Installing Windows from a USB drive

Have you ever wanted to install Windows 7 (or Windows 8) from a USB Flash drive rather than from DVD media?

If so, Microsoft has a tool to meet your needs!

You can download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool which simply takes the contents of an existing DVD or an ISO image and push the content onto a USB Drive.  You can then boot from the USB drive and completely install Windows 7 or Windows 8!!  No DVD media required!  How cool is that???

You can download the tool from the Microsoft store from here: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool

Configuring ADFS v. 2.0 on Windows Server 2012

With the release of Windows Server 2012, ADFS v. 2.0 is now built into the OS.  You can simply add ADFS v. 2.0 by adding roles/features through Server Manager.

However, you will notice that the ADFS v. 2.0 Configuration Wizard has been slightly updated and refreshed with the release of Windows Server 2012.

Screenshots from the updated ADFS v. 2.0 Configuration Wizard in Windows Server 2012 are below:

Problems while installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2012 RTM

I was recently following the following article in order to install SharePoint 2010 SP1 with June 2012 CU on Windows Server 2012 RTM:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bedwards/archive/2012/08/21/sharepoint-2010-on-windows-8-rtm-with-sql-server-2012-rtm.aspx

However, I came across an error message after running the SharePoint Product Configuration Wizard:

So, I first looked at my IIS configuration in IIS Manager and noticed that despite setting the default .Net Framework version in IIS Manager, my Application Pools were still created with .Net 4.0 compatibility.  So, of course, I had to change them back to .Net 2.0 compatibility:

I was then doing some more digging around in IIS and I found this setting:

 So it looked like the Application Pool Defaults were separate from the .Net Framework version defaults!!

So, of course, I looked at the Application Pool Defaults and sure enough, they were set to .Net 4.0:

In order to make sure everything would work correctly, I changed the Application Pool default .NET Framework version to v2.0:

After making those changes, my SharePoint Product Configuration Wizard was successful!!

Welcome improvements to managing Self-Signed Certificates in IIS 8

One of the pain points in IIS 7 and IIS 7.5 has always been using Self-Signed Certificates with DNS names. By default, the Self Signed Certificates always assigns the default host name for the Self-Signed Certificate.  In order to get around this limitation in the Self-Signed Certificate Wizard in the past, we have had to use Self SSL 7.

However, with the release of IIS 8 on Windows 8/Windows Server 2012, this limitation has been removed. You can now generate an SSL Certificate with a specified domain name and then bind the appropriate hosting Web Site with the matching domain name in order to be able to leverage that Self-Signed Certificate.

Naming and grouping Tiles in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012

One thing that I have to say for the overall design of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012--it is NOT intuitive!!

I wanted to try and create a named grouping for all of my Start menu Tiles and I could not figure out any OBVIOUS way to accomplish this!!

Thank goodness for Google! Whew!

Fortunately, I found this article which describes this process very clearly:

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/create-name-app-groups-on-windows-8-start-screen/

This process seems so unintuitive and difficult that I just don't understand how this got missed in a usability study of Windows 8....

Windows Server 2012 RTM released on MSDN!

Windows Server 2012 RTM is now available for download from MSDN!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions

In addition, Visual Studio 2012 developers out there will be pleased to know that Visual Studio 2012 RTM installs successfully on Windows Server 2012 RTM!!

VMWare Workstation 9 now fully supports Windows 8

If you have had trouble with installing Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 using VMWare Workstation 8.x in the past, fortunately VMWare has just recently released VMWare Workstation 9!!

http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/new.html

VMWare Workstation 9 offers full support for Windows 8 and partial support for Windows Server 2012.  It also has significant performance improvements over its predecessor--Workstation 8.

Check it out--it is well worth the upgrade!!

The Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0 provider is not registered on the local machine

I was recently using SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) in SQL Server 2012 to attempt to import an Excel spreadsheet into a SQL Server database table, when I encountered the following error message:

After doing a bit of further research, I discovered an article which pointed to this download:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255

So after installing the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable (I installed the 32-bit version), I was able to successfully import my Excel spreadsheet using SSIS!!