It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, that’s for various reasons, one of which was that I have been preparing for, and taking, my MCSA exams. So here it is… MCTS Windows Vista, Configuring (70-620)  MCP Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment (70-290) MCP Implementing, Managing and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (70-291) CompTIA Security+ (SYO-101) Which all add up to an MCSA Windows Server 2003 Security+.

I had an odd problem today, I logged on to begin my day’s work and plugged in my iPod as per normal. iTunes crashes, Vista tries to recover. iTunes closes. iTunes opens. iTunes crashes. Vista tries to recover. As you can imagine that gets tiresome, so I tried repairing iTunes, reinstalling iTunes, installing older versions of iTunes, all to no avail. The solution in the end was to remove Quicktime and do a fresh install.

I’ve finally cracked the installation problems with VS 2003 SP1 on Vista. The problem seems to be that the SP must be installed under the same credentials that Visual Studio was installed. I.e. I installed Visual Studio under the domain administrator credentials, but I run my day-to-day under a standard user credential. When installing the SP1 I was elevating my standard user credential rather than running as the domain admin. I don’t know what difference that makes to anything, but it’s worked!

I’ve recently had to upgrade my VM Server due to an increase in load. I had 2 virtual servers running off of the same hard disk, with 768mb of RAM split between the lot. After jamming 2 new 1GB sticks of DDR in, and a new 120GB hard drive it was time to re-allocate some of these resources…here’s how: WARNING! You should always perform a backup on a server you can’t afford to lose BEFORE any operation that could potentially destroy the disk (think what would happen if you had a power cut while resizing…) Step 1 - Moving the Virtual Server.

I’m not going to go into the rights and wrongs of DRM, I will say that I’m strongly against piracy and if your intention is to strip DRM for those kind of reasons, kindly go somewhere else for your info. If you’re wanting to strip DRM for a legitimate personal use, such as playing in another media player or an MP3 player other than an iPod - read on!  QuickTimeFairUse is a great little application that takes your .

Just a quick post today about trust levels for .NET assemblies that are hosted remotely. My current set up at work means that I am maintaining one version of our web site while working on developing a new one - not uncommon. I have 2 virtual servers running Server 2003, IIS and SQL Server, each an identical copy of our production server. Each solution and it’s projects are stored on each virtual server, with the project folders shared and mapped as drives on my laptop.

If, like me, you want to administrate your Windows 2003 servers from your Vista workstation, you may find that you recieve an “MMC could not create snap in” error when you open one of the admin tools, it also manifests as corrupted graphics within some MMC Add-ins. It appears that the dlls are not registered correctly, there’s a KB article from Microsoft that contains a script to reregister the dlls. It’s a simple fix: Copy and paste the following script into a text document, save it as RegisterAdminPack.

It’s not as easy as you might imagine if you’re going to be developing on a local machine. The pre-requisites include IIS and FrontPage Server Extensions which will need installing. Install IIS on Vista Go through Control Panel, Programs and Features, then select “Turn Windows features on or off” on the left hand menu. The basic installation of Vista from the control panel will not be sufficient for a VS install, you must add IIS Metabase Compatibility (you’ll see why later), .

Originally published Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 Wahey! I got published this week in IT Week, ok it was only a readers letter, but I got in! Here’s what I wrote: “New software always excites me, so I was enthusiastic as I installed Office 2007 on my laptop. The machine offers more than enough grunt for my media applications, but sadly not quite enough to install Office in less than 15 minutes, plus one restart.

I recently installed Vista as a dual boot with my old XP installation, while I transferred things over and made sure I could do all I need to do with my new Vista install. It came to the point when I needed to remove XP and solely rely on Vista. Some might say that’s brave, others foolish, others still insane. Whatever your opinion, I needed the HD space and was having no problems with Vista, so I bit the bullet.