According to the facebook page, Earlybird Registration will open on Monday, May 10th.  Make sure you get in…

If you have a MSDN or TechNet-Plus subscription, you probably know that today the downloads for the latest version of the Windows client operating system were released.

Windows 7 comes in a number of flavours, targeted/marketed at different audiences.  Starter (for NetBooks and the like), Home Basic (for emerging markets), Home Premium (the primary candidate for home users), Professional (for most common business uses) and Ultimate (all the features). There is also Enterprise edition which is the same as Ultimate, but with a different licensing mechanism.

Like Windows Vista, Microsoft use a common install media (DVD) which has all the bits required for any of the installation versions on the same disc.  Which bits to install is determined by the edition selection/configuration.

With the Windows Vista downloads from MSDN / TechNet, you had a single disc and when you started the install process, you picked which edition you wanted/had the key for.  You then entered the key.  This was easy, except when you didn’t know what edition the key you had was designed for.

Windows 7 downloads are different this time round, because Microsoft have created a DVD for each edition, not giving you the choice of which edition to install at run-time.

That means if you want to test different configurations using Home Basic, Home Premium and say Ultimate, you need to download 3 different DVD images (at 2.4 or 3GB each)

BUT.  There is a was to bring back the selector.  HOWEVER, it requires a bit of time and a few tools.  The tools I use in this description are ones I used, but there are alternatives available.

1. Download an ISO for the desired platform (x86 or x64).  I recommend the Ultimate but it makes no difference (except possibly the enterprise edition, due to it’s different licensing system)
2. If you want, burn the ISO to disc.  Remember that this disc will only be for that particular edition.
   • If you didn’t burn a DVD, then you can use a virtual drive software (Daemon Tools, Virtual Drive, etc..) to mount the ISO as a drive.
   • Otherwise, use a archive extraction tool like 7Zip or WinRAR to open the ISO like an archive file
3. Copy the contents of the ISO/disc to a temp folder on your hard-drive.  Be sure to copy all subfolders.
4. Now navigate to <temp>\sources and delete ei.cfg.  This config file tells the installer what edition the disc has been classified as.  Removing it enables the edition picker.

Right.  That’s it.  Now you just need to make a bootable media so you can do some installs.  I prefer to use a USB drive.  There are a number of good tutorials on how to do this, such as http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/

Otherwise, if you want to make a DVD, you will need to create a bootable ISO image. Again, there are a number of packages out there.  I use a Microsoft (internal) tool called CDImage

cdimage –lGRMCULFRER_EN_DVD –m –u2 -b<temp>\boot\etfsboot.com <temp> <dest>\Windows7.ISO

Give it a while and you’ll have a ISO file that can be burnt with any standard burning software (or even Windows itself if you’re using the RC)

Let me know if you have any problems and I’ll try and help where I can…

• Did you know there are 3 MCITP tracks for Microsoft SQL Server 2008?  What are they, and why should I care?  
• Did you know there are 3 MCPD tracks for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008?  What are they, and what’s the difference from MCITP?    

James is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.  He has contributed lectures on Microsoft Certification, SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Data Services to the INETA and PASS communities.

6:00pm - Thursday 30th April

Datacom Systems Ltd
210 Federal St
Auckland CBD
Map

Food and Drink will be provided from 5:30pm.  Please feel free to contact us with any specific culinary requests

Please register here:  http://www.aucklandsql.com/Meetings/Certification.aspx

Installing the .NET Framework 3.5 as a pre-requisite for a web-app.

Get a dialog up saying “Please close the following applications before installation can proceed”

‘iexplore.exe’
‘dotnetfx35setup.exe’

The sort of points that might kill a bee¹

• VB6 runtime support will be supported in Windows7.  Woo?
• Not sure I like where they’re going with the Visual Studio 2010 interface.  I want fast, efficient and productive; not pretty. 
• I have over 300MB of images in my Wallpapers folder (I love that W7 has a built in wallpaper changer).   And surprisingly 0 boobies. 
• I willingly installed iTunes (with QuickTime) and Safari 4 (beta) tonight.  The Safari installer was nice; it asked what extra bits I did/didn’t want.  
  iTunes just went for it, and I had to remove a pile of junk later.
• I fired up the version of a customer facing application I developed at work.  It was replaced by a new and improved version (that I didn’t write) in 2006.  My old version presents the EXACT same look’n’feel, offers more features and is at least 400% faster according to the benchmarking tools I used.  
  We’re upgrading to an “even better” platform in June/July.  Current test site is 1000% slower than the current site, let alone my site.  Performance is not expected to improve, but it’s got more wizzy bits now.

¹ Sorry, private joke.

Firefox 3.x (with a few additional plugs-ins/add-ons) seems to be meeting my day-2-day browsing requirements.

At home at least.

The kicker will be next week, when I return to work.  Sure I’ll need to use IE for several key things, but I will also try and use FF as much as I can.

Are my days of zelotry for M$ at an end?  Will I soon be giving my whole to the OSS (Open Source Software) community.

Not bloody likely.

I have had it pointed out that my brain in a bottle is similar to the Microsoft PDC 2008 brain in a bottle.

I had mine first.

I just wish I were going...

In my RSS feeds, I saw a number of entries about the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports.  Since these originally came out in July of 2007, I figured they'd been updated and now actually worked...

Hah!  Same version.  Dunno why the blogs had brought them up again.

But this time round, I spent the hours and managed to get them all running correctly.  Why oh why DATEDIFF() only supports returning an INT I don't know.  That means if you're working with Milliseconds, you've only got 24 days. 20 hours of difference available to you.

And how Microsoft managed to release a package which is has as it's core a series of stored procedures, one of which can't handle a SQL server having been up for more than 24 days (quiet you Oracle DBAs) I don't know.

Anyway, thanks to Google and Live Search (I got my relevant hits from live than I did from google, shock horror) I found some tips on how to get through it, and I now have a series of reports that tell me:
- I've got ~200 missing indexes that I really should look at implementing
- Several of our applications have DB handle leaks
- Several of our applications DON'T have DB handle leaks, but they run for far too long