Windows 7 “XP Mode”

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week was a frustrating one… you see, earlier this month Paul Thurrott gave a hint about an exciting Windows 7 secret. I put 2 and 2 together and it seems that I came up with 4. The trouble was that I was given the details from an official source at around the same time – and that information was under NDA so I couldn’t write about it here!

It’s times like this that I’m glad I’m not running a news site and waiting for a “scoop”, but all three of the leading tech journalists covering Windows (i.e. Paul Thurrott, Ed Bott and Mary Jo Foley) have written articles in the last few days about Windows 7 XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC, and I want to pull things together here.

Basically, Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera are reporting that there will be a new version of Virtual PC, available as a download for Windows 7, including a licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 to run those applications that don’t behave well on the Vista/Windows 7 codebase. More details will follow (it won’t actually be “in the box” with Windows 7) but Ed Bott has commented that it looks an awful lot like MED-V.

Of course, the technology is already there – as well as drawing comparisons with MED-V, Ed Bott points out that you can do something similar with VirtualBox in seamless mode and the key detail with Windows XP Mode is the licensing situation. Full licensing details have yet to be announced but the only Microsoft blog post I’ve seen on the subject says:

“We will be soon releasing the beta of Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate”

That reference to Professional and Ultimate would also indicate that it will run on Enterprise (virtually identical to Ultimate), but not Starter, Home Basic or Home Premium. As Microsoft’s main concern is allowing businesses to run legacy applications as they are weaned off XP, that seems fair enough but, then again, MED-V is only available to volume license customers today and Mary Jo Foley suggests that could be the same for XP Mode – I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

So, will this work? I hope so. Windows Vista (after SP1) was never as bad as its perception in the marketplace indicated but if ever you needed an example that perception is reality, then Vista was it! Strangely, Windows Server 2008 (the server edition of Vista SP1) has been well received as the solid, reliable operating system that it is, without the negative press. Windows 7 is a step forward in many ways and, as XP is now into its extended support phase, many organisations will be looking for something to move to but the application compatibility issues caused by Windows Vista and Windows 7’s improved security model will still cause a few headaches – that’s what this functionality is intended to overcome, although there will still be some testing required as to how well those old XP apps perform in a virtualised environment.

More technical details will follow soon, but either Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera are operating on a different NDA to me (which they may well be) or they feel pretty confident that Microsoft will still give them access to information as they continue to spill the beans on this particular feature…

Windows 7 Starter Edition: let’s put it into perspective

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

There seem to be a number of sites linking to a prominent “news” site that claims Windows 7 will be “crippled” on netbooks but… WTF? Are they serious, or just posting link bait?

Back in February, Microsoft announced the various editions that Windows 7 will be available in, including Starter Edition, which will only be offered pre-installed by OEMs and is recommended for price-sensitive customers with small notebook PCs.

Basically, that sounds like a low cost version for netbooks. – and key features were listed as:

  • Broad application and device compatibility with up to 3 concurrent applications.
  • Safe, reliable, and supported.
  • Ability to join a Home Group.
  • Improved taskbar and JumpLists.

Now someone has stirred things up and headline-grabbing tech-“journalists” (I use the term lightly… these are not the Mary-Jo Foleys, Ed Botts, or Paul Thurrotts who actually look at the technology and when researching stories but consumer-focused writers with a few press releases and 500 words to churn out for an editor who wants nothing more than a good headline) are saying how this will kill Windows 7 sales and open the netbook market to Linux. Yawn. Have I suddenly fallen foul of a cross-site scripting exploit and ended up reading Slashdot, or The Register? Nope. It seems I am still reading Computerworld, a site that seems to think words like Ed Bott or ZDNet turn my comment into spam!

It’s the three application limit that seems to have people up in arms but, according to Paul Thurrott in episode 103 of the Windows Weekly podcast and Ed Bott’s recent post on living with the limits of Windows 7 Starter Edition, the three application limit is not triggered by things like Explorer windows, Control Panel applets, system utilities or gadgets – this is three applications – not three Windows!

And, as I wrote when I bought one a few months back, netbooks are not for content creation but for ultra-mobile content consumption. You’re not going be doing much on a 10″ screen with a tiny keyboard! Not unless you want to end up with a bad repetitive strain injury.

Mary-Jo Foley reminds us that Home Premium is the default consumer version of Windows 7 – not Starter Edition. Who says that netbook OEMs will not provide Home Premium for those who want it?

Meanwhile, Ed Bott made a very good point when he wrote “Is this a netbook or a notebook? If the answer is netbook, you might be pleasantly surprised at what this low-powered OS can actually accomplish” but he also notes that, if he tried to use it as a conventional notebook, he “would probably be incredibly frustrated with the limitations of Starter Edition.” And Laptop magazine wisely commented that any comment has limited value until we know the price difference between a netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition and the same netbook with Windows 7 Home Premium, a view which Mary-Jo Foley also puts forward in her post.

To me, it’s simple:

If I was a betting man, I’d wager that most netbook users fall into the latter category.

Microsoft Virtualization: the R2 wave

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

The fourth Microsoft Virtualisation User Group (MVUG) meeting took place last night and Microsoft’s Matt McSpirit presented a session on the R2 wave of virtualisation products. I’ve written previously about some of the things to expect in Windows Server 2008 R2 but Matt’s presentation was specifically related to virtualisation and there are some cool things to look forward to.

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

At last night’s event, Matt asked the UK User Group what they saw as the main limitations in the original Hyper-V release and the four main ones were:

  • USB device support
  • Dynamic memory management (ballooning)
  • Live Migration
  • 1 VM per storage LUN

Hyper-V R2 does not address all of these (regardless of feedback, the product group is still unconvinced about the need for USB device support… and dynamic memory was pulled from the beta – it’s unclear whether it will make it back in before release) but live migration is in and Windows finally gets a clustered file system in the 2008 R2 release.

So, starting out with clustering – a few points to note:

  • For the easiest support path, look for cluster solutions on the Windows Server Catalog that have been validated by Microsoft’s Failover Cluster Configuration Program (FCCP).
  • FCCP solutions are recommended by Microsoft but are not strictly required for support – as long as all the components (i.e. server and SAN) are certified for Windows Server 2008 – a failover clustering validation report will still be required though – FCCP provides another level of confidence.
  • When looking at cluster storage, fibre channel (FC) and iSCSI are the dominant SAN technologies. With 10Gbps Ethernet coming onstream, iSCSI looked ready to race ahead and has the advantage of using standard Ethernet hardware (which is why Dell bought EqualLogic and HP bought LeftHand Networks) but then Fibre Channel over Ethernet came onstream, which is potentially even faster (as outlined in a recent RunAs Radio podcast).

With a failover cluster, Hyper-V has always been able to offer high availability for unplanned outages – just as VMware do with their HA product (although Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Datacenter Editions were required – Standard Edition does not include failover clustering).

For planned outages, quick migration offered the ability to pause a virtual machine and move it to another Hyper-V host but there was one significant downside of this. Because Microsoft didn’t have a clustered file system, each storage LUN could only be owned by one cluster node at a time (a “shared nothing” model). If several VMs were on the same LUN, all of them needed to be managed as a group so that they could be paused, the connectivity failed over, and then restarted, which slowed down transfer times and limited flexibility. The recommendation was for 1 LUN per VM and this doesn’t scale well with tens, hundreds, or thousands of virtual machines although it does offer one advantage as there is no contention for disk access. Third party clustered file system solutions are available for Windows (e.g. Sanbolic Melio FS) but, as Rakesh Malhotra explains on his blog, these products have their limitations too.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V can now provide Live Migration for planned failovers – so Microsoft finally has an alternative to VMware VMotion (at no additional cost). This is made possible because of the new clustered shared volume (CSV) feature with IO fault tolerance (dynamic IO) overcomes the limitations with the shared nothing model and allows up to 256TB per LUN, running on NTFS with no need for third party products. The VM is still stored on a shared storage volume and at the time of failover, memory is scanned for dirty pages whilst still running on the source cluster node. Using an iterative process of scanning memory for dirty pages and transferring them to the target node, the memory contents are transferred (over a dedicated network link) until there are so few that the last few pages may be sent and control passed to the target node in fraction of a second with no discernible downtime (including ARP table updates to maintain network connectivity).

Allowing multiple cluster nodes to access a shared LUN is as simple as marking the LUN as a CSV in the Failover Clustering MMC snap-in. Each node has a consistent namespace for LUNS so as many VMs as required my be stored on a CSV as need (although all nodes must use the same letter for the system drive – e.g. C:). Each CSV appears as an NTFS mount point, e.g. C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1
and even though the volume is only mounted on one node, distributed file access is co-ordinated through another node so that the VM can perform direct IO. Dynamic IO ensures that, if the SAN (or Ethernet) connection fails then IO is re-routed accordingly and if the owning node fails then volume ownership is redirected accordingly. CSV is based on two assumptions (that data read/write requests far outnumber metadata access/modification requests; and that concurrent multi-node cached access to files is not needed for files such as VHDs) and is optimised for Hyper-V.

At a technical level, CSVs:

  • Are implemented as a file system mini-filter driver, pinning files to prevent block allocation movement and tracking the logical-to-physical mapping information on a per-file basis, using this to perform direct reads/writes.
  • Enable all nodes to perform high performance direct reads/writes to all clustered storage and read/write IO performance to a volume is the same from any node.
  • Use SMB v2 connections for all namespace and file metadata operations (e.g. to create, open, delete or extend a file).
  • Need:
    • No special hardware requirements.
    • No special application requirements.
    • No file type restrictions.
    • No directory structure or depth limitations.
    • No special agents or additional installations.
    • No proprietary file system (using the well established NTFS).

Live migration and clustered storage are major improvements but other new features for Hyper-V R2 include:

  • 32 logical processor (core) support, up from 16 at RTM and 24 with a hotfix (to support 6-core CPUs) so that Hyper-V will now support up to 4 8-core CPUs (and I would expect this to be increased as multi-core CPUs continue to develop).
  • Core parking to allow more intelligent use of processor cores – putting them into a low power suspend state if the workload allows (configurable via group policy).
  • The ability to hot add/remove storage so that additional VHDs or pass through disks may be assigned to to running VMs if the guest OS supports supports the Hyper-V SCSI controller (which should cover most recent operating systems but not Windows XP 32-bit or 2000).
  • Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) to make use of new virtualisation technologies from Intel (Intel VT extended page tables) and AMD (AMD-V nested paging) – more details on these technologies can be found in Johan De Gelas’s hardware virtualisation article at AnandTech.
  • Boot from VHD – allowing virtual hard disks to be deployed to virtual or or physical machines.
  • Network improvements (jumbo frames to allow larger Ethernet frames and TCP offload for on-NIC TCP/IP processing).

Hyper-V Server

So that’s covered the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2 but what about its baby brother – Hyper-V Server 2008 R2? The good news is that Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will have the same capabilities as Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition (previously it was based on Standard Edition) to allow access to up to 1TB of memory, 32 logical cores, hot addition/removal of storage, and failover clustering (with clustered shared volumes and live migration). It’s also free, and requires no dedicated management product although it does need to be managed using the RSAT tools for Windows Server 2008 R2 of Windows 7 (Microsoft’s advice is never to manage an uplevel operating system from a downlevel client).

With all that for free, why would you buy Windows Server 2008 R2 as a virtualisation host? The answer is that Hyper-V Server does not include licenses for guest operating systems as Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter Editions do; it is intended for running non-Windows workloads in a heterogeneous datacentre standardised on Microsoft virtualisation technologies.

Management

The final piece of the puzzle is management:

There are a couple of caveats to note: the SCVMM 2008 R2 features mentioned are in the beta – more can be expected at final release; and, based on previous experience when Hyper-V RTMed, there may be some incompatibilities between the beta of SCVMM and the release candidate of Windows Server Hyper-V R2 (expected to ship soon).

SCVMM 2008 R2 is not a free upgrade – but most customers will have purchased it as part of the Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) and so will benefit from the two years of software assurance included within the SMSE pricing model.

Wrap-up

That’s about it for the R2 wave of Microsoft Virtualization – for the datacentre at least – but there’s a lot of improvements in the upcoming release. Sure, there are things that are missing (memory ballooning may not a good idea for server consolidation but it will be needed for any kind of scalability with VDI – and using RDP as a workaround for USB device support doesn’t always cut it) and I’m sure there will be a lot of noise about how VMware can do more with vSphere but, as I’ve said previously, VMware costs more too – and I’d rather have most of the functionality at a much lower price point (unless one or more of those extra features will make a significant difference to the business case). Of course there are other factors too – like maturity in the market – but Hyper-V is not far off its first anniversary and, other than a couple of networking issues on guests (which were fixed) I’ve not heard anyone complaining about it.

I’ll write more about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 virtualisation options (i.e. client and server) as soon as I can but, based on a page which briefly appeared on the Microsoft website, the release candidate for is expected to ship next month and, after reading Paul Thurrott’s post about a forthcoming Windows 7 announcement, I have a theory (and that’s all it is right now) as to what a couple of the Windows 7 surprises may be…

The sun sets on Windows XP, Office 2003 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 – Vista SP1 and XP SP3 will soon be unblocked – Office 2007 SP2 to ship at the end of April – Office “14” is given a name (and will be available in both 32- and 64-bit versions)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, today is the day that Windows XP and Office 2003 end their mainstream support phase and move onto extended support – it’s security hotfixes only from now on, unless you are prepared to pay. Security updates for Windows XP will continue to be issued via Windows Update until 8 April 2014 (ditto for Office 2003).

Whilst XP has enjoyed a longer period of mainstream support than would otherwise have been the case (due to the time it took for Microsoft to ship its successor – Windows Vista), many organisations have held back on upgrades due to the negative press that Vista has received (which may have been partially warranted at release but is not exactly valid in 2009). Regardless of the perception of Windows Vista, Windows Vista R2 [ahem] Windows 7 is receiving plenty of praise and a release candidate is widely expected to be released within the next few weeks. Those considering an eventual move to Windows 7 could prepare themselves by application testing on the beta – or even using Windows Vista as a limited pilot in preparation (the two operating systems are remarkably similar, for all but those applications that need to work at a very deep level – e.g. anti virus and VPN software).

Meanwhile, reaction to Office 2007’s “ribbon” user interface has been mixed; regardless of the many improvements in Office applications with the 2007 release, many users are still using the same basic word processing features they had in earlier versions (dare I say as far back as Word for Windows 2.0) and so organisations are needing further persuasion to upgrade – for some the business case is only justified through integration with Office server products (such as Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2) although, my personal experience of reverting to Office 2003 for a few weeks whilst my laptop was being repaired was not a happy one… it’s amazing how those “little tweaks” become embedded in your way of working after a while.

As for Windows Server, those organisations still running Windows Server 2003 (including R2) with service pack 1 lose their support today – Windows Server 2003 with service pack 2 will continue to receive mainstream support until 13 July 2010 with extended support ending on 14 July 2015.

On the subject of service packs, now is probably a good time to remind people that the service pack blocking tools for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 will expire on 28 April 2009 and 19 May 2009 respectively, after which time the updates will be automatically delivered via Windows Update. As for Office updates, Office 2007 service pack 2 is due for release on 28 April 2009 (including support for ODF, PDF and XPS document formats).

Looking ahead to the next release of Microsoft Office, various websites are reporting that Office codenamed “14” has been named as… no surprise here… Office 2010. APC’s David Flynn is citing delays that prevent a tandem launch with Windows 7 but I have no recollection of any announcements by Microsoft for either a joint launch or a 2009 release – and they have not even committed publicly to releasing Windows 7 this year (it’s all pure speculation by journalists, bloggers and other pundits)… how can something slip if it’s not even been formally announced? Meanwhile ARStechnica is concentrating on the availability of both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010.

The halycon days of wholesale PC refreshes every few years may now be just a distant memory but these changes signal the need for IT departments to seriously consider their options. With Office 2010 expected to include web applications based on a monthly subscription charge, increasingly feasible online services, and desktop virtualisation becoming increasingly viable (in various forms – be that full VDI, a managed virtual desktop running on a traditional PC, or a hybrid solution using something like MED-V), these are interesting times for those given the task of providing a corporate desktop.

Establishing parental control: easy when you know how

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This week, Channel 4 is running a series of sex education television programmes looking at how young people today are gaining their sex education from Internet porn – and as a result are exposed to some disturbing content on the web.

I like to think that I’m fairly open-minded but my eldest son is reaching the point where I am considering giving him his own computer and, whilst I’d like to think that his computer time will be supervised, that will not always be possible as he grows up, or when he uses systems at friends’ houses, school, Internet cafés, etc..

One of the points that Channel 4 is highlighting is the lack of awareness (and knowledge, based on visits to a PC World, Sony Store and Micro Anvika stores) about the parental controls that are available in modern operating systems so, in this post, I’ll give a quick rundown of how to set up parental controls on your child’s PC – without resorting to additional software like that listed on the Kids’ safety advice on GetNetWise.

First up, the operating system on most of the world’s PCs – Microsoft Windows. Windows XP may not have any parental controls within the operating system but Vista and 7 do – as long as you are not running in a domain! Yes, that’s right – no parental controls on domain-joined PCs. I suspect this is something to do with the prospect of being hauled up in front of the United States Department of Justice or the European Union Competition Commission by the vendors of content filtering solutions if businesses relied on the controls built into the operating system to stop their employees from visiting the less salubrious portions of the web but for me, with several domain-joined PCs in the home, this effectively means my children will have to use their own PC. Not necessarily an issue but nevertheless an unnecessary constraint, particularly for those who have a single PC used for both home and business activities and also joined to a corporate domain (perhaps in a small business environment).

Assuming that your Windows Vista or Windows 7 PC is not joined to a domain, it’s parental controls are accessed via Control Panel and include limits on web content, limits on computer access times and games, as well as the ability to block access to specific applications. More information on Windows Parental Controls is available on the Windows help site and it’s also possible to view activity reports.

Over on the Mac, it’s pretty much the same story – OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) include parental controls in the user account properties. In addition, OS X can display a simplified Finder window for young or inexperienced users, only allow access to certain applications, hide profanity in the dictionary (yes, I used to look up rude words in a paper dictionary when I was a boy!), limit website access (including the ability to create allow and deny lists) limit the users with whom mail and IM can be exchanged, enforce computer time limits (with different limits for weekdays and weekends!) as well as bedtime on school nights and weekends (I should try setting this on my own account).

The principles are similar in Windows and on the Mac but I’m using the Mac in these screen grabs (because my Windows machines are domain-joined). If I search for the first thing that a schoolboy might think of when given Internet access, it’s blocked:

Parental Controls preventing website access in Safari on Mac OS X 10.5

Unless I happen to know the administrator password:

Parental Controls requesting authentication on Mac OS X 10.5

Similarly, if I try to open an image, using an application that’s not allowed (in this case the OS X Preview application)… computer says “no”:

Parental Controls preventing application access on Mac OS X 10.5

And, assuming I’m not watching over my child like a hawk, I can keep an eye on their computing activities from a distance using the logs:

Parental Controls logging activity on Mac OS X 10.5

By now, you have probably got some idea of what’s possible on the mainstream consumer operating systems. Over in Linux-land it’s a little more complicated but still possible using a combination of IP filters, third party applications and limited DNS (e.g. OpenDNS). I’m sure I’ll write more as I become exposed to child computing habits but, for now, hopefully this has highlighted the ability to easily put in place some controls to protect your children from the Internet, whilst simultaneously allowing them some freedom.

Identifying power management issues in Windows 7

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks back my friend and colleague Garry Martin alerted me to an enhanced battery indicator for Windows Vista and 7 (BatteryBar). Normally, I wouldn’t want to use something that installed a big button in the notification area but this is actually a pretty useful enhancement over the standard power icon (and better looking than many of the OEM-provided versions). Not only can I see how much battery charge I have left but BatteryBar shows information such as capacity, charge rate, battery wear, etc.

It’s worth knowing though, that for tweaking power settings, Windows 7 users have another tool at their disposal – the powercfg.exe command line tool. This tool exists in Vista too but in the Windows 7 beta there is a new switch (/energy) that generates a Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report (saved to %systemroot%\system32\energy-report.html).

In addition to providing details of the system used to generate the report, the report highlights errors, warnings and information about a system’s current state to identify: USB devices that are not suspending (and therefore preventing the CPU from managing power effectively); processes that are requesting a small timer resolution; processes with high CPU utilisation; as well as information about the power plan, battery and processor power management capabilities.

Windows 7 seems to fix itself!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Microsoft gets some stick for Windows supposedly being less than stable (which, as I’ve written here many times before, is not my experience); however my netbook has had more than its fair share of BSODs this evening… something to do with a file called tdx.sys (the TDI Translation Driver). I should point out that this machine is running a beta operating system (i.e. one where problems should be expected) but the good news is that Windows 7 detected the problem and the Action Center referred me to Microsoft knowledge base article 967891, from where I was able to apply for, download and install the associated hotfix.

Action Center KB referral

Only time will tell if the hotfix solved the problem but the point is that Windows self-diagnosed the issue and I was able to follow the necessary steps to fix it. Some people may argue that if the system can diagnose the issue then it should be able to self-heal and they may have a point but I’d like to know which updates are being applied (and why), so this system works for me.

On a related note, Daniel Terhell at Resplendence Software has written a great utility called WhoCrashed. If you’re trying to diagnose the cause of system crashes, this might just help out (it makes use of Microsoft’s Debugging Tools for Windows) – and it’s free for personal use. If it can’t find any crash dumps on your system (but you can see them in the %windir%\minidump folder) then make sure you are running the program as Administrator (and that’s no excuse for running with Admin privileges all the time).

WhoCrashed

If you want to see just how stable your system is and you’re looking for the Reliability Monitor, under Windows 7 (at least in the beta – build 7000) it is available in the Action Center.

Installing Windows SharePoint Services on Windows 7 (or Vista)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is not supported on a client operating system, but that’s not to say it shouldn’t run – right? After all, Windows client releases include a web server and can run a database service – that should pretty much cover the basics (back in the days of Windows NT it was generally reckoned that the differences between the Workstation and Server releases were just a few registry entries – but even if that was true then, there are a few more differences today)! In response to this, the guys at Bamboo Nation came up with an installer for SharePoint on Vista and, even though it’s been around for a while (thanks to Garry Martin for alerting me to this), last week I finally got around to trying it out on Windows 7.

It seems to work well but, having never installed SQL Server 2008 Express Edition (WSS needs access to a SQL database) I needed to combine two very good resources (the Jonas Nilsson’s installation guide for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Windows Vista and Symantec’s article on installing and configuring SQL Server 2008 Express) – the result is my installation notes (repeated in full here in case either of those articles ever disappears but for screen shots, refer to the originals – or to Jim Parshall’s video tutorial):

  1. Gather together all the resources that will be required. Assuming that Windows is already running, the remaining components are:
  2. Install and configure SQL Server 2008 Express Edition:
    • SQL Express may be downloaded with or without tools – I went for the “without” option but the tools may be useful for troubleshooting purposes. If you’re installing on an older platform, there are some pre-requisites (.NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Windows Installer 4.5 and Windows PowerShell 1.0) but my Windows 7 client already had these (or later versions).
    • Run the SQL Server Express installer and follow the wizard. It’s fairly straightforward but there are a couple of things to watch out for:
      • For the instance configuration, specify MSSQLSERVER as both the named instance and the instance ID.
      • For the server configuration, use NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM (no password) as the SQL Server database engine account name and set the SQL Server Browser startup type to Automatic.
      • For database engine configuration, either Windows or mixed mode authentication may be used (I stuck with the defaults) but the installer will not continue until users or groups are specified for unrestricted access to the SQL server. SQL DBAs and security guys will probably have lots of best practice advice here for use with production servers but I took the view that it’s probably nothing too much to worry about on a developer workstation and simply gave the necessary rights to the account I was running as.
  3. Install and configure Internet Information Services in Control Panel, Programs and Features by clicking the option to turn Windows features on or off and enabling:
    • Internet Information Services
      • Web Management Services
        • IIS 6 Management Compatibility
          • IIS 6 Management Console
          • IIS 6 Scripting Tools
          • IIS 6 WMI Campatability
          • IIS 6 Metabase and IIS 6 configuration capability
        • IIS Management Console
      • World Wide Web Services
        • Application Development Features
          • .NET Extensibility
          • ASP.NET
          • ISAPI Extensions
          • ISAPI Filters
        • Common HTTP Features
          • Default Document
          • Directory Browsing
          • HTTP Errors
          • HTTP Redirection
          • Static Content
        • Health and Diagnostics
          • HTTP Logging
          • Request Monitor
        • Performance Features
          • HTTP Compression Dynamic
          • Static Content Compression
        • Security
          • Basic Authentication
          • Request Filtering
          • Windows Authentication
  4. Install the WSS on Vista setup helper application by running wssvista.msi.
  5. Install WSS by:
    • Locating the WSS on Vista helper application files in %programfiles%\WSSonVista\Setup and running setuplauncher.exe.
    • Pointing the setuphelper to the WSS installer (sharepoint.exe)
    • Following the WSS installation wizard, selecting an advanced installation for a web front-end server, creating a new server farm, and supplying the details for the local SQL database (including the account details).
  6. At the end of the WSS installation, take a note of the port number used, and then navigate to http://localhost:portnumber/. If all goes well, then you should see the SharePoint Central Administration site in your browser:
    Windows SharePoint Services running on Windows 7

Finally, a couple of additional notes:

  • I ran all of this as a standard user, answering just a few UAC prompts at the appropriate points to elevate my privileges).
  • These instructions will allow access to SharePoint site from the local machine; however it will be necessary to create some firewall exceptions if remote client access is required.

Bulk file renames in Windows Explorer

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Working in Windows Explorer today, I noticed something that I found pretty useful. At first I wasn’t sure if it was a new feature in Windows 7 (I’ve since tested and found XP will do something similar, so I guess Vista will too) but I was bulk renaming files and found that Explorer would allow me to rename several files to the same filename root, but suffixed with an identifier to ensure that each file name was unique.

For example, imagine you work for an organisation that produces a lot of customer design documents but which is really keen on re-use. Some customisation is inevitable but you might start out with a template document, or you might work from a documentation set produced for a similar customer environment.

In this example, I have three documents in my set:

Customer X – Infrastructure Design (AD)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (Exchange)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (SharePoint)

If I copy and paste these, I now have 6 documents:

Customer X – Infrastructure Design (AD) – Copy
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (AD)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (Exchange) – Copy
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (Exchange)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (SharePoint) – Copy
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (SharePoint)

Keeping the copies highlighted, if I right click and select Rename, I can rename them all to a common root of Customer Y - Infrastructure Design. The resulting directory structure is:

Customer X – Infrastructure Design (AD)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (Exchange)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (SharePoint)
Customer Y – Infrastructure Design (3)
Customer Y – Infrastructure Design (2)
Customer Y – Infrastructure Design

At this point, it’s now very simple (faster than renaming each file individually and typing the whole filename would have been) to amend the end of each filename to get what I really wanted:

Customer X – Infrastructure Design (AD)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (Exchange)
Customer X – Infrastructure Design (SharePoint)
Customer Y – Infrastructure Design (AD)
Customer Y – Infrastructure Design (Exchange)
Customer Y – Infrastructure Design (SharePoint)

Some people may be unimpressed. Others may say “script it”. And more people might say use the document templating features in Microsoft Office! Whatever your view, for me, this was a real timesaver.

Windows 7 feature walkthoughs

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve just come across a link to a section on the Microsoft TechNet website with walkthroughs for new features in Windows 7. If you’re looking to get up to speed on the next version of Microsoft’s client operating system then these videos might be worth a look (there is an RSS feed to keep up-to-date with new releases).

These videos are not the same series as the “how to” videos I have been producing for TechNet (one of which was featured in the TechNet newsletter last week!) but are actually from the Springboard series.