Windows Server - Shutdown Event Tracker

Anyone who has used a Windows Server OS for their workstation, in a VM or on a development server has probably been annoyed by the Shutdown Event Tracker (that prompt that asks you to enter a note about why you are shutting down) when restarting or shutting down. If you have ever wanted to get rid of that than here are some instructions.

1. Open the Local Group Policy Editor by running gpedit.msc
2. Under Computer Configuration select Administrative Templates and Click System
3. In the right window double-click Display Shutdown Event Tracker
4. Change the setting to Disabled and click OK

That's it.

-Z

More on GNOME 3

Just a note on a few things I have noticed with GNOME 3.

First - No desktop icons. That is going to take a little getting used to. I don't use them all that much anyway but I still like to have them there for commonly used files and applications. But now that there is the favorites bar on the left, that pretty much takes care of the desk top application links and I really should be keep my documents and things in the proper location anyway so its no big deal.

Second - Search. When you bring the mouse to the upper left corner or click activities, in addition to getting the favorites bar on the left, desktops on the right and open windows or applications in the center you also get a search bar that will narrow the list of applications to what you enter. So, for instance, I type Blue and I get Blue Fish Editor and Bluetooth settings. It also has the option to search Google or Wikipedia for the search string you typed. 

Third - Minimize and Restore icons. The normal options of close, minimize and restore are replaced with just a close icon, although Chrome still has all 3. This is a little awkward but you can right click on the title bar to use these functions. 

Finally - IM. When you receive an instant message you get a notification with the message in the lower center that doesn't interfere with what you are doing. Hover your mouse over and it opens up with a place to type a reply so you can IM with someone while doing other things without switching back and forth between windows.

Overall I like the new UI but I guess like anything that is new, you aren't going to love everything about it.

-Z

Intellisense in SQL Server 2008 R2

Well since I complained about something stupid in SQL Server 2008 R2 the other day, I think I should say something good. Having come from SQL Server 2005, I have to say I am loving that Microsoft added intellisense to SQL Server 2008. Its one of those features that I always wished was there because its so easy to mistype something, especially when creating stored procedures, so the fact that tables and field names, parameters, etc pop up as you type makes life much easier.

-Z

Bare Metal Restore

I got 2 new SSD drives this week at work for my laptop. They are replacing 2 regular drives of the same size. Unfortunately the old drives were setup in a RAID 0 configuration so to the OS (Windows Server 2008 R2) they read as a single 320 GB drive. I had less than half the space used up so I thought I could do a Bare Metal Restore backup and restore it to one of the new drives. The backup went fine but when I went to restore I kept getting the error:  "The system image restore failed. No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found."  Not a very helpful message, it gave some additional information about checking for excluded disks and some suggestions if you were restoring to a USB disk none of which applied.

I assumed the problem had to do with the RAID configuration or something with the size of the backup. After some research it turned out that you can not do a Bare Metal Restore from a larger disk to a smaller one even if the size of the data to restore would fit on the new disk. So now I had to figure out how to manage that. I went to Server Manager and tried to Shrink the C Drive but due to fragmentation of the drive it could not shrink it enough. I ran disk defragmenter and tried to shrink the drive again but it still would not shrink it enough. Then I remembered a tool I had used when converting my home laptop from a windows machine to dual booting windows and linux, Perfect Disk. It had been able to move files that the windows defragmenter couldn't so I gave it a try and sure enough, it came to the rescue again and completely defragmented the drive and I was able to shrink it enough, do another backup and restore it to  one of the new drives and everything is working great with the new SSDs.

-Z

GNOME 3

Well I gave up on the Unity UI for Ubuntu 11.04, I just didn't like it. I installed GNOME 3 using these instructions with a few changes. First instead of using the Run Application dialog I just opened a terminal window and ran all the commands in there. Also, before I could get sudo apt-get install gnome-shell to run I had to do sudo apt-get -f install. After that it worked fine.

So far I like it a lot better. Although there are some similarities, GNOME 3 is a lot more intuitive than Unity and even after using it for just a few minutes I could find everything and get around pretty easily which wasn't the case with Unity.

I'm not sure I like it better than GNOME 2 yet but as I play around with it I will see how I like it.

-Z

Why does Microsoft have to change things?

This is kind of a pointless post but I was doing something in SQL Server 2008 R2 today and I wanted to quickly view the contents of a table so I went to do the old stand-by from SQL Server 2005 of right-clicking on the table name and selecting Open Table but it wasn't there. I looked at the options and decided to try one that looked like it might be similar, "Edit Top 200 Rows". Seems to be exactly the same as Open Table. I just don't get why they had to change that, especially since I more often use that feature to just do a quick look at the data in the table than to actually edit the data so I think the old label made more sense.


Anyway, that's it, just complaining.


-Z

Ubuntu 11.04

I installed the update to Ubuntu 11.04 today, actually started it last night but it didn't finish before I went to sleep. I'm not sure what to think about Gnome being replaced by the Unity interface. It seems pretty dumbed down, kind of Mac like. It seems to be focused on commonly used applications over getting to things like settings/administration screens. It also seems to be a bit slow at starting up applications, but maybe I am just looking too hard for problems.

I know it sometimes takes a while to get used to a new interface so I will give it a chance for a little while. If it still isn't working for me I may try to install Gnome 3.

-Z

Document Sets in SharePoint 2010

I came across another new feature of SharePoint 2010 called Document Sets. This looks pretty useful. It basically gives you a way to group documents in a document library similar to a folder but with more flexibility. A document set is setup as a content type on the document library that you can customize in a number of ways.

• You can add columns to the set and can default values in the columns so that you don't have to add the metadata values on each document. This also means if you have to add a new column you can easily set a value on all existing documents in the document set. 
• You can also run workflows against the whole document set.
• Versioning can be done either on individual documents or the document set.

Here is a post I was reading on this today, that goes into a lot of detail on the differences between document sets and folders.

-Z

SharePoint 2010 New Developer Tools

Today I was continuing the process of learning about SharePoint 2010  and one of the areas that I focused on was all the new tools that have been added for Developers.

SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio

• New SharePoint explorer (in Server Explorer) - view into site collection on local farm with nodes for features, lists, etc in site collection.
• When creating projects for SharePoint 2010 there are project templates. Deploying these automatically builds solutions package.
• Most of the tools for Visual Studio were available through a combination of Visual Studio Extentions for WSS, WSP Builder from CodeProject and other tools. Now these are all just built into Visual Studio so it is more seamless and complicated.

SharePoint Designer

• New UI based on SP Objects rather than virtual folder/file tree like 2007 - This should make it much easier to find what you are looking for.
• Can easily see relationships between objects
• Can now export work done in SPD to wsp files that can be imported into Visual Studio project. 
• Standard approval workflow is now a customizable SPD workflow.
• In 2007 workflows were not really reusable. In 2010 can now create reusable workflows.
• New Workflow designer interface
• Can prompt for workflow variables and use those variables in the workflow 

Developer Dashboard - This looks like it will be a great addition. Turning it on will enable troubleshooting issues. I found this post that gives some good detail on it.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=8d9e2a99%2Df288%2D47c2%2D916b%2D2f32864f7b82&ID=457&Web=5e4647a0%2De7d0%2D4626%2Db71c%2Db1ff06402465

Learning SharePoint 2010 Continued

I spent some more time today learning about the changes and new feature in SharePoint 2010 and I have to say I am really looking forward to working with it. Here are some of the changes that I think are really great:

• Client Object Model - Obviously the Object Model has been around for server code that has access to the SharePoint dll but for applications that run on the client this wasn't possible. Now in 2010 the Object Model is available on the client side as well.
• LINQ to SharePoint
• Allows creation of LINQ classes to access SharePoint list data.
• Generated CAML behind the scenes but makes querying data from SharePoint much more standard.
• Workflows on objects other than lists
• Can now have workflows based on sites. I am really want to see how this works.
• Business Connectivity Service / BCS (was BDC)
• Can be created using SharePoint Designer
• Created as External Lists
• External Lists are treated in SharePoint like native lists.
• Can write back to data source (SQL Server DB, etc)
• Sandbox Solutions
• Allows solutions to be created when you don't have farm level access
• Solution uploaded to site collection user code gallery
• Not deployed to GAC
• New List Features
• Navigation Hierarchy - Allows drill down on the side navigation of list based on certain types of field data
• Key Filters - Adds a filter to the side navigation to allow filtering of commonly used fields
• Tasks Predecessors - Adds the ability to require some tasks to be completed before others
• Wiki style page editing
• Page content can be edited right in the browser
• Can insert pictures, web parts, etc inline
• Files uploaded for page content goto new Site Assets list

As I get to use some of the new features I will post some updates on them.

-Z

SharePoint 2010

I have been working with SharePoint 2007 for almost 3 years now but have just this week started the process of moving to SharePoint 2010. I installed in in the VM the other day and started reading about some of the new features. A couple of things I have been reading that I think are some nice changes:

1. Event log flood protection - As someone who has experienced the messages in the log file repeating constantly and taking up a lot of space in SharePoint 2007, this sounds great. If a repeating message is detected it is suppressed and only occasional reminders that it is still occurring are reported.
2. Powershell replacing STSADM  - I love Powershell so the fact that you can now do all the administrative tasks that used to be done with STSADM in Powershell is great. It should make it much easier to create powerful administrative scripts to perform common functions.
3. Ribbon UI - OK, this one kind of worried me because I have not been a big fan of the Office ribbon, I am used to it now but I still prefer the old menus and toolbars. I have to say though that from what I have seem so far, the ribbon in SharePoint 2010 seems to really be a good addition to make it easier to get to common functions without having to search around and should save quite a bit of time.

I am really looking forward to digging in and starting to create some new sites and doing some development against 2010.

-Z