Today marks two important occasions… On this day, 17 years ago, I was hired by Microsoft as a support engineer, supporting MS-DOS 4.01, 5.0, Windows 3.0, and Windows 3.1 (the list goes on, so I won’t bore you <g>).  I have made many, many,...

I frequently do a lot of testing inside Virtual Machines (VMs) using Server 2003 and Server 2008 and one thing I’ve grown to dislike is having to type in a reason why I decided to shut down or restart my machine. Even though I’ve grown accustomed to simply...

This took a bit of time to find, so, thought I’d share it with everyone to hopefully save you some time. If you have a website you’d like to be indexed by Bing, simply use the following URL: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx To determine whether...

I realized after returning from vacation recently, my Jawbone 2 was dead, and I have a conference call tomorrow that I must take from my car.  Of course, I left my charger at work, and since it doesn’t have any sort of standard USB connector on it...

I use task manager a LOT in my job.  I also almost always have a ton of programs running,  therefore, do not have much space on my taskbar and get tired of finding “just the right spot” to right click in on to get to Task Manager.  Saving...

Have you ever come across an error like this? Or perhaps one similar to this? Unfortunately, these types of “unexpected error” messages do not provide any level of detail as to the actual problem, but instead, only inform you, the admin, there was some...

I recently formatted my wife’s notebook in order to install Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC).  I was curious whether her system was 64-bit capable or not, so I whipped up the following script, which answered the question for me (yes, it was, btw...

If you download hotfixes on a regular basis, this may be old news for you, but if not, you may find use in the below.  Most, if not all recent hotfix articles contain the means to obtain the hotfix electronically, without having to call into support...

THE Ops Manager…  Here’s my thousand words:

Recently, I ran down an issue with very frequent crashes occurring on one of my customers’ MOSS 2007 x64 Index servers.  Every time it would attempt to crawl virtually any VSD file in the farm, we would experience a crash in the daemon (mssdmn.exe...

Every time I install a fresh copy of Vista and/or Server 2008, I have to dig this up and “remember” how to bring back my IE icon on the desktop, since there’s no longer a way in the UI to do it, so I thought I’d share this with you (and me next time I...

Newly released! http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx Check it out.  Definitely good reading here!

Just a quick note to let everyone know of some great long-awaited content that was recently published regarding high availability within MOSS. The link to the article is here . There is also a nice Visio that accompanies the article which can be found...

I know I am... Like me, you might also like two new downloads that have been recently posted. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training Standalone Edition and Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training Portal Edition

Bill Baer recently finished his whitepaper concerning strategies around SharePoint related database maintenance. I encourage you to download it from here and check it out! Bill's blog is also located at http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/ if you would like...

Have you ever opened the IIS Manager MMC (quick shortcut - Start/Run/inetmgr) only to find it comes up completely blank? Also, keen eyes will notice it takes a lot longer for the MMC window itself to appear as well, when this problem occurs. This phenomena...

Just a quick note to let you know the new version (as of 2/25/08) is available for download here . The previous version (v1.2) was updated last August.

Nothing overly fancy, but useful enough to warrant sharing. This is something you can use to get your SharePoint farms set up to turn every IIS logging option on. The good news is each web site in a MOSS farm shares the same web site ID, so it should...

http://jamesbl.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!BC0D2CA343FFE85A!166.entry From my alter-ego... This worked well in a pinch.

Often times when delivering a training class, while browsing around in Explorer, I will hit a particular keystroke which almost always elicits conversation from my students who are paying close attention... I am not sure why, but it appears to be a little...

Here's my cheap inexpensive tribute to Raymond (no, not you Raymond, the OTHER Raymond that had a piano in his office while working on DX1, ahh the good ol' days!). I got tired of opening a command prompt and manually navigating to the C:\Program Files...

Recently, I worked with a customer who was installing Microsoft Forefront on their soon-to-be-deployed MOSS farm. It occurred to me that finding a good way to test its base functionality was probably something useful to know. Enter the EICAR anti-virus...

This week I had the privilege of attending our 2007 customer SharePoint briefing with some great product group folks and MMS (aka MSIT) team members. One of the presenters, Sean Livingston, discussed upgrading and customizations, etc. in good detail....

Have you ever popped in a flash card from your digital camera on a Windows Server 2003 machine and were annoyed that it does not automatically mount it and create a drive letter for you? So you then must open the Disk Management MMC and give it a drive...

Often times, in debugging various ASP.NET memory related issues, I find numerous assemblies that have been compiled in debug mode. One of the main problems, however, is the person I'm working with is almost always the one responsible for getting the server...