   Slides, Scripts, and Rating Links SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Apr '10 Slides and Demo Scripts SpeakerRate: The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007 SpeakerRate: Managing SharePoint 2010 Farms with PowerShell   Conclusion     Big thanks out to Brian Gough (@bkgough), Dan Lewis (@sharepointcomic) and all of the other organizers of this event.  Also a big thanks out to the other speakers and sponsors (too many to list) who made the event possible.  Lastly thanks to my Sogeti coworker Kelly Jones (@kellydjones) for picking me up from the airport and a ride back to Columbus.  I hope everyone that attended got something out of the event and will continue to grow the SharePoint community.  I’m on a break from conferences for a few weeks and then have 3 more back to back weekends in May, blog posts announcing those coming later.  Enjoy the slides, scripts, and pictures.         -Frog Out

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• Farewell

  - by brian.harrison

  Dear Friends and Colleagues After 8.5 years with Plumtree/BEA/Oracle, it is time for me to move on to something new and exciting. Tomorrow, May 21, will be my last day with Oracle. Prior to joining Plumtree back in 2001, I had not stayed with any one company for more than two years at a time and I really thought that that might be the case with Plumtree even then. However, 8.5 years later, I can definitely say that it has been a great ride with very few regrets. I have made some fantastic friends and have learned something from each and every one of you. I have definitely considered this to be a rewarding experience and I will miss all of you. I do hope that you will keep in contact. You never know, our paths may cross again in the future. If you would like to keep in contact, then you can find me on Facebook or Linked In and my personal email is: [email protected]. Goodbye and Good Luck. Brian C. Harrison

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• Central Ohio Day of .Net 2010 Slides and Files

  - by Brian Jackett

  This weekend I presented my “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” session at the Central Ohio Day of .Net conference in Wilmington, OH this weekend.  This is the second year I’ve attended this conference, first time as a presenter.  For those unfamiliar Day of .Net conferences are a one-day conference on all things .NET organized by developers for developers.  These events are usually offered at no cost to anyone interested in .NET development.     The attendees of my session had some great questions and I hope they all got something worthwhile out of it.  Below are my slides and demo scripts (some of which I didn’t have time to demo) along with my sample profiles.  If you have any questions, comments, or feedback feel free to leave comments here or send me an email at brian[email protected].   Slides and Files SkyDrive link   Technology and Friends Interview Experience     On a side note, any of you familiar with one of my Sogeti co-workers in Detroit David Giard may know that he hosts a web series called Technology and Friends.  After my session David tracked me down and asked to interview me about PowerShell.  I was happy to oblige so we sat down and taped some material.  I don’t know when that interview will be going live, but look for it on www.davidgiard.com.   Conclusion     A big thanks goes out to all of the sponsors, speakers, and attendees for the Central Ohio Day of .Net conference.  Without all of them this conference couldn’t have been possible.  I had a great time at the conference and look forward to coming back next year whether that is as a speaker or attendee.       -Frog Out

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• Slides and Pictures from PowerShell Saturday Columbus 2012

  - by Brian Jackett

  On March 10th, 2012 the first ever PowerShell Saturday conference took place in Columbus, OH and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.  We had 100 attendees from 10 different states (the biggest surprise to me) come to see 6 speakers present on a variety of PowerShell topics: introduction, WMI, SharePoint, Active Directory, Exchange, 3rd party products and more.      A big thank you also goes out to a number of people. Planning committee Wes Stahler, lead organizer of PowerShell Saturday Columbus, president of Central Ohio PowerShell User Group Ed “Microsoft Scripting Guy” Wilson Teresa “The Scripting Wife” Wilson Ashley McGlone Brian T. Jackett (myself) Speakers Ed Wilson Ashley McGlone James Brundage Trevor Sullivon Daniel Cruz Volunteer Lisa Gardner, fellow Microsoft PFE volunteered her time on a Saturday to assist with smooth operation of the day Facility Coordination Debbie Carrier, facilities coordinator for the Columbus Microsoft Office and helped us out greatly with the venue   Slides and Script Samples    I presented my session on “PowerShell for the SharePoint 2010 Developer”.  Below you can download the slides and script samples.   Photos    I wasn’t able to take took many pictures (only 3) as I was busy doing my presentation, answering questions, and taking care of random items throughout the day.   Pictures on Facebook    click here Pictures on SkyDrive (higher res) PowerShell Saturday Columbus Mar '12 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL   Conclusion    I’m very happy that this first ever PowerShell Saturday was a success.  My fellow PFE and speaker Ashley McGlone also has a short write-up on his blog about the event (click here).  I have heard rumors that there are other cities starting to plan their own local events.  When I hear more details I’ll spread the word here and on Twitter.         -Frog Out

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• How to focus on one topic? [closed]

  - by Brian

  I have a huge problem while reading computer books. Every couple pages I'll end up googling something I want to learn more about, but then I'll find something on that page that I'll want to learn more about and google that (sometimes programming related, sometime hardware related). Normally after wasting around 3 hours going into different subjects I'll return to the original text only to repeat the process a few pages later. Any advice for sticking to one subject and learning that in-depth? I have tons of programming books I've read half-way through since I'll become interested in other languages/topics (not that I'm not interested in the books I've started). Also, what would be worth focusing on in depth? I've gone into Python in the most depth but for classes I'm learning Java and assembly (ARM and Motorola 68000). Also, I've taken a class on C++. Lately I've been spending most of my time learning about Linux instead of programming though. I'm not sure what would be worth focusing on the most to get a job. In other words, how can you focus on one topic and not let curiosity about everything else get in the way? Thanks in advance, Brian

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• FREE Online Azure Workshop includes a **FREE Azure Account**

  - by Jim Duffy

  My friend and all around good guy, Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Carolinas, Brian Hitney, along with fellow Microsofties Jim O’Neil and John McClelland will be presenting a FREE Windows Azure online workshop tomorrow, Tuesday, May 4th from 7pm-9pm. What? You can’t make it Tuesday evening? Not to worry. This webcast will be repeated again a number of times over the next month or so. Taken from Brian’s blog post about it: “Elevate your skills with Windows Azure in this hands-on workshop! In this event we’ll guide you through the process of building and deploying a large scale Azure application. Forget about “hello world”! In less than two hours we’ll build and deploy a real cloud app that leverages the Azure data center and helps make a difference in the world. Yes, in addition to building an application that will leave you with a rock-solid understanding of the Azure platform, the solution you deploy will contribute back to Stanford’s Folding@home distributed computing project. There’s no cost to you to participate in this session; each attendee will receive a temporary, self-expiring, full-access account to work with Azure for a period of 2-weeks.” Did you catch that last sentence??  “each attendee will receive a temporary, self-expiring, full-access account to work with Azure for a period of 2-weeks.” A FREE, full-access, Windows Azure account to experiment and learn with? Now we’re talking. For more information check out Brian’s blog post or head here. Have a day. :-|

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• Subaru CIO wins SIM Leadership Award

  - by tony.berk

  Congratulations to Brian Simmermon, CIO at Subaru of America, Inc., for winning the Society for Information Management's (SIM) fifth annual SIM Leadership Award. Simmermon joined Subaru of America in 2005 as Chief Information Officer. Simmermon then performed a company-wide technology assessment and determined that the business ran a large collection of applications, many of which duplicated functionality. Establishing the mantra, "Simplicity, Flexibility, and Cost Effectiveness", he reduced the total number of applications, moved to a small core set of systems - including Oracle and Siebel. Tom Doll, COO for Subaru of America said, "We are very pleased Brian has been recognized. He has consistently shown vision and leadership and under his leadership, our technology group's innovations have helped our sales to grow to record levels, regardless of the economic circumstances." Simmermon's technology group's aggressive business deliverables have helped Subaru to become one of the most successful brands in the US with the brand reaching record sales in both 2009 and 2010. Click here to read the full press release. Click here to learn about Subaru's success with Oracle products. Congratulations Brian!

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• Lots of great stuff going on with Oracle Secure Global Desktop!

  - by Chris Kawalek

  You're probably familiar with Oracle Secure Global Desktop, our solution for providing secure, browser-based access to Oracle Applications and other enterprise software. It's a fantastic product and one I've been personally involved with for nearly a decade! I wanted to give you a quick update on all the fantastic things that are going on with it: First, we have done a few videos with Oracle's Mohan Prabhala at trade shows recently. You can get a quick product refresher and an update on the latest new features by watching these: Next, we talked at length with Brian Madden and Gabe Knuth on Brian and Gabe LIVE about Oracle Secure Global Desktop. Click here or on the screenshot below to go to the brianmadden.com video. Part 1 focuses on Oracle Secure Global Desktop. Listen toward the end for Brian to say, “I kinda want this actually at TechTarget right now.” The analysts are talking about us, too. When we released Oracle Secure Global Desktop 4.7, Chris Wolf over at Gartner had this to say on Twitter. Last, just a quick reminder for existing Oracle Applications customers that Oracle Secure Global Desktop is easy for you to leverage for secure application access. Oracle Secure Global desktop is certified for use with Oracle browser-based applications such as Primavera, E-Business Suite and with Exalogic. Steven Chan over at the E-Business Suite Technology blog gives a great explanation of how Oracle Secure Global Desktop works with E-Business Suite, as an example. As the title says, lots of great stuff going on! -Chris

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• How&rsquo;s your Momma an&rsquo; them?

  - by Bill Jones Jr.

  When a Southern “boy” like me sees somebody that used to be, or should be, a close friend or relative that they haven’t seen in a long time, that’s a typical greeting.  Come to think of it, we were often related to close friends. So “back in the day”, we not only knew people but everybody close to them.  When I started driving, my Dad told me to always drive carefully in Polk county.  He said if I ran into anybody there, it was likely they would be related or close family friends. Not so much any more… the cities have gotten bigger and more people come south and stay.  One of the curses of air conditioning I guess. Anyway, it’s been a while.  So “How’s your Momma and them”?  Have you been waiting for me to blog again?  Too bad, I’m back anyway <smile>. Here in Charlotte we just had another great code camp.  The Enterprise Developers Guild is going strong, thanks to the help of a lot of dedicated people.  Mark Wilson, Brian Gough, Syl Walker, Ghayth Hilal, Alberto Botero, Dan Thyer, Jean Doiron, Matt Duffield all come to mind.  Plus all the regulars who volunteer for every special event we have. Brian Gough put on a successful SharePoint Saturday.  Rafael Salas and our friends at the local Pass SQL group had a great SQL Saturday.  Brian Hitney and Glen Gordon keep on doing their usual great job for developers in the southeast as our local Microsoft reps. Since my last post, I have the honor of being designated the INetA Membership Mentor for Georgia in addition to mentoring the groups in the Carolinas for the past several years.  Georgia could be a really good thing since my wife likes shopping in Atlanta, not to mention how much we both like Georgia in general.  As I recall, my Momma had people in Georgia.  Wonder how their “Mommas an’ them” are doing?   Bill J

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• Team Foundation Service Preview now open for all!

  - by Tarun Arora

  The concept of TFS in the cloud was first presented back in early 2010, the product team worked hard to preview a constantly evolving solution at the BUILD conference last year and after having completed 31 Sprints today the preview service has been opened for all. No more invitation codes required, TfsPreview has been made public! “Since we announced the Team Foundation Service Preview at the BUILD conference last year, we’ve limited the on boarding of new customers by requiring invitation codes to create accounts.  The main reason for this has been to control the growth of the service to make sure it didn’t run away from us and end up with a bad user experience.  In this time period, we’ve continued to work on our infrastructure, performance, scale, monitoring, management and, of course, some cool new features like cloud build. ”   - Brian Harry Since the service is still in preview, it is free for all… If you haven’t, now is the best time to try out the offering. There is no fixed time line on how long before service becomes chargeable but the terms of service support production use, the service is reliable and the product team committed to carry all of your data forward into production. “The service will remain in “preview” for a while longer while we work through additional features like data portability, commercial terms, etc but the terms of service support production use, the service is reliable and we expect to carry all of your data forward into production. ”  - Brian Harry As of today it’s possible to use TFS Preview with VS 2012 RC, VS 2010 SP1, VS 2008 SP1, the service currently does not work with VS 2005, this is something the product team is actively working on. You can refer to Brian’s announcement blog post here, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2012/06/11/team-foundation-service-preview-is-public.aspx

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• Running RSpec Files From ruby code

  - by Brian D.

  I'm trying to run RSpec tests straight from ruby code. More specifically, I'm running some mysql scripts, loading the rails test environment and then I want to run my rspec tests (which is what I'm having trouble with)... I'm trying to do this with a rake task. Here is my code so far: require"spec" require "spec/rake/spectask" RAILS_ENV = 'test' namespace :run_all_tests do desc "Run all of your tests" puts "Reseting test database..." system "mysql --user=root --password=dev < C:\\Brian\\Work\\Personal\\BrianSite\\database\\BrianSite_test_CreateScript.sql" puts "Filling database tables with test data..." system "mysql --user=root --password=dev < C:\\Brian\\Work\\Personal\\BrianSite\\database\\Fill_Test_Tables.sql" puts "Starting rails test environment..." task :run => :environment do puts "RAILS_ENV is #{RAILS_ENV}" # Run rspec test files here... require "spec/models/blog_spec.rb" end end I thought the require "spec/models/blog_spec.rb" would do it, but the tests aren't running. Anyone know where I'm going wrong? Thanks for any help.

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• Get Exchange Online Mailbox Size in GB

  - by Brian Jackett

  As mentioned in my previous post I was recently working with a customer to get started with Exchange Online PowerShell commandlets.  In this post I wanted to follow up and show one example of a difference in output from commandlets in Exchange 2010 on-premises vs. Exchange Online.   Problem    The customer was interested in getting the size of mailboxes in GB.  For Exchange on-premises this is fairly easy.  A fellow PFE Gary Siepser wrote an article explaining how to accomplish this (click here).  Note that Gary’s script will not work when remoting from a local machine that doesn’t have the Exchange object model installed.  A similar type of scenario exists if you are executing PowerShell against Exchange Online.  The data type for TotalItemSize  being returned (ByteQuantifiedSize) exists in the Exchange namespace.  If the PowerShell session doesn’t have access to that namespace (or hasn’t loaded it) PowerShell works with an approximation of that data type.    The customer found a sample script on this TechNet article that they attempted to use (minor edits by me to fit on page and remove references to deleted item size.)   Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select DisplayName,StorageLimitStatus, ` @{name="TotalItemSize (MB)"; expression={[math]::Round( ` ($_.TotalItemSize.Split("(")[1].Split(" ")[0].Replace(",","")/1MB),2)}}, ` ItemCount | Sort "TotalItemSize (MB)" -Descending | Export-CSV "C:\My Documents\All Mailboxes.csv" -NoTypeInformation     The script is targeted to Exchange 2010 but fails for Exchange Online.  In Exchange Online when referencing the TotalItemSize property though it does not have a Split method which ultimately causes the script to fail.   Solution    A simple solution would be to add a call to the ToString method off of the TotalItemSize property (in bold on line 5 below).   Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics | Select DisplayName,StorageLimitStatus, ` @{name="TotalItemSize (MB)"; expression={[math]::Round( ` ($_.TotalItemSize.ToString().Split("(")[1].Split(" ")[0].Replace(",","")/1MB),2)}}, ` ItemCount | Sort "TotalItemSize (MB)" -Descending | Export-CSV "C:\My Documents\All Mailboxes.csv" -NoTypeInformation      This fixes the script to run but the numerous string replacements and splits are an eye sore to me.  I attempted to simplify the string manipulation with a regular expression (more info on regular expressions in PowerShell click here).  The result is a workable script that does one nice feature of adding a new member to the mailbox statistics called TotalItemSizeInBytes.  With this member you can then convert into any byte level (KB, MB, GB, etc.) that suits your needs.  You can download the full version of this script below (includes commands to connect to Exchange Online session). $UserMailboxStats = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox ` -ResultSize Unlimited | Get-MailboxStatistics $UserMailboxStats | Add-Member -MemberType ScriptProperty -Name TotalItemSizeInBytes ` -Value {$this.TotalItemSize -replace "(.*\()|,| [a-z]*\)", ""} $UserMailboxStats | Select-Object DisplayName,@{Name="TotalItemSize (GB)"; ` Expression={[math]::Round($_.TotalItemSizeInBytes/1GB,2)}}   Conclusion    Moving from on-premises to the cloud with PowerShell (and PowerShell remoting in general) can sometimes present some new challenges due to what you have access to.  This means that you must always test your code / scripts.  I still believe that not having to physically RDP to a server is a huge gain over some of the small hurdles you may encounter during the transition.  Scripting is the future of administration and makes you more valuable.  Hopefully this script and the concepts presented help you be a better admin / developer.         -Frog Out     Links The Get-MailboxStatistics Cmdlet, the TotalitemSize Property, and that pesky little “b” http://blogs.technet.com/b/gary/archive/2010/02/20/the-get-mailboxstatistics-cmdlet-the-totalitemsize-property-and-that-pesky-little-b.aspx   View Mailbox Sizes and Mailbox Quotas Using Windows PowerShell http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/gg576861#ViewAllMailboxes   Regular Expressions with Windows PowerShell http://www.regular-expressions.info/powershell.html   “I don’t always test my code…” image http://blogs.pinkelephant.com/images/uploads/conferences/I-dont-always-test-my-code-But-when-I-do-I-do-it-in-production.jpg   The One Thing: Brian Jackett and SharePoint 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg_h66HMP9o

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• SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival     Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner”     Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions     The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation     I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…     As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files     For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session   Picture Albums     For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion     A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.         -Frog Out   links: Michigan image

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• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

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• Thoughts on Thoughts on TDD

  Brian Harry wrote a post entitled Thoughts on TDD that I thought I was going to let lie, but I find that I need to write a response. I find myself in agreement with Brian on many points in the post, but I disagree with his conclusion. Not surprisingly, I agree with the things that he likes about TDD. Focusing on the usage rather than the implementation is really important, and this is important whether you use TDD or not. And YAGNI was a big theme in my Seven Deadly Sins of Programming series. Now, on to what he doesnt like. He says that he finds it inefficient to have tests that he has to change every time he refactors. Here is where we part company. If you are having to do a lot of test rewriting (say, more than a couple of minutes work to get back to green) *often* when you are refactoring your code, I submit that either you are testing things that you dont need to test (internal details rather than external implementation), your code perhaps isnt as decoupled as it could be, or maybe you need a visit to refactorers anonymous. I also like to refactor like crazy, but as we all know, the huge downside of refactoring is that we often break things. Important things. Subtle things. Which makes refactoring risky. *Unless* we have a set of tests that have great coverage. And TDD (or Example-based Design, which I prefer as a term) gives those to us. Now, I dont know what sort of coverage Brian gets with the unit tests that he writes, but I do know that for the majority of the developers Ive worked with and I count myself in that bucket the coverage of unit tests written afterwards is considerably inferior to the coverage of unit tests that come from TDD. For me, it all comes down to the answer to the following question: How do you ensure that your code works now and will continue to work in the future? Im willing to put up with a little efficiency on the front side to get that benefit later. Its not the writing of the code thats the expensive part, its everything else that comes after. I dont think that stepping through test cases in the debugger gets you what you want. You can verify what the current behavior is, sure, and do it fairly cheaply, but you dont help the guy in the future who doesnt know what conditions were important if he has to change your code. His second part that he doesnt like backing into an architecture (go read to see what he means). Ive certainly had to work with code that was like this before, and its a nightmare the code that nobody wants to touch. But thats not at all the kind of code that you get with TDD, because if youre doing it right youre doing the write a failing tests, make it pass, refactor approach. Now, you may miss some useful refactorings and generalizations for this, but if you do, you can refactor later because you have the tests that make it safe to do so, and your code tends to be easy to refactor because the same things that make code easy to write unit tests for make it easy to refactor. I also think Brian is missing an important point. We arent all as smart as he is. Im reminded a bit of the lesson of Intentional Programming, Charles Simonyis paradigm for making programming easier. I played around with Intentional Programming when it was young, and came to the conclusion that it was a pretty good thing if you were as smart as Simonyi is, but it was pretty much a disaster if you were an average developer. In this case, TDD gives you a way to work your way into a good, flexible, and functional architecture when you dont have somebody of Brians talents to help you out. And thats a good thing.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Cannot change port 25 to port 587

  - by Steve

  I am using outlook 2003. My email provider is Cox. Trying to change my out going port to 587 so I send mail while traveling. Others I know on Cox have done this with succes, but they are using newer version of outlook. When I go to change my existing email accounts, outlook will not allow me to change the settings. I can delete 25, but it will not allow me to type in 587. What am I doing wrong?

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• Troubleshooting Windows Explorer

  - by edward.r.cox

  I have a .NET application that receives messages from a web server and alerts the user. I have one Windows XP SP3 computer that when my application receives the message, it crashes the Windows Explorer shell. (I can see the message received in the listview just before Explorer crashes.) I don't see any errors in the Windows event logs. Is there somewhere that I should be looking at to troubleshoot this problem?

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• Apache - building extensions with apxs

  - by Brian

  Hello, Pardon the newbie question - I haven't worked with manually compiling Apache modules (or anything) before. I am trying to get the mod_concat module going. It seems simple enough - just requires downloading the mod_concat.c file and then running: axps -c mod_concat.c This is new to me. Does it matter which directory I put mod_concat.c before running this command? I ran it from my home directory, and I see some new files - mod_concat.la, mod_concat.lo, mod_concat.o, and mod_concat.slo - along with a new subfolder called .libs/ that contains mod_concat.so along with some other files. I'm not sure where to go from here, I have a feeling these files were created in the wrong place. Don't I need mod_concat.so to be in my apache modules directory with the rest? Thanks for the help, Brian

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• SQL 2008 publisher -> SQL 2000 subscriber: Is a pull subscription possible for merge replication?

  - by Brian Dunzweiler

  I am trying to synchronize a SQL 2000 SP4 subscriber to a SQL 2008 publisher via a merge pull subscription. When the subscriber tries to run the merge agent, it fails the following error: The process could not connect to Distributor 'OH05DBS002\SAM_SSG_2008'. SQL Server does not exist or access denied. Has anyone had success with this setup? I was able to create and synchronize a push subscription so I know that communication works between the two, at least from 2008-2000. The lack of communication from 2000-2008 also affects the ability to create a linked server on the SQL 2000 subscriber. One other tidbit - I did install the SQL 2008 native client on the the 2000 box but it didn't help either. Before anyone asks, I can't upgrade the subscriber as it still needs to support replication between MS Access 2003. Yeah, I know. :) TIA, Brian

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• Cached Network Share Credentials?

  - by Brian Wolfe

  Hi, I have an issue in Windows 7 where I get the following error message when attempting to access an admin network share on a machine in another domain: "Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again." Troubleshooting I've Done Start Run cmd net use * /DELETE Start Manage Windows Credentials Deleted all credentials I still receive the same error until I reboot my machine. After I reboot, it works fine. However, I am able to log into the admin share if I hit it by it's IP address. QUESTION My question is, is there somewhere else I should be looking for cached user credentials? Thanks, Brian

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