Free Microsoft Ebook

Microsoft is celebrating its 25th anniversary by providing some free MS Press e-books



Windows Server® 2008 TCP/IP Protocols and Services
by Joseph Davies
ISBN: 9780735624474



Programming Microsoft Robotics Studio
By Sara Morgan
ISBN: 9780735624320

Woes of IE 8 beta un-Installation

Finally I planned(got some guts) to evaluate IE 8 beta in my local virtual machines. After evaluating I wanted to rollback for IE 7 for SharePoint requirements. Rollback happened like a charm with out any hitches.

But after a few hours I got a crazy error message box, asking me to Abort, Retry & Ignore.



I checked my event viewer, there I found the following error under UserEnv category.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Userenv
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1041
Date: 10/14/2008
Time: 9:58:30 AM
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: JD1E4K
Description:
Windows cannot query DllName registry entry for {CF7639F3-ABA2-41DB-97F2-81E2C5DBFC5D} and it will not be loaded.
This is most likely caused by a faulty registration.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

After digging a lot, no resolution was found. Finally I took a backup of Registry and did a quick search using the GUID in the error message. It seems to be in the following location.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GPExtensions/

Delete the key and quit the Registry. Yeah done finally resolved the issue.

DISCLAIMER (As usual): Editing the registry may cause unpredictable problems in the machine, So take a BACKUP before proceeding.

How to compact Virtual hard drives?

When we develop in our virtualized dev environment, the virtual hard disk will expand dynamically in size. The problem is they don't compact automatically when we clean-up the VHD's. steps to reduce the VHD in size

1. Remove all unwanted files in temp locations or use CCleaner to remove all unwanted files.
2. Uninstall all programs which are unused in the dev environment.
3. Defrag the disk by using the system defragmenter.
4. select Capture ISO Image from CD menu and browse to the Virtual PC additions
directory
5. Location is %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions by default.
6. Mount Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso. The precompactor will start automatically.
7. Once it's done , shut down the Virtual Hard disk.
8. Select the VPC from the Virtual PC console. Click on the settings button and select the Harddisk1 from the left pane.
9. Click over the "Virtual Disk Wizard" button and click next in the wizard.
10. select Edit existing disk, next choose the compact option - this can take a while to complete

For more info KB888760 How to prepare a Virtual Server 2005 virtual hard disk file to send to Microsoft Product Support Services