Recently in Windows/XP/Vista/Windows 7 Category

Well, it’s official. Microsoft has abandoned another mainstream product with no replacement. When I installed the new IE9 I discovered that SharedView no longer worked. I quickly uninstalled IE9 and submitted a Connect bug and asked my MVP lead to check out what’s going on. He got back to me today with the grim news: “Microsoft SharedView is no longer supported by Microsoft.”

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharedviewbetahelp/threads

This is pretty sad. I leaves me and many other trainers and support professionals in the lurch. Now I have to find a suitable (non-Microsoft) replacement, test it and learn how to use it as well as update my course materials. I expect this is not nearly as expensive as the costs incurred by others that depend on SharedView on a daily basis.

Why is SharedView important? Yes there are other programs that purport to do the same. The SharedView advantage is that it's a MICROSOFT desktop sharing solution. You don't have to convince a customer that this free program is going to do anything but do what it's supposed to do. It's very lightweight, installs in seconds, is virtually pain-free and is brutally simple for each end to use. We have lots of sites where remote desktop is not an option--especially in my webinar classes. Consider that SV lets me view the system while the customer demonstrates a problem. I can take over his mouse and keyboard but only if he lets me and all he needs to do to take control back is move the mouse or press a key. It gave the customers a lot more confidence in their own system's security.

Wonder why the Microsoft stock is flat or falling while other companies continue to grow even in this economy? Now you know.

I took on the job of creating a DVD of this year's choir concert. I used my Canon Vixia HF20 HD (1080i) camera to record the video and sound and frankly, it did a great job. Now came the hard part.

Another day lost. As many times as I’ve helped others get connected, nothing worked today as I tried to connect from one system in a Workgroup to a SQL Server on a local (trusted) domain. I tried everything imaginable including:

• Checking to see it the server properties were set to permit remote connections. They were.
• Was the SQL Browser service running? It was.
• Did the SQL Server Configuration Manager say that the right protocols were enabled? Yes, they were.
• I tried to Telnet to the IP address and port being used (based on SSCM). It worked locally but not over the network.
• I stopped the Windows Firewall service as I was running Small Business Service and it thinks it knows best about configuring client firewalls (despite the fact that I have other firewall hardware). That made no difference.

Nothing made any difference. I could not connect from other domain-based systems either. The rest of the story? Well, I remembered having installed Windows 7 on top of an existing Windows Vista system. I had assumed that it had joined the SBS domain correctly (I ran “Connect” which was supposed to do that). Apparently it didn’t. When I dropped the offending system from the domain, went into SBS, dropped the system there, and rejoined the domain it worked fine. Everyone could see the SQL Server. That only took 6 hours of fiddling to figure out. I’m hesitant to run connect again…

Sigh. How does anyone get any work done if all we do is frutz with systems?

Bill

After updating a working Vista system to Windows 7 several things happened that made what seemed like an easy transition to Windows 7 from Vista less than productive. I detail these issues to help you avoid the same issues. Yes, Windows 7 is worth the pain. It’s noticeably faster at every step, the UI is different but I get it. It’s more secure, but that’s a PIA sometimes—and that’s not a Primary Interop Assembly.

Patrick, I could not agree more with your editorial this month. Based on what I hear when I leave my cave is that Microsoft just doesn’t get it. Because of politics (no, not the Bush/Obama kind) and an old-school marketing and sales plan, Microsoft has also forced its own development teams to pump out new versions of SQL Server and other serious platform engines on a ever-shortening cycle. The same is true for Visual Studio and the languages teams whose development cycles seem to be totally consumed trying to get the Entity Framework working. This means the teams place less emphasis on fixing existing long-term bugs and making development of existing architectures easier. Over and over again we hear that “Microsoft knows what’s best for developers”.

When the daily Vista backup failed, I expected it was time to throw out some of the older backups and make sure there was room on the backup drive for more—after all it’s only 750GB. Well about this time my system failed to boot. No amount of cajoling or trickery could get it to boot. Safe mode? Nope—blue screen that flashed by so fast I couldn’t read it. So I tried to use the backups that did exist on the drive to restore the system. The Vista Setup disk could not see them. I tore the system down (about midnight) and pulled the drive, tested it (it was fine) mounted it in a USB carrier and told Vista to look for it. No joy. I attached the drive and shared it to the network and told Vista to attach to the network (which it did) and look for the files. Not found.

As a result, I had to totally reinstall the OS. What a PITA. I’ll spend every non-working hour for weeks trying to get this (my primary dev system) back to 100%. Hell, the Windows updates alone take 36 hours to install…

I’m installing Acronis Workstation now and backing up the system so I can REALLY restore it when stuff happens—as it always does.

I just hope V7 works better than this…

ttyl

While at PASS I had a chance to ask questions about Windows Server 2008. You see I tried to back up my server using the built-in Windows Server Backup (WSB) program. Ah, it's pretty crude. Interestingly enough, very (very) few of the Microsoft folks at the booths knew of the (gross) limitations of the backup implementation. The third-party companies that sell backup solutions were also clueless.