Have you see this error before? Generally it occurs for me after I’ve changed my network password but had a previous network share open on a server using the old password. Before I found the information below I usually just logged out or rebooted and it’s fixed the issue. Recently I found myself in that situation again but I couldn’t reboot without losing a lot of data and I was crunched for time. What could I do? How did I get myself into this situation? Unfortunately, I can be a bit lazy sometimes (which is a good thing when you write computer software for a living… really Mom it is, trust me). You see, I don’t like mapping drives to get to network shares. Instead I almost always choose to use the UNC path and Windows Explorer (i.e. typing \\server\share directly into the address line of Windows Explorer) to connect directly to the share I need. However, this can leave some things hanging around that may cause problems later. Especially if your like me and don’t reboot all that often. Here’s what I found when doing a Bing search… This post from Travis Eperson (yes it was posted 4 years ago, thanks Travis!) helped me find the solution that didn’t involve logging off or booting. Here’s the steps. - From a command prompt type “Net Use” and enter. Which will display a list of the network connections you’ve used or are using. The ones where you’ve actually mapped a drive to you’ll see with a drive letter in the local column, but if you operate like me then that column will be blank since you haven’t really mapped any drive.
- Find the one that you don’t need anymore, clip the details in the “remote” column and type “Net Use <remote> /delete” replacing the <remote> with the data you clipped. if it contains spaces you might need to place the <remote> data inside quotes.
That’s it. Now you should be able to connect to the network share using your new password. Enjoy!
 HP worked with Microsoft to set up a pretty amazing private cloud for use during the Microsoft Management Summit 2011. Word from inside HP is it they designed and setup these racks in 7 days (from palette to the show). According to the blog post from the Microsoft Virtualization team…. …after a few days of running thousands of VMs in hundreds labs without issue and seeing that the hardware wasn’t being taxed, the team was very curious to see how just how many virtual machines they could provision. So, one night after the labs were closed the team decided to see how many VMs they could run… -
7,200 VMs running across 32 blade servers -
225 VMs running per Hyper-V host where each host has 128 GB of physical memory. Here’s an example of where Hyper-V Dynamic Memory improved density by over 100%. Here’s a video with an overview of the setup from Scott Farrand @ HP. This is truly “doing amazing”.
I’m not a big environmentalist, but I believe that we need to take care of the things entrusted to us by God. Using technology to bring awareness to environmental issues or allow us to track our environment is a good thing. I saw this post by Steve Clayton on what the European Environment Agency, with help from Microsoft, is doing to help it’s citizens keep an eye on their slice of the earth. It’s not only scientific reporting of climate (Air and Water) but it’s also a Web 2.0 enabled application that allows feedback and reporting of information by millions of ordinary people. You can even get text message on your mobile updates via SMS. Cool! 
Breathe Better!
So let’s start the journey to understand the MSDN simply with a review of their MSDN Flash newsletter. A good way to keep up on the ever changing content of the MSDN is to subscribe to the MSDN Flash Newsletter. Directly from their site… MSDN Flash delivers critical developer news to you in one information-dense, compact newsletter. Stay up to date with the latest development news from Microsoft by subscribing today. Learn about the latest resources, SDKs, downloads, partner offers, security news, and national and local developer events. Every other week you'll get an e-mail containing pointers to all of the new articles, samples, and headlines from MSDN Online, the MSDN Library, the Knowledge Base, the Developer Centers, and other Microsoft Web sites. In addition, look for announcements of Microsoft and industry events, training opportunities, chats, and webcasts.  It’s a newsletter that conforms to what you want to see, allowing you to add or remove topics of interest to you. New subscribers are taken through a series of questions that help you mold the newsletter to give you the information you want to see. If you’re a current subscriber, they recommend reviewing your choices periodically to keep the newsletter current for our ever-changing interests and jobs. Subscribing will also get you some additional content not available in the ‘online’ version of the newsletter. Each email edition contains an editorial from one of several regionally chosen guest editors who take turns providing pointers to great MSDN content, free downloads, mash ups, or other fun things. The editors are usually regional evangelists, which works to your advantage since they are familiar with things in your area and also are people you can see and talk to if you attend their events. Now for the downsides of the newsletter. First it’s regionally based and while this is a good thing, sometimes you need to see information from several regions. It’d be great if you could select several regions or no-region and get everything (I need to try that out, maybe you can). Second, it’s just a newsletter. No matter how hard they try they’ll never get everything in there. MSDN is a huge, very large, lots of content, extremely big (you get the picture) site with a lot of data in it. It is not humanly (or even machinely - is that a word?) possible to grind all that content down into something you can read over a cup of coffee while chestnuts roast on the fire. However, it’s a good place to start learning about the MSDN and meet some of the people involved with it. I am also a little disappointed in the frequency of the newsletters. With the amount of content on MSDN and the number of evangelists that Microsoft employees you’d think they’d be able to push this out more frequently. I would enjoy getting this newsletter once a week or more. Maybe with the improved MSDN site things will be more intuitive. Only time will tell. Well that’s all for now. Thanks for joining me. I enjoyed the coffee (a chilled German roast over ice with French vanilla and cream). See you next time. Enjoy the Weekend!
Have you ever read someone else’s code? I have, but generally it wasn’t to see how well they coded it, or to learn something new, but rather to fix something broke or add a new feature. However, since I began reading Scott Hanselman and his “The Weekly Source Code” series of posts, I have changed the way I think and operate, somewhat. I’ve began looking at code just for the fun of it. Yea, kind of weird. But that’s what being in this business is all about (or so I tell myself). If your not familiar with Scotts series, it’s about taking some time each week to purposely read someone else’s code hoping to learn something, good or bad, that will help you become a better programmer. With the advent of Open Source projects and Google Code (is there a Bing Code?), that, has become a lot easier. How about documentation? Have you ever just grabbed your favorite API documentation or a stack of white papers and sat down by a cozy fire and read it from top to bottom while sipping some a latte? No? Well frankly, neither have I. But, I constantly find myself digging into them to understand a new tool or looking through them to solve a problem. Sometimes I use them to write my code for me grabbing the “samples” and pasting them in my classes. However, when I use them it’s usually as a result of a Google or Bing search pointing me to something deep inside of the documentation. I’ve never really taken them from the surface and just started reading them. Can you do that? Is there a way to read documentation like a book? I don’t know but, I’m willing to experiment to find out and in the process expand my knowledge and hopefully yours too. So in the spirit of Scotts “The Weekly Source Code” series, I am going to begin a series on reviewing online documentation, specifically Microsoft's. Taking a look at the hard core .Net developers favorite source for documentation, MSDN. MSDN is chock full of information of all varieties. There is so much information that I believe a lot of it is overlooked by the average developer, myself included. I intend to fix that and make myself more aware of what’s in there and, hopefully you’ll come along for the ride. So join me next Friday as I begin this journey into the the tangled field of API’s, white papers and blog posts. Till then, get the firewood and cappuccino machine ready. As for me, I’m off to start mapping my trip. Enjoy the day!
Now that Windows 7 is in general availability most hardware manufacturers have updated their lists of drivers available for their pc’s. If you've installed Windows 7 like I have, it would be good advice to take a few minutes to update those drivers now. I have an HP EliteBook that I use for work and when I took a look today at the HP support site I noticed that 9 of the drivers listed were newer. Time to start the downloads and keep my system running smooth. Later!
I was researching a problem tonight and I noticed that MSDN has a new look. There’s also a new “Switch View” button at the bottom allowing you to change the look/feel of the interface. Scott Hanselman posted about this earlier but I believe it’s now out into the open. Here’s a few shots… Classic View 
Lightweight Beta… 
ScriptFree… 
I like the easy control to switch between the different views… 
Time for some more exploration… Enjoy!
If you using the new Windows 7 and having fun with the new native VHD mounting and booting and the new Virtual PC, it wont be long before you’ll be looking for some utilities to make things easier for you. I’ve found a couple of tools to help me create and manage all the the VHD’s I’ve been experimenting with over the past few weeks. Make a VHD image from an existing hard drive image. Sysinternals has introduced a tool (Disk2Vhd) to convert you existing pc image to a VHD. .png "Disk2vhd")
Expand the size of a VHD vmToolkit has a great tool VhdResizer for increasing the size of a fixed VHD. It requires creating a second VHD (so save some space) and then it copies the files over sector by sector. I just used it on a Vista VPC image and it worked great. Don’t forget to expand your partition after using this tool. This tool only expands the VHD and not the partition found within the VHD. Once expanded I used the Vista’s Disk Management (via the Computer Management control panel) to expand it to the fill size of the VHD.  
Convert from VMWare Disks for use with Virtual PC vmToolkit also has another great tool, VMDK2VHD, to allow you to convert from VMWare's VMDK format to the Virtual PC’s VHD format. I haven’t tried this yet but looks like a promising tool. Several of these tools have been around a while, but I’ve not found a consolidated list of these so hopefully this post will help you as it has me. As I discover more of these tools I’ll try and keep this post updated. Enjoy!
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