Long story short, these slide decks are chock full of internal thinking on Windows 8 — everything from customer target audiences to the Windows 8 developer market to the Windows 8 product cycle and much, much more.

While I agree with the author of the post, in that I feel bad for the person who leaked this, I do think it is pretty interesting to get a look at what Microsoft is thinking.  I always find it useful to know now where they think things are going to be in the future, in the hopes that I will make better decisions about how to position myself and the company I work for to take advantage of the “new stuff” when it gets here.

After a bunch of searching, I saw a few people have gotten this, but no one had a solution, or at least I couldn’t find it.  I did see a similar message related to Adobe Reader, and that is what helped me find the answer to our problem.

One of the servers was not having the problem, but it DID have IE8.  hmmm..  It also had Adobe Reader 9 installed on it.  The others had Adobe Reader 8. 

So to fix the problem, required uninstalling IE8, updating to AR9, and then reinstalling IE8.  I did try just installing the updated Adobe Reader, but it still got the error until I uninstalled IE8. 

three big things we focus on for all TechNet scenarios are Content, Discoverability, and Participation. We really want to invite participation from everyone and what better way to combine that with discovery and content than to use Wiki technology?

Later this year TechNet and the Server & Cloud Division will partner to launch the new TechNet Wiki.
…
We believe a public wiki for technical content on TechNet has the potential to be a big step forward in all three areas:

• For content, while Microsoft teams write some great content, we cannot possibly author all the content customers need to be successful, and a wiki that offers content from the community will increase the breadth and depth of technical content available for IT Pros.
• For participation, the wiki is a great new way for any IT pro to create and share technical knowledge, engage with other technical people and with Microsoft, and build an identity and reputation within the TechNet community.

I used the word "potential" above because Microsoft cannot succeed with the TechNet Wiki on its own – success ultimately depends on the direct engagement, support, and ongoing feedback from the IT community.

I am not sure how I feel about this.  I like Wikipedia, and OFTEN reference it for information on non-work related topics.  We use a SharePoint wiki for a lot of our documentation where I work, but I don’t find it to be as useful as I would like, because for some reason, I don’t like the interface.  One of the big issues I have with it, is the inability to insert pictures directly in the article during the creation of the article.  You have to upload the picture (such as a screenshot) separately and then link to it.  That doesn’t seem very efficient to me.

With this blog, I use Windows Live Writer.  It allows me to take a snip like this:

and paste it right in the text.  When I publish, it is auto-magically uploaded and linked to my post.  I think the other issue that I have is that I am afraid I would take it personally if someone felt the need to correct something  I posted to a wiki.

I guess I am going to have to work on that.  Both for the wiki at work and (maybe) for the TechNet wiki.  There are those occasions when I actually have useful knowledge to share…

We don’t store or report on VMs currently, mainly because we were trying to keep track of total REAL disk used.  VMs often don’t use as much as they think they do, so that would skew the results, as well as the fact that we are reporting on the hosts. 

All of that is the reason that Patrick asked me to come up with some other tool to use for the VMs so I happened to find a few pieces of PowerShell script that I managed to put together to do a pretty good job of providing some of the info we wanted, and I thought I would share that with the 2 people who read my blog. 

$servers = Get-Content servers.txt

#Open Excel and create a new workbook and worksheet
$ExcelSheet=New-Object -comobject Excel.application   
$WorkBook=$ExcelSheet.WorkBooks.add(1)    
$WorkSheet=$WorkBook.WorkSheets.item(1)               

#Header row
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,1)=”Computer Name”               
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,2)=”Disk Device ID”              
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,3)=”Volume Name”                 
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,4)=”Size (GB)”        
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,5)=”Free Space (GB)”
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,6)=”Space Used (GB)”
$WorkSheet.cells.item(1,7)=”Percent Used”

$i=2

ForEach ($ComputerName in $servers)
{   
    echo "Server Name : ", $ComputerName
    $Disks = gwmi –computername $ComputerName win32_logicaldisk -filter "drivetype=3"

    foreach ($Disk in $Disks)
    {
        $Size = "{0:0.0}" -f ($Disk.Size/1GB)
        $FreeSpace = "{0:0.0}" -f ($Disk.FreeSpace/1GB)
        $Used = ([int64]$Disk.size – [int64]$Disk.freespace)
        $SpaceUsed = "{0:0.0}" -f ($Used/1GB)
        $Percent = ($Used * 100.0)/$Disk.Size
        $Percent = "{0:N0}" -f $Percent
               $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,1)=$ComputerName
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,2)=$Disk.deviceid
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,3)=$Disk.volumename
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,4)=$Size
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,5)=$FreeSpace
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,6)=$SpaceUsed
            $WorkSheet.cells.item($i,7)=$Percent

            $i=$i+1     
    }
}
#Show the results
$ExcelSheet.visible=$true

Which sent me here:

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7

Brief Description

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows® 7 enables IT administrators to manage roles and features that are installed on computers that are running Windows Server® 2008 R2, Windows Server® 2008, or Windows Server® 2003, from a remote computer that is running Windows 7.

Download details: Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7

Now that the problem was understood, Microsoft and Citrix brainstormed on workarounds customers could apply while Citrix worked on an update to the ICA Client that would prevent the sharing violation. One workaround was to disable application prefetching and another was to write a logoff script that deletes the Ssonsvr.exe prefetch files. Citrix published the workarounds in this Citrix Knowledge Base article and Microsoft in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article. The update to the ICA Client, which was made available a few days later, changed the network provider DLL to 10 seconds after Ssonsvr.exe launches before returning control to Mpnotify.exe. Because Winlogon waits for Mpnotify to exit before logging on a user, the Logical Prefetcher won’t associate Winlogon’s accesses of the user’s hive with Ssonsvr.exe’s startup.

Mark’s Blog : The Case of the Temporary Registry Profiles

Ask the Core Team : DPM 2007 – Troubleshooting protection for Hyper-V

This post is about Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role installed, that are being protected by System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.  There may be one or many Virtual Machines on each Host/Parent Partition, and they may be running Windows 2003 and/or Windows 2008. 

Ask the Core Team : DPM 2007 – Troubleshooting protection for Hyper-V

I came accross an interesting article that addresses some of this concern with the suggestion that IT needs to learn how to build and manage the Private Cloud:

One of the biggest strategic challenges facing IT organizations today is remaining competitive in a world full of cloud services that essentially outsource the IT function.

How to Build Private Clouds – IT Management

‘VMName’ failed to initialize.
Could not initialize machine remoting system. Error: ‘Unspecified error’ (0×80004005).
Could not find a usable certificate. Error: ‘Unspecified error’ (0×80004005).

Then this could be your answer:

Symptoms and resolution:

§ You may be unable to start or connect to virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. This occurs when connecting using vmconnect. Connections made using remote desktop won’t be affected.  

§ KB Article 967902 has been created that details the symptoms and resolution.  This KB article provides a direct link to download the quickfix to resolve this error.

Important Notes:

§ Though this error may occur, the Hyper-V service will continue to operate.   Neither the Hyper-V host nor the running virtual machines will go offline.

§ It is not expected that this issue can be exploited for malicious purposes.

§ Customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V beta won’t experience this error.

That last line it my favorite…

I guess we should be running the beta in production…  and what’s with the ‘Unspecified error’?  

Windows Server Division WebLog : Hyper-V certificate expiration and resolution

I have occasionally had trouble getting Writer to open.  I will click on the shortcut, the splash screen comes up and then I get an error.  Then it is gone.  I finally got around to digging into the cause and did a search and found this post from one of the Microsoft guys that builds this tool:

http://jcheng.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/windows-live-writer-2009-wont-start/

We’re getting ready to ship an update that fixes the problem, but in the meantime, there is a straightforward workaround to get Writer running again:

1. Start | Run
2. On Vista, enter this command:
   %AppData%\Windows Live Writer\Keywords
   On XP, enter this command:
   %UserProfile%\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Keywords
3. You should see a bunch of files whose names begin with “keyword” and end with lots of letters and numbers. Delete all of these files.

That should fix it.

The problem, as you may have guessed, is that one of these files is getting corrupted. This is due to a race condition in our code where the settings file can be closed while it’s still in the middle of being written. Our update will both fix the race condition, and also deal more gracefully with corrupted settings files (by ignoring them).

Well, that didn’t fix it for me.  In that post, Joe has updated to say that version 14.0.8064.206 includes the fix for this problem.  That happens to be the version I am running.    So back to searching…

I was digging around trying to figure out if I had just missed something, but instead I found a log file.  In my case the log is in the \AppData\Local\Windows Live Writer\ directory and it is named, funny enough, “Windows Live Writer.log”.  I looked in the log and found lots of stuff, but the part that stuck out was:

The network location cannot be reached.

That got  me to thinking and after doing some testing, I went back to Joe’s blog entry and left this comment:

Joe,
Another potential cause of the for the problem, Splash screen and then error and then nothing, could be My Documents redirection.
The company I work for as a policy doesn’t back up user machines, but we do redirect the My Documents to a network share. Most of our users have their My Documents set to be available offline. I don’t.
When I tried the steps that you recommended, it didn’t fix the problem, but then I remembered that I have had this problem before, and that it seemed to work fine when I was in the office.
I have two work arounds for this:
1. Open Windows Live Writer while still at the office and don’t close it. Hybernate the machine until I get home and use as normal.
2. Use Run As to run it as a local account so that it doesn’t fall victim to my My Documents being unavailable.
This is a good reason (among others) that it would be nice to have the option to change the default location for post data to be saved.

So, there you have it.  Another reason to NOT use My Documents redirection…  “Let me tell ya about My Documents redirection…”