Victor Stodell

Microsoft have released a beta version of Internet Explorer 9 and you cal tell that this is a true competitor in the browser war. For several reasons I have been running Google Chrome for a while but I always get curious when Microsoft makes a new release. Among other things, IE 9 comes with HTML 5 support and an well thought through integration with Windows 7. Apart from that the browser is faster, more secure and the user interface is redisigned to give more focus to the web sites. I have not tested it enough to say if they have succeeded, but as always I think highly of Microsoft. Read mor and download the beta version on  http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ .

With the purpose of automation DNS documentation I needed to get information programatically from the DNS servers. The answer to this, and many other similar tasks is spelled  WMI . That is short for  Windows Management Instrumentation , which is an infrastructure for getting information from Windows using a specific query language. Here is a method to get the host names and IP addresses for each A-record on the specified domain. public string Server = "192.168.0.1"; public string Domain = "domain.local"; public string Username = "DOMAIN\User"; public string Password = "Pa$$w0rd"; public Dictionary<string, string> GetHosts() { Dictionary<string, string> hosts = new Dictionary<string, string>(); ManagementScope scope = new ManagementScope(String.Format(@"\\{0}\Root\MicrosoftDNS", Server)); scope.Options.Impersonation = ImpersonationLevel.Impersonate; scope.Options.Username = Username; scope.Opti...

Instead of investing in a TACACS server solution we wanted to build switch and router logon on Active Directory authentication. This is possible by installing a RADIUS server to handle the communication between the Cisco devices and Active Directory. Windows Server 2008 R2 can be made into a RADIUS server by installing the role  Network Policy Server . Aaron Walrath  has put together a guide with everything that needs to be done to get the RADIUS authentication in the Cisco devices and how to connect this to the Active Directory. This guide is divided into two blog posts. RADIUS authentication for Cisco router logins Install Windows 2008 R2 NPS for RADIUS authentication for Cisco router logins

I finally took the time to go through with a certification that I have been wanting to do for a while, MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Forms Application Development . During my years as a .NET developer I have been working a lot with Windows Forms, so this was not a painful experience. The next step will propably be to aim for MCPD in the same area before it is time to move on to the new Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 certifications.

I just got home from  BriForum 2010 in Chicago. It has been a really fun and exciting week and a very interesting conference. This years main focus was  desktop virtualization , or VDI. This is a truly interesting subject and instead of a practically oriented conference there were a lot of discussions about the role of the computers in the near future and how we as IT staff would keep up with the rapid development. IT organizations often tend to be very stiff and having a hard time adapting to the user requests. This is something that hopefully will change, but it will take time and there are a lot of obstacles on the way. Technically we got to see a preview of  Microsofts RemoteFX , which basically is GPU-support over remote desktop. The next BriForum  will take place in London 2011. Form more information about the conference and what was presented, visit  briforum.com  or  brianmadden.com .

Active Directory have always been a little tricky to troubleshoot and monitor. There is a wide variety of  Performance Counters and other parameters to investigate, but this is heavy work to do manually. There is also a bunch of third party tools to do this for us but usually the price tag is big  With Windows Server 2008 a new set of tools were delivered which could be very useful when troubleshooting performance in Active Directory amongst other services. And the best of all is that they are free! Data Collector Sets The role Active Directory Domain Services includes a Data Collector Set intendet for Active Directory diagnostics. This can be found in Server Manager/Diagnostics/Performance/Data Collector Sets. Run the Active Directory Diagnostics for a limited time, but do not forget to stop it. A large amount of data is collected and when the job is stopped a nice and thorough report is generated. Windows System Resource Manager The Resource Manager is installed as a f...

I spent this tuesday at  Microsoft in Kista  for an event with the name  Cloud Day . The main topic was of course  Windows Azure . It is really not a question if the cloud should be used, but more what the cloud could be used for, and how ? When it comes to  PaaS (Platform as a Service)  Windows Azure offers a great advantage compared to traditional hosting. You only pay for the bandwidth and server needs you have at the moment. There are great savings to be made. But at the same time this presents a new challenge for system architechts, who have to think of for instance each database call as a potential cost. In the future Microsoft will publish an online version of all their software as  SaaS (Software as a Service) . Today there is already the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) , which contains Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communicator and Office Live Meeting. Apart from these topics we also got a preview of what is coming u...