When Software Attacks!

Unblocking a stuck Lab Manager Environment (the hard way)

This is a post so I don’t forget how I fixed access to one of our environments yesterday, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you. We have a good many pretty complex environments deployed to our lab hyper-V servers, controlled by Lab manager. Operations such as starting, stopping or repairing those environments can take a long, long time, but this time we had one that was quite definitely stuck.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 17, 2016

Installing Windows 10 RSAT Tools on EN-GB Media-Installed Systems

This post is an aide memoir so I don’t have to suffer the same annoyance and frustration at what should be an easy task. I’ve now switched to my Surface Pro 3 as my only system, thanks to the lovely new Pro 4 Type Cover and Surface Dock. That meant that I needed the Remote Server Administration Tools installing. Doing that turned out to be much more of an odyssey that it should have been and I’m writing this in the hope that it will allow others to quickly find the information I struggled to.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2015

Optimising IaaS deployments in Azure Resource Templates

Unlike most of my recent posts this one won’t have code in it. Instead I want to talk about concepts and how you should look long and hard at your templates to optimise deployment. In my previous articles I’ve talked about how nested deployments can help apply sensible structure to your deployments. I’ve also talked about things I’ve learned around what will successfully deploy and what will give errors. Nested deployments are still key, but the continuous cycle of improvements in Azure means I can change my information somewhat around what works well and what is likely to fail.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015

Automating TFS Build Server deployment with SCVMM and PowerShell

Richard and I have been busy this week. It started with a conversation about automating the installation of new build servers. Richard was looking at writing PowerShell to install and configure the TFS build agent, along with all the various SDKs that we use across all out projects. Our current array of build servers have all been built by hand and each has a different set of SDKs to build specific project types.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 17, 2014

SharePoint 2013: Creating Managed Metadata Columns that allow Fill-In Choices

This is a relatively quick post. There’s a fair bunch of stuff written about creating columns in SharePoint 2013 that use Managed Metadata termsets. However, some of it is a pain to find and then some. I have had to deal with two frustrating issues lately, both of which boil down to poor sharepoint documentation. Wictor Wilén wrote the post I point people at for most stuff on managed metadata columns, but this time the internet couldn’t help.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 17, 2014

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

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

Declaratively create Composed Looks in SharePoint 2013 with elements.xml

This is really a follow-up to my earlier post about tips with SharePoint publishing customisations. Composed looks have been a part of a couple of projects recently. In the first, a solution for on-premise, we used code in a feature receiver to add a number of items to the Composed Looks list. In the second, for Office 365, a bit of research offered an alternative approach with no code. What are Composed Looks A composed look is a collection of master page, colour scheme file, font scheme file and background image.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 28, 2014