Today is day one of six weeks that I am taking off from work.  One of the awesome benefits that Microsoft has is something called Parental Care Leave (formerly Infant Care Leave).  Under this program Father’s get 1 month paid time off (and up to 2 months additional unpaid).  Mom’s get 2 months paid and can take the additional 1 month unpaid.

I am going to be taking my 4 weeks paid, 1 week unpaid, and 1 week of vacation.  I am looking forward to the time off, spending time with Susan and Aidan, and tackling the long list of projects I never had time to deal with.  Maybe we’ll even be able to sneak in the occasional road trip. 

-Allen

P.S.  One of the things on my list is getting through old photos and blog posts.  Keep checking the blog and flickr for new (old) posts.

The other day, I was creating a web site and I need to create a drop down list for the site with values of 1-150. 

<option>1</option>
<option>2</option>
<option>3</option>
etc…

I was faced with 2 choices, do this manually 150 times or find a way to automate it.  Thinking about this, I wrote the following one-liner and then copied and pasted the output to my HTML document.  Voila!  Issue solved in less than 2 minutes.

PS C:\Temp> 1..150 | ForEach-Object { "     <option>$_</option>"}  >  htmloptions.txt

I am the furthest thing from a PowerShell expert, but I try to think of ways to automate functions that I have to do more than 1 time. 

The 1..150 defines a numeric range where number 1-150 would have normally been displayed on the screen. 

Since I followed this up with the pipe symbol (not the letter I or L) | the output goes to the next cmdlet.  This cmdlet ForEach-Object takes an action on each one of these numbers.   This action was to write the options for the dropdown list.  the $_ took the number that was piped in and inserted it in that location.

If you found this useful, please let me know in the comments section.

-Allen

At Ignite training, I was fortunate enough to have several friends in the training as well.  We got to hang and catch up.

Butch (my roommate during Ranger training)

Tuan and I
 

Tuan, Hank, and I

Jaclynn dropped me off at the airport

On the way back to NJ, I met Ja Rule in the Airport

Also Patrick Ewing was there, but he was with his daughter and for obvious reasons didn’t want to be disturbed.  I swear this pic is him.  We were both moving and my old point and shoot is too sloooow!

-Allen

This past week, I was in Orlando for Exchange 14 Ignite training.  This consisted of hands-on labs and presentations from Microsoft employees about the next version of Exchange.  While we were at the training, Microsoft unveiled the official title for Exchange 14, Exchange 2010.  There are some great new features.

• Database Availability Group (DAG) – allows database replication without a lot of the complexity that existed in Exchange 2007.  The nice thing about this is you can have a server with multiple roles and have a DAG.
• Self-healing databases – if there are multiple copies of a database (in a DAG array) Exchange now has the capability to recover from page errors in the database (-1018, –1019, and –1022).  A copy of the bad page can be copied from another database copy.
• Exchange Federation Gateway – This allows organizations to use a broker service provided by Microsoft in the cloud to authenticate cross-organization.  From this people can view Free/Busy information and even details.
• Decreased IO footprint – Exchange 2010 has the potential to reduce IO by 70% over Exchange 2007 and a total of 91% over Exchange 2003.  This is great news which can lead to larger mailboxes.
• Online mailbox moves – that’s right!  Now user’s do not have to be kicked out of their mailbox while it is being moved.

There are plenty of other features, but this is just a quick taste.  Overall, I feel that there are several features which warrant this upgrade from Exchange 2003 and even Exchange 2007.

Check out more details at: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/

-Allen

I was at a customer’s site this week when I ran into an issue with Vista on my laptop.  It kept displaying a network as Unidentified and I could not change this.  This was the loopback adapter that I was using for Virtual Server 2005.  I had recently enabled this adapter so I could move files from my physical laptop to virtual machines.

It turns out the workaround for this is to add a default gateway to the NIC.  That will give you the option to change the label/name for the network connection.  I found the solution for this in the following forum:

http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=671112

-Allen