if ( ! blogClogged )

Why I Want An iPad for Father’s Day

It’s true. I want an iPad for Father’s day. Some of the reasons are obvious and other reasons may not appear as obvious but are the real drivers for me. Basically, I want to expose Rachel, Eli and Mollie (REM) to the interface the iPad delivers more than to the classic mouse based interface I am about to let them jump into.

In case you don’t know, let me tell you that REM are triplets that turned four years old just a couple of months ago.

They have been playing with an old Windows mobile phone (Palm Treo 700w) I stopped using a long while back and even with its simple touch screen they are naturals at its use. While Eli’s sister Mollie loves to take pictures with the phone Eli is especially adept at finding new things and tinkering with it and then educating his sisters. He was the first to find the games and he is who Rachel and Mollie come to when they can’t seem to get navigated to somewhere they want to go. I decided it was time, maybe past time, for them to start learning more on a real computer. That’s when I started to consider what exactly does that mean ‘real computer’. Without doubt the Treo wasn’t what  I meant but it is in part actually closer to the landscape of emerging computer use than the classic PC.

I just replaced an old notebook computer (Latitude D505) used in the house with a new desktop. It couldn’t support Windows 7 properly due to lack of drivers and really could not be expanded in any way to have it keep up with modern software. I decided I’d strip it down and make it into the first PC dedicated to the kids. They could learn to use the mouse and navigate to activities on the local machine. Internet would be cut off except by password. I have a bunch of OLD games passed on from their cousins ranging from ‘The American Girls – Create and Produce Your Own Plays’ to ‘Fisher-Price Great Adventures Castle’. That’s all good but it’s not good enough. They should also be learning on a more modern user interface that involves touch, gestures, speech and even photos as significant means of interaction. They totally get touch and gestures. They definitely get speech. Geez do they get speech. They only know the world of digital photos; outside the Treo, Mollie has her own Kid Tough Digital Camera. Film is a foreign concept.

To close the gap between what I can offer them on the notebook and what I want them to experience the only other real solution is to have an iPad around – it’s the only game in town in truly providing the experience they’ll grow up with. Of course, I wouldn’t mind having an iPad but would not buy one for myself except that I have also been considering a Kindle and well… why not the iPad with the Kindle software instead and be able to make it highly accessible to REM as well.

I’m really upset about the idea of moving a computer to be more available in their life and exposing them to an older mindset of interaction i.e. Windows XP and a mouse. The iPad alone won’t do it they will still need the notebook for many if not most activities at the moment and they’d have to share the iPad (rather- I’d have to share the iPad) with the family as a whole and only under supervision could REM use it for many reasons (computer time is already going to be allotted times) but it seems important.

Am I going to spend $500 for the low end iPad to meet my perceptions of the value. Probably not. But I’ll wish I had. Now if I somehow decide to replace my old Sony e-Reader (a PRS-500 that won’t even read the current Sony e-books without sending it in for a firmware upgrade – if that options still exists) with a Kindle them I’d just do the iPad instead. I won’t at this time by an iPad primarily for REM as the prices will have to come down first. The cost/benefit is just not the proper ratio.

Love This External Video on EMC

I work for EMC. Specifically I work as part of EMC Consulting. More specifically I work as part of EMC Consulting in the Application Development and Design portion. In some research for some specific EMC material I ran across the below on YouTube. Yes, we do post videos on YouTube about new technologies and products etc. Plus I bet there are a few unsanctioned videos as well. :-)

This video dates back to November of 2007. Probably it is NSFW but only mildly so. I love the explanation of EMC multi-tiered storage- you’ll see – it’s a part that might make it NSFW with its mention of Penile Implants and Porn. You’ll have to see it to understand.

Clipped Messages in Gmail--- maybe it’s Outlook 2010 B2

As it turns out my clipped messages in Gmail that I have complained about in a prior post may actually be related to a defect that was in Outlook 2007 Beta releases. You can find some information at the Microsoft Outlook Product Team blog. This also explains why I was only seeing the clipping of my messages on email coming from a specific email distribution list. This list happens to be a group of Microsoft product team members, champs, rangers, MVPS etc. Effectively a high concentration of likely early adopters for Office 2010 Beta products.

I have not confirmed this is the root cause but it seems likely enough that it’s not worth further investigation. I do believe this issue is cleared in the RC version.

This doesn’t relieve Gmail of what I still see as major problems in their method of handling of clipped messages but it does give me a better explanation than I had of why Gmail was clipping the messages. I still disagree with their implementation as it renders clipped messages as unusable/unreadable on their very own software for Gmail access on Blackberry phones if not other devices as well.

Event Viewer 4201 Error

Note to self but useful to anyone that uses virtual machines and clones them or copies them into new environments. I’m not sure the exact order of things but I have often run into an issue where I get something wonky happening and when I go to check the event logs I find the service isn’t running. I then try to start the service to get a message that reads in part

“ERROR_WMI_INSTANCE_NOT_FOUND
4201 The instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a WMI data provider”

In the end I find that C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\WMI\RtBackup has bad permissions on it. It should have the system account with access (full control is what I provide).

Come to think of it the times I have seen it perhaps they all came from the same VM template in my library and I have it hosed in that source VM. Most likely.

At any rate, as a note to myself until I fix that instance. Here is the fix.

SCVMM Issues Resolved

It seems I was able to get my Hyper-V Host machine finally cleaned up of the remnants of a failed SCVMM install (see previous posts here and here). It took dozens and likely well over a hundred registry changes. Most of those changes being deleting references to libraries and installers. In the end I was able to successfully get the SCVMM Agent and a SCVMM Admin Console installed.

Now on to the next task which is what this was all about- get my TFS 2010 environment using this for Microsoft Test Lab Management (MTLM) and within MTLM I’ll be testing SharePoint 2010 code. Pretty cool I think. I’ll see how it works to have SharePoint 2010 code built then tested against a SharePoint environment spun up in MTLM.

More SCVMM Issues

From my  previous post I detailed issues I had run into with SCVMM. They continue to compound. The Hyper-V Server host is where I originally tried to install SCVMM with it getting hung between installed and not installed. That has come back to bite me again. The agent is not installed on the Host but since the install routine thinks that the SCVMM Server is installed then it thinks the agent is by default also present. Of course, neither is really there.

So now I can’t put the agent on because it says the server role is already installed which would contain the agent inherently but I can’t connect the real SCVMM Server because it recognizes there is no agent and when it tries to install one it gets a fatal error.

I fear I’ll end up having to rebuild this Hyper-V host. By the way in case I have never mentioned this is all for my TFS MTLM environment.

Calgon take me away!!!

SCVMM on a VHDs

I say all the below despite the fact that SCVMM is provided for trial as a virtual machine. My experience could have been machine or some other environment specific but nonetheless I give you the below…

In my experience the short and simple word when it comes to installing Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM) is that you should not do this on a virtual disk. Here is my experience and long convoluted path to getting it installed.

I spent numerous hours last week trying to install SCVMM onto a virtual drive, a Hyper-V VHD specifically and continually would get either an outright crash during the final portion of the install or it would come back with a message stating that a file(s) it needed to access was locked.

Don’t confuse the statement that I was installing it onto a VHD with the idea that I was virtualizing the OS and software. In the first instance I was installing to an OS that was a native boot of Windows Server 2008 R2- but it was a VHD native boot. No luck. This is where I usually had the message that a file was locked. Eventually I did get a crash of the install process and SCVMM now sits on that machine unable to be installed or uninstalled. It shows in the list of installed programs despite and if an uninstall is attempted it simply crashes.

After finally getting stuck in no mans land between installed and uninstalled I decided I’d give it a try on a fresh virtual instance of Windows Server 2008 R2. Crash, Crash, Crash. No luck. One common denominator they both were using a VHD – one as a native boot disk the other as a disk for the virtual machine. The forums for SCVMM had some references to issues with SCVMM and installing/running on a VHD.

Let’s not use a VHD in the process.

Giving up that idea I knew I had to come up with a solution. The SCVMM install was a part of my Team Foundation Server 2010 Microsoft Test Lab Manager environment I was building out. Not to be deterred I decided I’d try it on a VMware instance. I have a not so powerful 64 bit server on which I run ESXi. The ESXi server (Cronenberg) runs my tiny home office AD right now and has room to run something like SCVMM. I started the VMware standalone converter to  convert a sysprepped WIN 2K8 x64 VHD based image I use as a seed for all my servers. The converter reminded me after running the conversion process for a while that the target ESXi infrastructure server would not support x64 client. OH YEAH! That ESXi server is x64 but it’s an older Dell PowerEdge 830 server that does not have the proper hardware assisted virtualization technology in the chip to support x64 clients. Ughhh.. now what.

Then it hit me. I have a Toshiba Satellite R25-S3513 notebook on the shelf. It’s x64 and 4GB of RAM. Like the PowerEdge it has no hardware assisted virtualization but that is ok. I already had Windows Server 2008 hanging out on it. When I cranked it up it prompted for a Hard Drive Protection password. I knew the password but that function would have to go away as it’s not very suitable for a server that I’d want to restart unattended. Into the BIOS I go but the BIOS won’t allow the removal. Some research shows I need to use a Toshiba Utility to remove it.

More troubles.

I boot up the Toshiba, download the tool only to be told during installation that the OS is not supported for this application. So… I install a copy of Vista onto the machine just so that I can run this one tool. With the HDD password tool gone I push on a new Win 2K8 R2 onto the laptop. All is good. I install the SCVMM server and console first pass with no issues.

So far so good. I have not yet really used the server. I’ll let you know. That is on tap for sometime in the next 24 hours. I spent may many hours trying many things on a few different environments. Based on the threads I read do think there is a likelihood of SCVMM issues when installed to a VHD. I can’t be sure- there were many variables. I’d recommend you avoid it. As for vmdk… I have no idea. As I set up the rest of my MTLM environment I’ll keep you informed.

Just because I am curious I may try it under VMware with a VMDK and I may try to do a P2V on the machine that has it successfully installed and see if it runs fine virtualized and is mainly an issue as installation.

Then again I have a lot more stuff to do that ranks higher.

Clipped Messages In Gmail Is Killing Me

I have a few posts to make tonight and all the others will be more interesting and related to Visual Studio/TFS 2010 most likely but for now a rant on Gmail.

I like Gmail but lately I have suddenly started getting a large number of “clipped messages”.  If you are not familiar with a clipped message the short story is that an email chain has become too long and to save space the message has been clipped down. You would expect this on an email discussion group thread where people are responding back to the list as a whole and keep the original message in the reply after a few or few hundred people doing so the email message could get very large.  This is what a clipped message looks like:

I have been getting these messages clipped where it’s the first response to the original email. Both emails where short. I have blurred the original email in the following picture but you can see despite the blur the number of words and general length of the email (about 20 words).

The response by someone else was clipped as shown in the first image. The following blurred text is what that response contained- a sentence, a URL and a signature block plus the original 20 word message.

I really don’t believe a response to a 20 word email with an 11 word and 1 URL email plus a signature block rises to the threshold of needing clipped.

This really bothers me for a few reasons.

• My understanding is that if the message is clipped the contents that were clipped is not searchable when doing a search within the mailbox. I have not confirmed this yet.
• I use Google’s own Gmail client on my Blackberry. Clipped message simply show as blank with no means to read them i.e. no statement of message clipped and a link.
• I will confirm but believe I have also found this to be true if using the Blackberry browser and not using specific render settings for the Gmail pages. I’ll confirm.
• I have no control over how the clipping functions and it seems to function not very well.

Someone at Google needs to spend their 20% time and build out a lab item that suggests clipping an email versus doing it automatically and incorrectly as is increasingly the case in too many of the emails I have seen and people using this lab item should stop having their emails rendered bodiless by Google.

Someone else at Google needs to fix their own mobile client software to actually work with the messages after Google has gutted them and at least show the link so that I can read the messages I receive from somewhere other than my non-mobile browser. This one is the one that makes me really frustrated as I rely on my mobile access to Gmail extensively and I am, as of late, being far to often rendered neutered.

Ughhhh….

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

For once this isn’t referring to my code but MGM Digital Media on YouTube and most specifically to one of my favorite movies by the same name.

Imagine my surprise when I went to the YouTube Screen Room to see what new independent style films were on and up popped Clint Eastwood.

A New Coding Project And A New Release Of An Old One

I am about to start a new coding project using Azure with one little twist being that I plan to have it utilize Atmos as well. We’ll see how it goes. I won’t be coding for the scale at which Atmos is designed but this is more of a POC and a good way to knock off some Azure and Atmos coding at the same time.

The old project is the TFS Admin project on CodePlex. With VS 2010 on its way the TFS Admin tool must be significantly modified to support it. That is underway and some of the excellent developers that worked on it last time seem poised to go at it this round as well. They have a new interface I think all will find better and some new features and flexibility in those features have to be built. More on that as it comes.

Poor Network Performance on a Hyper-V V-Lan?

I found I was having terrible performance on my V-Lan that was part of a Hyper-V network. Working with a new install of VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 on a freshly minted Hyper-V host I was getting timeouts like made. Not in the virtual machines but also in the actual host itself.

Off to Google I go. I found the perfect little nugget that seemed to solve my problem. In short the physical network controller that is only running only the Virtual Network Switch Protocol needs a little tweak. This is under the scenario that the flag for the v-LAN that states ‘Allow management operating system to share the network adapter’  is flagged for true.

Go into that connection in the Network Connections Screen.

Right click and then properties

You’ll see the properties with only the Virtual Network Switch Protocol selected

Click the Configure button

Select the Advanced tab

Select the TCP Checksum Offload (IPV4) and change the value to disabled

Select the UDP Checksum Offload (IPV4) and change that value to disabled.

OK your way out.

Now try your network performance. Mine was then more in line with expectations.

This comes from IT Proctology.

I haven’t look for other solutions or investigated fully what this does but I’ll keep you informed.

Microsoft Test Lab Manager, HyperVisor, Dual Boot and bcdedit

I recently upgraded one of my PCs  CPU and RAM  to better support virtualization in general and to support the Microsoft Test Lab Manager environment for Visual Studio 2010. In that process I learned a few things.

1. I learned how cool it is to boot from a VHD. I am now natively booting my machine into Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 with Windows Server 2008 being on a VHD.
   
2. I learned that bcdedit is my friend and not nearly as bad as I recall as it let me perform #1
   
3. I learned that when you set up a dual boot and one of the machines is to be running HyperVisor then you should expect to perform the following command to set it up in the bcd:
   
   bcdedit /set {ID FOR THE HYPER-V MACHINE IN THE BCD} hypervisorlaunchtype auto
   
4. I learned that while your at it you might as well perform the following command to set the Data Execution Prevention flag:
   
   bcdedit /set {ID FOR THE HYPER-V MACHINE IN THE BCD} nx AlwaysOn
   
5. I learned that bcdedit is my friend and not nearly as bad as I recall as it let me perform #3 and #4
   
6. I learned that you cannot run bcdedit from an operating system natively booted from a .vhd. Makes sense – kind of.

On Behalf Of EMC - Welcome Dell. *jk*

The Modern Consultancy Pre-Sale Life-Cycle

At long last I am coming in from the dark. Last April I joined EMC Consulting in the role of Solutions Principal (SP). Since that time I have largely gone “dark” in terms of blog or non-work related technical activities. One reason is that the role keeps me very busy. I love to be busy but this isn’t the good type of busy that feeds your soul but the type of busy that is like a wraith sucking the essence from you.

There have been times when I wanted to blog something about the work day and thoughts and technical challenges I have seen with clients but all that information is highly sensitive. I am doing technical pre-sale work and as such can’t spend time talking publically about opportunities we are going after, internal changes and initiatives we have on-going in various technologies and the list goes on. I have neglected some of the things I love, such as blogging, and replaced it with drawing up a new PowerPoint (I despise the use of PowerPoint for communication) or writing a Statement of Work.

Time to shift gears. I’m in a highly demanding role. I have often heard this role referred to as “SP Hell” by those that had moved out of it into other roles at some point. It can be demanding and with that rewarding. It can at times give you a sense that you are the epitome of the Peter Principal in that all the reasons/actions that made you appealing to the organization for the SP role you now no longer have the luxury to perform. Perhaps I’m just inefficient but I see the same across the board.

It’s a great position don’t get me wrong and I’d encourage others to not shy away from it given the opportunity. If you like to be in front of clients and talking about a large breadth of technologies it can be rewarding. I know I love that. But do I get in front of clients enough?

Enter the modern age.

The lack of face to face communication in my position is one problem that I know is consistent with any sort of consultancy that covers many clients and prospects across large areas. Clients, when I say clients I mean prospects as well, no longer have an expectation of meeting face to face to discuss their challenges and seemingly more often than not when talking about their technical issues all together. That first sales call by a sales person to establish one another will occur. After that so much is done over phone. Without doubt the pure sales people are doing face to face with much greater frequency but for the technical people supporting the opportunity we can often be no more than a voice on the other end of the line for the entire process. I am confident this is a major problem in modern consultancy with the client life-cycle. I definitely have not spent enough time in front of clients. I haven’t done enough whiteboards with them. The result is fewer engagements or engagements that I fear are less engaging for the delivery folks than they should be and produce lower value for the client than it could.

My sense of consultancy the way it used to be versus the current state of not having nearly as many face to face conversations with clients was brought into sharp contrast recently when an initial technical meeting with the client was followed up by a whiteboard session. Furthermore, this was an opportunity for different divisions across the organization and each of those divisions were in play together on trying to solve this problem.  Having done the whiteboard session I realized how much of that was missing from the routine. I suspect I share this sense with others in similar roles.

Understandably everyone has been trimming budgets for years and less travel and less in-person contact with distant clients is a trend that will likely continue and one that I need to become accustomed to. Regardless, these more modern/less personal and less in-depth mechanisms are surely closer to that essence-sucking wraith than to a soul feeding.

Here’s The Deal When Your Code Compiles But At Runtime It Can’t Find Some TFS Assemblies

I have run into this twice now. Both on the same project but different branches. The second time was about 6 weeks after the first and I could not remember where or when I had seen it first I just knew that I had. The steps go like this:

The solution compiles clean.

You go to run the solution and it may start running if it doesn’t have an immediate reliance on a TFS assembly. As soon as the application needs to load a TeamFoundation assembly it dies with the following exception:

"Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.":"Microsoft.TeamFoundation, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"

As it turns out I am working on an x64 machine and the Solution Platform was set to Any CPU or Mixed Platforms

I needed to open up the Solution Configuration and create an x86 platform configuration and then set each project to the x86 Platform (both debug and release). Then when I compile I ensure I have the x86 selected as the Solution Platform.

Voila! The code now runs on my x64 machine.

Team Foundation Server Administration Tool Version 1.4 Has Been Released On CodePlex

Version 1.4 has been released. Build 1.4.90426.1. It really has few user level changes from the 1.4 Final Beta. Some of the reports on the final beta have been pushed into the next release or as of yet unrepeatable from our end.

Ladislau Szomoru and Peter Blomqvist have been working hard on 1.5 that has some significant changes in terms of user experience (it may end being a 2.0, I don't know yet, but they have been referring to it as 1.5. We'll definitely have a major version number change when Team System 2010 is released. What the feature set will need to be will change drastically and the configuration of environments could be much more diverse making it a challenging release for this tool. It may be like starting over.

For a list of all the changes since Version 1.3 follow this link. The big change from V1.3 and V1.4 is the proper support of Reporting Service for SQL Server 2008. We had that in 1.4 Beta 1 but it is still the most significant of a number of changes and the entire reason that we got moving on a 1.4 version.

TFS Admin Tool 1.4 Final Beta

The TFS Admin Tool on Codeplex has a new build (1.4.10402.1). This is being labeled the 1.4 Final Beta. You can grab it and also see all the changes from here. 

Special thanks to Ladislau Szomoru and Peter Blomqvist who did most the work for this build.

What’s Up With ComboBoxes and ObservableCollections in Silverlight??

I have had two different yet potentially related issues in Silverlight within the last week. Well, more than two but just two I am going to talk about in this post. Note my last post title Silverlight With A Set Of Canvases Inside A Stack Panel. To me stacking canvases as I did seems perfectly natural and acceptable but the results are canvases “stacked” on top of one another in the z-dimension as opposed to horizontal or vertical. I digress.

One issue I ran into is hard to explain but is easily presentable. See the video demonstrating it. Basically, if I opened a combobox which was not yet bound then bound it from the async return call to a web service the combobox would then render hosed up from that point forward. If I didn’t touch the combobox and then bound it it worked just fine. Justin Angel rightfully noted I should use the dispatcher to update the combobox that was on the UI thread from the async callback that would be on a different thread. Sadly, this made no difference. Ultimately I ended up locking access to the combobox using isEnabled= false until the async web service call had returned and populated them.

The next issue looked, to me, like a pure eventing issues with some event being delayed. The scenario went like this. If I had a combobox A that when the selection changed locked combbox B (so as not to get the prior issue), cleared the ObservableCollection that was the ItemsSource to combobox B and then made an async web service call rebinding the return values back into the combobox via the same obserrvablecollection, set the SeletecedIndex = 0 less than a second later a javascript error (or something of the nature) would get thrown out saying the index was not in range.

I stepped through the code. It was properly bound on the return trip, it had multiple entries and in the code behind it successfully set to 0 for the selectedindex. If I had not made a selection on combobox B prior to changing the selection on ComboBox A all worked OK.

Really just sensing that there was some in-the-framework event thread that was firing too late and that it was likely coming from the ObservableCollection I shifted it over to a List<> and problem solved.  I had 3 such dependent comboboxes and each one would have the same issue until I moved the source that I bound them to off of the ObservableCollection.

Hmmm…

Silverlight with A Set Of Canvas Inside A StackPanel

What would you expect to be rendered from the following? Answer in the next post.

Personally I’d expect a vertical stack of canvas each with a button and combobox beside one another. Short answer. Nope!

   1: Notice the nested canvas and the controls list a location relative to Canvas 

   2:  

   3:  

   4:  

   5:            <Canvas>

   6:                <StackPanel>

   7:                    <Canvas>

   8:                        <Button Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="0" Width="50" Height="30" Content="-->"></Button>

   9:                        <ComboBox Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="60" Width="250" Height="30"></ComboBox>

  10:                    </Canvas>

  11:                    <Canvas>

  12:                        <Button Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="0" Width="50" Height="30" Content="-->"></Button>

  13:                        <ComboBox Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="60" Width="250" Height="30"></ComboBox>

  14:                    </Canvas>

  15:                    <Canvas>

  16:                        <Button Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="0" Width="50" Height="30" Content="-->"></Button>

  17:                        <ComboBox Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="60" Width="250" Height="30"></ComboBox>

  18:                    </Canvas>

  19:                    <Canvas>

  20:                        <Button Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="0" Width="50" Height="30" Content="-->"></Button>

  21:                        <ComboBox Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="60" Width="250" Height="30"></ComboBox>

  22:                    </Canvas>

  23:                    <Canvas>

  24:                        <Button Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="0" Width="50" Height="30" Content="-->"></Button>

  25:                        <ComboBox Canvas.Top="0" Canvas.Left="60" Width="250" Height="30"></ComboBox>

  26:                    </Canvas>

  27:                </StackPanel> 

  28:            </Canvas>

  29:  

Moving To EMC Consulting As A Microsoft Solutions Principal For the Northeast US and Canada

Looks like I am moving back into the world of consulting but wearing a different hat than ever before. It’s not so much that the hat (technical sales) is such a different style than I have worn in the past just that I’ll not also be wearing the implementation hat. I didn’t actively seek this position out in the beginning and it was not an easy choice to transition from what I do now in leading a team (managing is such a harsh term) because I enjoy my team.

Being the technical face for sales and working deeply on the proposal is not foreign and is something I enjoy. The need to be quick on your feet, the customer interaction, proposing solutions to problems are all awesome things. I have included below the formal EMCC position description. Much is classic technical pre-sales which is exactly what it is supposed to be but I hope to provide much more. For instance my understanding is that EMC is a Microsoft Surface partner (or something) and I certainly plan to leverage that as I am bullish on surface (even if it ends up being largely after hours focus for me), I hope to bring EMCC into more community involvement in the Northeast US and foster growing relationships with Microsoft and building stronger ties with clients and partners. I’m looking forward to working with the Paul Levine who is the Practice Team Lead and who has been doing not only his job but this job as well for longer than I am sure he’d like. He’s the guys who is responsible for getting the stuff implemented so obviously he and I will work closely together.

I’m excited about the move as I always am about any new adventure. I am also appropriately humbled by the tasks I see before me. It’s a part of the business I have always been familiar with as an independent consultant, business owner and principal consultant but the scale with EMC is greater and to get to ‘own’ the role at that sort of scale brings only greater business knowledge and acumen.

I’ll keep you informed and just as importantly if you are once again a competitor… I look forward to the seeing you in the battlefield. :-)

----------------------

Job description

The Role of a Microsoft Solutions Principal

The Solution Principal is responsible for driving Practice bookings through the EMC field account and services sales teams. He/She will provide technical presales support and lead proposal scoping and levels of effort with the delivery team members as directed by the Managing Principal in order to produce a quality proposal.  The Solution Principal partners with the field Account Managers and Client Solutions Director to maintain coordinated account selling efforts.  The Solution Principal also partners with the assigned delivery team members to drive follow-on opportunities within active accounts.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain Practice engagements on a selected list of focused accounts agreed upon with management within the assigned territory
• Maintain a broad-level understanding of the Microsoft stack (Infrastructure, Application Development and Portals)
• Define, develop and implement actions according to account plans on selected focused accounts with account teams
• Drive Practice business development with CSD’s to support presales activities, with a primary focus on identifying, scoping and proposing engagements
• Coordinate sales efforts with delivery management and practice management team(s)
• Participate in regional marketing events to promote Practice
• Ensure formal contractual mechanisms (i.e. SOW) are established and maintained within active accounts
• Develop new business opportunities on focused accounts
• Deliver accurate weekly bookings forecast within assigned territory
• Participate in account relationship and issue management activities
• Maintain proficiency in focused offerings, value propositions and representative case studies
• Provide high level technical direction and expertise to clients, architecting solutions and working on proof of concept projects

TFS Admin Tool Beta 2 Released

TFS Admin Tool Beta 2 was released. The only intended change from the beta 1 was that is now supports non-alphanumeric characters for the 2008 SQL Server name. If you ran into that issue try out the Beta 2

http://tfsadmin.codeplex.com

BTW... for the twitterati out there: #tfsadmintool and also you can follow tfsadm1ntool (note the numeral 1 in place of the i- twitter won't allow the word admin in the name)

On Microsoft, Doorstops and Being an MVP

Under inspiration of a few beers and a friend, Steve St. Jean, I put together a little video titled "Things Are Tough At Microsoft Too". It's poking fun at myself and how unengaged I am in the little trinkets Microsoft provides in the MVP Award kit (I'm all about the MSDN license and innumerable other benefits, plus the everlasting glory ;) ) but also poking fun at what must have been a 5 lb hunk of glass they sent this year in the award kit. 

So go see the video and take it as all in fun. The production values are a little rough as I didn't have time to do more. And no... it wasn't done with Microsoft Movie Maker, but Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum.

http://vimeo.com/3685683.

And here it is embedded which they wouldn't let users do in the past without a 'plus' account but hey it seems to work now- it’s smaller dimensions than the original so for best quality use the above link. You may find you need to turn the volume up on your machine as well.

 
Things Are Tough At Microsoft Too from manicprogrammer on Vimeo.

TFS Admin Tool 1.4 Beta Released

We just release the 1.4 beta of TFS Admin Tool on Codeplex. It’s the first release in over a year. Its big feature is that is provides support for SQL Server 2008 which had not been previously supported. The 1.4 final version will follow shortly as will hopefully a 1.5 and just as important to me a 2.0 version to start to be worked on in parallel to the 1.x releases.

Go take a look at the new features and bug fixes in this version, download it if you need it and provide feedback for what you want to see enhanced and fixed. There is plenty to do.

TFS Admin Tool Codeplex Project Adding Improved Community Support

We are working on a new release for the TFS Admin Tool on Codeplex. It will focus on adding support for SQL Server 2008 and have a few other things thrown in for good measure but we won’t be stopping there. You may have seen posts from a few different places sending a blast out for the community to get involved at least to add in defects and feature requests but even better to submit up code.

To further the community involvement and also make it easier for the active contributors to communicate in real time and in a group other than always by email or through the forums I just added in support for a multi-user IM jabber based conference room. The goal is that people can drop in there to communicate in real time on the product. We’ll schedule structured roundtable times and I’ll encourage the contributors when working on the project, if they can, to have a presence there as well.

If you go to http://tfsadmin.codeplex.com you’ll find a link to the wiki page that contains more details.

It’s an effort to make it easier for the active contributors but also provide a mechanism for the community at large.

Watch the TFS Admin page on Codeplex as well as this blog for an upcoming meeting for you to come in and discuss the tool.

Free 184-page preview chapter

From @chrisbowen tweet:

Free 184-page preview chapter (by Scott Guthrie) from "Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0" -