You are trying to compile your solution or a single project and Visual Studio responds back with build failed message but without any errors shown in the error list and checking the output messages no real clue is given for the reason to the error.

Every system administrator uses remote desktop which is a great protocol by Microsoft. When you are having a lot of clients and virtual/physical servers you often face a problem with organizing and keeping track of all the connections. To add even more complexity you may need to go trough remote desktop gateway to connect to the endpoint. Using Microsoft Remote Desktop’s MMC (included in Windows Administration Kit) is often seen but the mmc snap-in lacks many functions and have it’s issues. I will have a look at two forgotten tools that should always be included in your system administrator toolkit and used daily.

Windows 7 Phone is here and many stores got their customers this weekend. But using Windows 7 Phone with corporate Exchange was a no-go for many users with a certificate error thrown back to the screen. Companies using their own PKI or self-signed certificates must install the root certificate in the phone before getting synchronization to work. Either publish it to your existing AIA distribution point or put the base64 on a webserver for public download. Remember Windows 7 Phone doesn’t support binary certificate format.

Google Visualization API becomes a breeze in MVC and classical ASP.NET applications with the shiny new class library which today were released in github under GPL v3. As a ASP.NET and MVC programmer you now can create interactive charts easily in your controllers and support asynchronous query calls from the API.

Ubuntu 10.10 was today 2010-10-10 released which is great new for us working with Hyper-V R2. We now have access to all the new drivers that Microsoft donates to the Linux community. The earlier drivers available in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS lacked features such as integrated shutdown, heartbeat detection, problematic host and guest synchronization and unstable network drivers (network traffic died unexpectedly). With Ubuntu 10.10 we now have the sames features as the Linux Integration Components 2.1 from Microsoft which only enables us to use Red Hat, Cent OS or SuSE Enterprise where Cent OS is unsupported from Microsoft.

Microsoft today released the Linux Integration Service version 2.1 for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2. This package will get you new and improved features. Some of the most appreciated will be integrated shutdown,support for up to 4 virtual processors and better timesync. Please don’t miss this package.

When Windows encounters a serious error occur that leads to blue screen of death a memory dump file is created which can help you to debug and resolve issues quicker. To read and interpret the dump file you need the WinDbg(Windows Debugger) tools from Windows SDK. I will show you how-to get started with this tool.

When building IT-infrastructure people often order their server racks and associated equipment from their server supplier, like Dell, HP, IBM etc. My assumption is that this is because they have an established relationship, pricing and guranteed compatiblity. But take a look at Rittal and maybe your next choice will be different.

Using Performance Counters as a system administrator is a very important tool. Understanding the dozens of performance counters that exists and their formula is not easy. Myself I were faced a problem when relogging performance counter data to SQL. You can use Data Counters in Performance Counters to store the data and then relog this to SQL (or store it directly to SQL).

ZingChart is a new piece of software used to build flash and HTML5 charts. So if you are a using Microsoft MVC for your web solutions you may need some helpers to make the charting a breeze. Here I create a simple way of controlling the ZingChart in the controllers.