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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Tuesday, February 21, 2017 8:09am |
For the last 8 or more years I have maintained my technical blog at http://csi-windows.com. My career focus has shifted a lot since starting that site and it was time to acknowledge this in the focus of my blogging.
The new location is https://cloudywindows.io. As in the past, some some of this content will be posted to Linkedin as well.
The focus of the new blog is cloudifying Windows. This means focusing on insights and code that help Windows be a better cloud player. It also means focusing on the technologies of Microsoft's Server 2016 release as it is a significant milestone in readying Windows to be better fit to cloud environments.
I hope you'll keep up to date with Cloud Windows by either following me on twitter or subscribing to the feed or email list at: https://cloudywindows.io.
The new location was also an exploration in deploying a blog with modern cloud and DevOps technologies.
The blog is generated by the static site generator "Hugo" and it is hosted on AWS CloudFront. Static sites have no back end computing - a limitation which means there is not much to hack as the entire site is static files. Static sites can be checked into source control - giving a whole host of "site as code" benefits.
In this case, it also means the shutdown of a dedicated server that was costing over $100/month - to be replaced by about $3/month (after the AWS free trial period). The new site utilizes CloudFront's free SSL to boost trust for Google and other search engines.
It has been the leanest site deployment I've ever pulled off - consuming about 80 hours of weekend time from discovery through deployment.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Tuesday, April 5, 2016 6:23am |
I started teaching DevOps around the year 1999. All together now: "Darwin, are you insane? The term, 'DevOps', is a lot newer than that!" That's absolutely true, but a concept always exists long before it is recognized and labelled...
In 1999 I was a newly hired Principal Consultant and I clearly remember getting a call from my manager. He was at a Microsoft partner event that demonstrated Microsoft's soon-to-be released technologies. One of hottest demos for Windows 2000 showcased the life-saving capabilities of a new software deployment automation technology that was code named "Darwin" It tickled him that it was named after the newest member of his team and he was calling to have a chuckle about it with me. That technology became Windows Installer or MSI.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Monday, February 8, 2016 7:52am |
So I get the question about the free upgrade to Windows 10 a lot. I am going to share with you the criteria I use for my own machines in hopes it might help you make your decision. If you think my criteria is a little overdone, just credit one year of hard experience to each point in the evaluation process ;)
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Friday, January 15, 2016 9:48am |
PluralSight's virtual hack.summit() looks like it's going to be pretty epic! Presentations by creators of various technologies and languages and a $150,000 hackathon. Worth a look:https://hacksummit.org/
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Saturday, October 10, 2015 8:06am |
For one of my clients I created a PowerShell automation framework that could work stand alone (great for testing) or under SCCM - with no coding changes to switch. I was excited to wire up it's error reporting system to SCCM custom status MIFs. Somehow in the age of the API the SCCM development team decided to drop this very helpful feature - but only from "Applications" because the are so much "better"...
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Thursday, August 20, 2015 8:27am |
When I create cover letters and resumes, it is always a challenge to convey that although I don't code in a compiled language like C#, I understand and enjoy applying serious structured coding and testing techniques to the PowerShell code I write.
I believe this is not a small distinction when looking for DevOps professionals. Many of us from the Infrastructure side of the house cut our teeth on coding by hacking together useful scripts in languages whose capabilities were Neanderthal. A good portion of time was spent working around the limitations of the language, rather than being empowered by it's capabilities.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Saturday, August 15, 2015 4:59pm |
When I was a toddler my dad caught me repeatedly stepping on the cat's tail. Rather than react to my childishness with a reprimand, he simply asked "What are you doing?" I proceeded to explain to him what is now commonly called a "four square" matrix.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Friday, April 10, 2015 9:41am |
Wow - sometimes you don't know how easy you've got it until you step off the cliff! That cliff for me was attempting to replace VMware Workstation with Windows 8 Hyper-V. Hey Microsoft, you really should do something about this since I see it cited ad nauseam as a primary reason many IT Pros retreat from their attempt to adopt Win 8 Hyper-V and go back to VMware. But in the meantime, I have some steps to make this as easy as possible.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Saturday, May 24, 2014 7:19am |
With Office 2013 Microsoft created a new deployment and installation mechanism known as "Click To Run (CTR)". This is the method used to deploy office from the web in a near instant fashion and it includes a type of "Runtime App-V" under the covers. The same mechanism is used to deploy the Click To Run edition in corporations. Up until now you could only install the entire suite of Office applications when using Click To Run (MSI based installs have always retained full selective product install capabilities).
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Friday, February 28, 2014 3:02pm |
I have been working on a project to deploy Office 365 to the enterprise for over 6 months now. Office 365 SP1 is a significant boost to the ability to deploy an on-premise source approach to Office 365...
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Monday, April 15, 2013 11:05am |
Although this is the previous version, the major kernel changes that were done for Server 2008 / Vista are the same as Server 2008 R2 / Windows 7 - so it is still a solid reference.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Saturday, December 22, 2012 8:33am |
"Silver Bullet" status is high praise - I'm slow to give it. However, when I am most tempted, the item has the quality of unveiling something that has formerly been invisible by virtue of it's universal acceptance. There is something that may be invisible to you now that could have a dramatic effect on your career satisfaction and the rest of your life as well. That something is...
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Monday, December 10, 2012 4:27pm |
Most scripters I know are code sample junkies – the learn by hacking away at existing scripts on the web and one’s they have collected. Recently I’ve been on the hunt for a easier way to store, search and find code snippets. I found a lot of stuff, but nothing that satisfied. As I was searching I realized by configuring three different areas of Windows, I could have a pretty nice snippet manager right in Windows Explorer. Some of these changes you will want to make even if you don’t actively manage snippets!
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Wednesday, October 24, 2012 12:08pm |
Idera PowerShell Plus is a top grade script editor. In addition to full PowerShell support, it syntax highlights VBS, .CMD/.BAT, XML, HTML and SQL scripts. Up until now it has been a commercial product, but the company has just made it into a free product.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Wednesday, September 19, 2012 11:00pm |
Darwin Sanoy delivered the Experts Exchange Webinar "Managing Apps and Scripts on 64-bit Windows". This is the video recording of that webinar.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Monday, August 6, 2012 1:48pm |
We've recently updated some of our training content to include Windows 8. I want to share a little background on those changes and how they might be helpful to your own career planning if you're involved in application deployment or support. I also wish to outline why the consumerization of IT must be driven from the outside IN, not from the inside OUT.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Thursday, June 21, 2012 8:16am |
Microsoft has release a free ebook on Server 2012 and it's role in the hybrid cloud.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Friday, February 10, 2012 9:02am |
How many times have I been asked if there is a way to silence or automatically approve the UAC prompt for non-admins? I lost count a long time ago, but if I had a dime for each time – I’d be set! Windows Installer, however, is a unique case – mainly because Windows Installer only uses the UAC prompt to approve it’s own internal privileges model IF AND ONLY IF it needs to.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Friday, February 3, 2012 8:14am |
From time to time you may find you need to identify which software package a cached MSI is associated with. Since the names are purposely randomized to prevent name conflicts for per-user installs, it is not easy to tell which software they belong to. Here is an easy method to see this information for all packages from within Windows Explorer.
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General
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Written by Darwin Sanoy
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Saturday, December 17, 2011 12:00am |
Active Home Pro (AHP) is a low cost software package from x10.com that allows programming of affordable home control devices that follow the x10 protocol. AHP does not natively provide network or web based access to the computer that is running the software. There are a variety of devices and software packages that can solve this problem for $100 or up – but all I really need is the occasional ability to control a single device. WMI is up to the task…
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