Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.

That seems rather cool – and a lot like one of the new Microsoft desktop virtualization technologies whose acronym I totally can’t think of right now…

Thing is, I’m not sure I’ve figure out properly how to use it or not. You can’t just drag the shortcut from the VM to the host machine’s desktop as the shortcut disappears along the way. Closest I’ve found is to start the VM, switch it to “unity mode”, tjem start the app and then Pin it to the start bar. I can confirm that the ability to pin an “unitied” app is new to this version, so maybe that’s the trick? The pinned app will stay there even after the VM is shut down so I guess I’m on the right track.

Clicking that pinned app repeats the process: It starts the Virtual Machine, flips it into unity mode and then runs the app itself. Not real quickly on my test machine, but that’s likely more a factor of my test machine than Vmware.

I’m doing some studying for a SQL Server cert (70-433) and have a VM build with a 180 day trials of Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2. I have the SQL Server Management Studio pinned from that VM and find it works as a great way to get the VM up and going when I’m ready to do some more study exercises.

Related posts:

1. Quick Look at VMware Player 2.50
2. VMware Fusion 2 Beta
3. VMware Server 2.0 beta – First Look

The first email was to alert me about the pilot launch of the new Usage Meter. Current Comcast data limits are at 250 GB/month — which to me is a lot — and this meter is something folks can use to keep an eye how much data they’re moving. As you can see from the image to the right, I don’t really use that much data… Considering how many random apps and “light Linux” ISOs I download, this actually surprises me a bit.
[click the picture to see a bigger version]

Two days later I received another email from Comcast. This one is encouraging me to enjoy my digital TV subscription – online! Free access to tons of shows and movies via the Fancast site.

I guess they noticed my usage was low too.

Related posts:

1. Comcast’s Arena Rock
2. The 250 GB Challenge and How to Measure
3. Speaking of Speeds

The install would go fine, but once completed the boot times on this machine would go through the roof. It would take over 5 minutes just to get to the login prompt! I initially assumed it was a network issue. In fact, my first guess was a DHCP request timing out. But that wasn’t it.

So I uninstalled Player and got back to work. But whenever I had a free moment I’d try another install and then muck around with network adapters and binding/unbinding the VMware bridge thingy.

But still no luck.

Tonight I made one last run at it. As always, the install went fine and the subsequent reboot took forever. But this time I looked a little closer at the event logs and one event caught my eye:

I checked the services control panel and that particular service was up and running so I guess it eventually started… On a whim, I changed that VMware Authorization service to a startup type of “Automatic (Delayed Start)” and rebooted. This is a relatively new startup type (since Vista?) that runs the service at a lower priority and has it wait until after startup and the initial “busy time.”

Problem solved. No more Event 7022 and no more slow boots. Now this laptop starts up just as fast as ever and VMware Player works like a champ.

Related posts:

1. Couple VMware Player Resources
2. VMware Player 3.0 and Network Configuration
3. VMware Player is more than a Player

Now you can get driving directions and choose “Bicycling” to get bike specific directions. That’s nice and all, but here’s the part that I like even better. Looking for more trails around Cherry Creek State Park? First, find the park at Google Maps, then click on “More…” and check the “Bicycling” box. All those green lines are the trails.

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

This is going to be a great resource for finding and planning rides. I’m pretty stoked. Will it replace my paper map of the Denver area trails (sold via the Denver Bicycle Touring Club)? Nah, but it will definitely be the first place I start now.

Oh, and check out the Satellite view – the trails really “pop” in that view:

Related posts:

1. Maps.Amung.us
2. Windows Mobile GPS Apps?
3. TrackMe: A Quick Look

It turns out that SQL Server Management Studio has a nifty little option to speed up many, if not most, database tasks. Just find the Template Explorer under the View menu:
(note: my understanding is this is the same for 2005 and 2008 versions. The pictures below are from 2005)

This opens a new panel on the right side of SSMS (by default). Tons of tasks are listed. For instance, suppose you want to create a new table. Drill down to it and then double-click.

That leads to the template opened in a new SQL editor window.

But look at all those angle brackets. We’re not done quite yet. In the past I would start editing all those to replace my own values manually. Today Chris Randall showed me a better way while on a bit of a “side trip” during a test prep session.

Under the Query menu, select “Specify Values for Template Parameters…”

Now you get this slick little dialog. Set your values, click OK and you have a script ready to go.

Great tip, huh?

Check out the template list sometime, it is huge! I’m sure it is documented somewhere… but I couldn’t find a full list of all the stuff it holds.

Related posts:

1. SQL Server in the Cloud
2. Learned a bit about SQL Server Full Text Search
3. Tiny Wi-Fi rant, New Meebo feature and SQL Server observation

I hate to risk losing data or configurations so before I retire a server I convert it to a virtual machine. The same with employee PCs. When someone leaves, I convert it to a VM before it gets rebuilt for the next use. I can’t deny that this habit has saved more more than once over the past few years when you suddenly realize a key file only existed on Billy’s machine – and Billy’s old machine has been reloaded twice since he left! Just fire up the virtual machine and grab that file.

There’s a small wrinkle though. After converting servers and desktops to VMs for a few years, the storage needs grow dramatically! Storing VMs is the primary purpose for my Openfiler server (first mentioned). However, now when I need to fire up a machine it is a lot more tedious moving the VM image to the ESXi server or my local VMware Workstation machine (powering them up over the LAN is even more tedious imho).

While watching one copy last week I wondered aloud, “Wouldn’t it be handy if I could just treat that virtual hard drive (.vmdk) like any other drive?” VMware was already way ahead of me. Enter the VMware Workstation Disk Mount Utility. Note: There’s not much to see at that link. Just accept the agreement and you’ll get the download.

This is a command line utility so a glance at the docs wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Run vmware-mount with no arguments to see what is currently mounted. To mount a .vmdk file to a drive letter run
vmware-mount [driveletter:] [path to .vmdk] [arguments]

This works fine even while the .vmdk file is on another server. Assuming you have proper access you can specify the “path to .vmdk” portion in UNC form (\\servername\share\path\to\file.vmdk). As you might guess, this saves me a lot of time shuffling around big files over the network.

When done just run vmware-mount [driveletter:] /d to dismount it.

One small note: While this has worked for me every time I’ve used it, it may have quirks.

Related posts:

1. VMware Converter
2. VMware ESXi Goes Free — Hmmm…
3. VMware Fusion 2 Beta

The Web Platform Installer is smart enough to grab pre-requisite software so not only did it installed IIS, SQL Server Express and all the .NET stuff I asked for, but since I asked for WP it also installed PHP 5 and MySQL. Not only that, but it then prompted me for the usual stuff you deal with when installing WP and gave me a link to my completed site.

Bam. Just like that, I had a working WordPress site hosted on my Windows box. Not only that, but Permalinks and auto upgrade worked too! Pretty slick, really. A nice, native, alternative to a WampServer or XAMPP.

I fired up an XP machine, downloaded the Web Platform Installer, only checked “WordPress” and then started the installer. With XP, if IIS isn’t already on there you will get prompted for the install CD for that part – but everything else was downloaded and installed on the fly.

WordPress works fine under XP but there are no pretty Permalinks (just “almost pretty”) on this older version of IIS (version 5.1). Also, the auto upgrader prompts for FTP credentials instead of just upgrading. Probably a permissions issue but I didn’t chase it down as I don’t spend much time on XP anymore.
[note: if you need to sort this out try the Process Monitor tool as mentioned below]

Next I tried Vista. Same routine, only selected “WordPress” and ran Web Platform Installer. Wasn’t prompted to install any other media, unlike XP, and after a brief wait and some WP setup prompts it was done.

With Vista I got a more modern version of IIS and Pretty Permalinks worked right away – but with a wrinkle. I had to create and populate the web.config file manually as WP couldn’t do it automatically. Oh, and the auto upgrader took me the FTP route. Once again, I figured I had a permissions issue but this time I decided to chase it down.

Grabbed my old friend, Process Monitor, and did some monitoring to see what was up. It didn’t take long:

I explored that Access Denied line to see what the user was and found that it was IUSR. I went to IIS Manager, expanded down to my WordPress site and then right-clicked and chose “Edit Permissions…”. In the result dialog I chose the “Security” tab, clicked “Edit…” and then added the IUSR user with “Modify” level permissions.

Now upgrades happen automatically and Permalink changes require no manual intervention. Now, I can’t speak to the security of this approach – but then I’d never expose a Vista server live on the internet either!

Going full circle I next tried just the WordPress install on another Windows 7 machine. To make a long story short, it was just like the Vista story above. So, something I installed my first time around (with all the other .NET stuff) changes permissions around a bit. Or, perhaps it was the fact that on that first install I created the WP installation as a new IIS site, not as part of the Default. Something else to test on another day…

Related posts:

1. Web Platform Installer Updated
2. Testing New WordPress Versions Part 1: XAMPP
3. Microsoft Web Platform Installer