Windows Server 2008

This video walks through the creation of a customized Windows PE boot image and the addition of that image to a Windows Deployment Server (WDS) as a boot image.

Join Hilton Giesenow as he investigates how to create a new column in a Windows SharePoint Services list, then builds on this by creating a Site Column that can be reused across multiple lists while being maintained centrally. The video also examines creating a column based on data in an existing list in the site.

Mark Wilson discusses remote management as well as some tweaks that are available with freeware software that helps in administration at the command line console.

Join Hilton Giesenow as he explores how to configure a Windows SharePoint Services site collection to make use of ASP.Net Forms-Based authentication. The video makes use of the existing SQL Server-based membership storage to maintain the user details, so this video demonstrates how to configure this aspect of the process as well. This topic makes the required configuration changes manually. To see how these steps can be accomplished using the new ASP.Net integrated management features within IIS 7, see the additional video in this series.

Chris Shaw posted a new SQL Quiz where he asks: "What are the largest challenges that you have faced in your career and how did you overcome those?"

Denny Cherry (@mrdenny on twitter)tagged me so here is my story:

The biggest problem I had was when a developer I worked with went on vacation, it was agreed upon by us and the client that once that developer came back from vacation we would make her changes 'live'. Needless to say a week after she left the cliend needed this code now because the tax code changed (or something like that) I did not really know what she worked on specifically, nor did I know if whatever the latest thing was on development should be pushed out to production. We had some code on the QA box but that was not the greatest and latest either. The biggest problem was that I didn't really know what procs had changed between dev/qa and production. I tried to do this manually but after 4 hours of so got frustated because I was scared I would mess up something on the production box.

This is where third party tools come in :-) I fired up SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare (for the lookup tables mostly) saw what needed to be changed on production, scripted out everything and I was in business. Yes I dropped tables on a production box (one table really) and messed up data but that I could fix fairly easy with a point in time restore and I knew what needed to be done. The problem is when you are faced with the unknown, what you do then will decide if you sink deeper into the hole you are already in or if you come out of that hole saving the company/CEO/data.....

 

So now it is my turn to tag some victims. first person I am taging is George Mastros, an amazing SQL developer and a good friend. Next up is Alexander Kuznetsov because he was giving me a hard time with the interview questions post. Another person I am tagging is Aaron Bertrand (@aaronbertrand on twitter) because I learned a lot of him from the newsgroups when I was lurking. Finally I am tagging Andy Leonard because he is on twitter (okay so I had to come up with a reason, @andyleonard)