On Tuesday I took a day off work and went to a couple of TechNet events which were running in Newcastle. Big thanks to the guys at TechNet for answering many requests to visit the North East and visiting us in Newcastle, I hope the MSDN team are planning some events in Newcastle, cos we'd love to see them here too!

This was not the usual type of event for me and to be honest most of the content in the main session of the day - "Creating and Managing a Virtual Environment on the Microsoft Platform" was outside the realm of my job and professional experience, however I did find it very interesting.  The way in which Steve Lamb and James O'Neill delivered the session, 90% live demos with 10% slides was very good, and I appreciate the amount of hard work involved in delivering that type of session. Big thumbs up guys and I think it is an excellent way of delivering content.

Links from TechNet On The Road:

• James O'Neill's Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone
• Steve Lamb's Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/steve_lamb
• Eileen Brown's Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown
• Steve and James' Slides and Eileen's Slides

The evening session was a very enjoyable and consumer oriented session delivered by James Senior and Matt McSpirit.  This session covered Windows Vista, Xbox 360 and Media Center. This was a great and relaxed look at how users can use the technology for home orientated tasks such as Photo storage using Live Photo Gallery, make DVDs using DVD Creator, Movie Maker. They showed some of the features of Photo Synth. Gave a good demonstration of Media Center, and Media Center Extender on XBox 360, Sideshow gadgets and James had a LG Z1 laptop which has a SideShow panel in the lid (see my earlier post - CES - So Many New Toys! - Windows Vista SideShow). They gave away a couple of copies of Windows Vista Ultimate - One through a Guitar Hero II Challenge (in which Matt was soundly beaten by an attendee!) and the second through a text competition.

One of the most interesting pieces of technology on show was Windows Home Server which is a server for the home, which stores your music, photos, files, backups and is remotely accessible. This looks really cool and is certainly added to my ever growing wish list :-). For more information see the guys' blogs:

• James Senior's Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/james
• Matt McSpirit's Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit

Yesterday, the Windows Vista Team, announced on their Blog, the forthcoming release of a beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 1.  The release of the beta is expected to be in the next few weeks, with the team working on a full release for the first quarter of 2008.

For more information check out the following:

• Windows Vista Team Blog Post
• SP1 Beta White Paper
• Jon DeVaan's Q&A Session on Microsoft PressPass

Earlier this week these two events were highlighted by Phil Cross of Microsoft in an email I received.  TechNet on the Road will be running in Reading, London, Manchester, NEWCASTLE and Falkirk.  Vista After Hours is running in Manchester, NEWCASTLE, Falkirk and London.   These look to be great events for IT Pros and even for Developers who have an interest.

The following information on the events was taken from the latest Technet Flash Newsletter:

TechNet on the Road
This new-style TechNet event, featuring powerful product demos, will start by explaining the environment we'll be working in, and then use Windows Deployment Services to jump straight into a server deployment. The new server will form part of a server cluster. We'll generate workloads to run on the cluster, using Windows Server Virtualisation, with which we'll create a number of Virtual Machines - Domain Controller, DNS and DHCP VMs. We'll also create a Windows Server 2008 'Server Core' installation. Next we'll explore clustering further, specifically the failing over of workloads between nodes. We'll close with a session dedicated to managing this infrastructure, using tools such as System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM, formerly Microsoft Operations Manager, MOM), System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and PowerShell, the fantastic new command-line shell and scripting language.

20 September 2007, Manchester: Creating and Managing a Virtual environment on the Microsoft Platform

21 September 2007, Reading: Creating and Managing a Virtual Environment on the Microsoft Platform

25 September 2007, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Creating and Managing a Virtual environment on the Microsoft Platform

27 September 2007, Falkirk: Creating and Managing a Virtual environment on the Microsoft Platform

03 October 2007, London: Creating and Managing a Virtual Environment on the Microsoft Platform

Vista After Hours
You may be familiar with Windows Vista at work - whether you have deployed it or are evaluating it - but have you ever thought about the possibilities of Vista outside work? This session, aimed at IT professionals, explores not only the built in elements of Vista (such as Search, Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, and the Networking and Sharing Centre) but also how you can extend your Windows Vista Experience with Windows Media Centre, Xbox 360 and specific applications to open up a new world of gaming and home entertainment.

20 September 2007, Manchester: Vista After Hours

25 September 2007, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Vista After Hours

27 September 2007, Falkirk: Vista After Hours

03 October 2007, London: Vista After Hours

I am thinking of attending at least the Vista After Hours event in Newcastle and maybe the full day on Windows Server 2008 too, so if you're attending I might see you there!

On Tuesday, 27th March, I delivered the EVO (Exchange, Vista and Office) Launch event at the Microsoft Offices in Edinburgh for VBUG Scotland. In this packed session I attempted to cover as many of the new features for Developers to be aware of in the new products Vista and Office 2007. Unfortunately the session overran and thanks to those who stayed that extra bit longer to hear some more. The slides are linked below, if you wish to take a look at them and if you have any questions please email me using the contact form and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

I enjoyed coming up to Scotland and enjoyed delivering the event, gained more experience and had some interesting conversations with delegates, listening to opinions on the new software and their experiences with Vista and Office. Questions were plentiful and interesting and a couple which I had to do some further research on are detailed below.

• Network Access Protection - How is it configured and how is it managed in infrastructure - is it a Vista only feature?
• Manifest files in UAC aware applications, are the elevation rights defined for application or process?

To tackle Network Access Protection, this is a feature which enforces policies on networks as to requirements for clients to connect to the network, this is achieved by checking computers against a defined security policy. The infrastructure involved primarily includes servers running Windows Server "Longhorn" and a Network Policy Server (NPS) which enables centralised policy configurationa and evaluation of the client health state. There is also a Network Access Protection Client currently in beta testing for Windows XP Clients. For more information see the Technet Network Access Protection pages.

Manifest files in UAC aware applications are used in applications to inform the Operating System of what the application needs, this will become a mandatory requirement for applications as Operating Systems evolve even further. The manifest schema is used to allow developers to set attributes to detail the requested execution level - for more information see the "Developer Best Practives and Guidelines for Applications in a Least Privileged Environment Documents on MSDN.

Resources, Slides and Code Samples from the session

Daniel Moth's Blog - A great source for lots of Vista examples, Daniel covers UAC, Sidebar, Sideshow. Indeed the samples I used were created with the help of his MSDN Nuggets

Check out Channel9's coverage of Windows Vista, plenty of Videos and Screencasts to take a look at

Windows Vista Developer Centre on MSDN and go and download the Windows SDK (warning this is a very big file!).

For more resources see the slides from the session. The slides are available in both Office 2007 - pptx format and Office 97-2003 ppt format:

• Office 2007 Format PPTX (5MB)
• Office 97-2003 Format PPT (8MB)

Hello World SideBar Gadget Sample

Wow no posts for a while then three come along at once, sorry they've come at once been a little busy.

Just released is the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista. This release had previously been available as a beta but has now been fully released and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center at the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=90e2942d-3ad1-4873-a2ee-4acc0aace5b6&displaylang=en

A lot of the community groups are holding EVO Launch events at the moment and NxtGenUG recently held their event in Coventry and from the article on their site it looked to be a complete hoot! Of particular interest is Dave McMahon's show stealing ReadyBoost song, check out the article and watch the video, hosted on Soapbox, of Dave's ReadyBoost Song.

At the recent EVO Launch event I mentioned a tool called the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. This tool cans your system and produces a report which will inform you of any issues which may prevent upgrading to Windows Vista, recommend ways to resolve them and it can help you choose the right version of Vista to fit the way you use your computer. I hope this helps anyone who is looking to upgrade to Vista but is not sure whether or not their machine is capable.

To download the Upgrade Avisor go to the upgrade section of the Windows Vista site.

A question that was posed to me at the recent VBUG EVO Launch event was do Parental Controls have to be enabled in order to get the Activity Log reports? I have looked into this further and played with my installation of Vista RC1 and have found that yes Parental Controls need to be enabled to track the Users' activity on the machine. This can be turned off but by default when Parental Controls are enabled on a user, so are the activity logs. The actvitity logs can also only monitor standard users they cannot be used to monitor Administrator Accounts.

FOr more information check out the section on Parental Controls in MSDN Library.

On Tuesday evening, John Price and I delivered the VBUG North East EVO (Exchange, Vista and Office) Launch Event. Big thanks go to John Price for presenting with me, sharing the work, providing great support, delivering a great presentation and travelling from the East Midlands, it was very much appreciated John, Thank You! Thanks must also go to John Timney for arranging the venue and to BT for providing the venue.

We had a good turnout and the topics we covered were well received. Plenty of swag was distributed. We covered Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

Admittedly there was an awful lot of content and there was possibly too much to cover in one session. I will bear this in mind for any future launch events and indeed, in my own presentations. Thanks go to those who attended, I hope you all enjoyed the event and if you have any questions about the EVO Launch, previous or upcoming events, or questions about VBUG please email me on northeast@vbug.com.

The slides are available in both pptx (Office 2007) and ppt (Office 2003-97) formats:

• Office 2007 Format (5MB)
• Office 2003-97 Format (8MB)

I look forward to seeing you at the next event in late March, early April, further details to follow soon.

The official in person Windows Vista and Office 2007 Launch Event in Reading has been full for a long time now, but the great news is that you can take part in the launch event online. The Keynote is being streamed over the internet and can be viewed by all you don't need to register just remember this URL - http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/default.mspx and go there tomorrow to see all of the sessions and the keynote on the web!

There are also copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 for you to win if you take part in the day 2 coding sessions online. These are two practical scenarios wherehy you will have a chance to develop a solution for Windows Vista and Office 2007! Cool! Mike Ormond and Ian Moulster have posted more information about this.

Go to the URL NOW - http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/default.mspx and bookmark it then set up a reminder in Outlook and remember to go back tomorrow and take part in this unique Online Launch event!

I will be at the event on and around the VBUG come and say hello and tell me what you think about the event, ask about VBUG and if you have any feedback about my blog then please let me know.