When Software Attacks!

Safely modify SharePoint 2013 Web.Config files using PowerShell

One of the things we learn early in our SharePoint careers was not to manually edit the web.config files of a web application. SharePoint involves multiple servers and has its own mechanisms for managing web.config updates. Previously, I’ve created xml files with web.config modifications and copied those to each WFE. Those changes are merged into the initial web.config by SharePoint. I’ve always been vaguely aware of there being a better way, but never needed to track it down from an IT point of view.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Adding USB 3 to my Lenovo X220 Tablet

My X220 is a stalwart machine. It’s built like a tank and can be upgraded in a numb of ways. Mine now has 16Gb of RAM and two SSDs which allow me to run multi-VM environments for development and demo. Unfortunately, however, there is no USB 3 on the laptop. That’s a pain if I need to copy stuff on and off via USB, or run VMs from a USB 3 pod.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, June 8, 2014

Enabling Data Deduplication on my Windows 8.1 Laptop

Lets get the disclaimer out of the way first: What I’ve done is absolutely unsupported by Microsoft. Just because it works for me does not guarantee it will work for you and I am not in any way recommending that you follow my lead! I use a great many virtual machines for both customer work, internal projects and just tinkering. My ThinkPad X220T is tricked out with extra RAM and two SSDs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, June 8, 2014

Microsoft People-centric IT Roadshow

Microsoft UK have been running technical events around the UK for a couple of years now, and it’s a great thing. Too many events are focused in the south of England and there are lots of IT pros north of the M25! Starting on Monday, the latest series of events kicks off. The People-Centric IT roadshow content is being delivered by MVPs from across the UK and Ireland. Covering hot-topics like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and information security, the sessions will talk about using the appropriate tooling from across the Microsoft stack to address these real-world problems.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, June 8, 2014

Our TFS Lab Management Infrastructure

Richard and I spend a good deal of time talking about Lab Manager and our environments. I’ve written here before about our migration to the latest versions of the various components of Lab and both Richard and I have delivered sessions at user groups and conferences. Richard was in Belgium last week for Techorama, after which he was asked about the specifics of our setup. Between us, we came up with a diagram of our Lab Environment and Richard recently posted that to his blog.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, June 8, 2014

Getting ready for Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2

It’s a busy week. I’m speaking at the [Black Marble-hosted GWAB2 event](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event= Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2) this Saturday, along with Steve Spencer and Andy Westgarth. Richard and Robert will also be on hand which means between us we should be able to cover questions on much of the newly re-monikered Microsoft Azure. I’ll be running through IaaS, Azure AD and looking at hybrid cloud solutions from an IT perspective while Steve and Andy talk through the other platform services from a developer point of view.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Migrating to SCVMM 2012 R2 in a TFS Lab Scenario

Last week I moved our SCVMM from 2012 with service pack 1 to 2012 R2. Whilst the actual process was much simpler than I expected, we had a pretty big constraint imposed upon us by Lab Manager that largely dictated our approach. Our SCVMM 2012 deployment was running on an aging Dell server. It had a pair of large hard drives that were software mirrored by the OS an we were using NIC teaming in Server 2012 to improve network throughput.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 20, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 4: Local networks and site-site connectivity

This is part 4 of a series of posts building powershell functions to create and modify Azure Virtual Networks. Previous posts have covered functions to create virtual networks and then delete them. In this part, I’m going to show you functions that will define local networks and configure site-site VPN connectivity between a local and virtual network. Next on my list is to create functions to delete the local networks and remove the site-site connections.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, March 9, 2014

Gary Lapointe to the rescue: Using his Office 365 powershell tools to recover from a corrupted masterpage

I also need to give credit to the Office 365 support team over this. They were very quick in their response to my support incident, but I was quicker! Whilst working on an Office 365 site for a customer today I had a moment of blind panic. The site is using custom branding and I was uploading a new version of the master page to the site when things went badly wrong.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, March 7, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 2: Powershell functions

In my previous post I talked about what was involved in creating an Azure network configuration using Powershell. In this post I’ll cover where I’ve got so so far, which is a series of functions that do the following: Contact Azure and get the current network configuration. Convert that to sensible XML and if it’s empty, create the basic structure. Create a new virtual network, checking to see if one with the same name already exists.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 4, 2014