Remote Desktop Connection to Hyper-V Virtual Machine

Ok. This one seemed like it should be pretty simple. But I couldn’t find a description of it anywhere online. And I am not the only person who couldn’t figure this out. But I finally figured it out, and it was simple.

Here’s what I have and what I needed: My host machine is Windows 8. I am using Hyper-V (built into Windows 8 – if you are a developer and aren’t using Windows 8, you are missing the boat!) to run a virtual machine (doing some SharePoint development). I frequently need to pass big files back and forth between the host and the virtual. I could never figure out how to do it. I always ended up either emailing the files to myself (because the virtual can see out to the Internet) or storing them up on SkyDrive.

But the other day I had a new need that led me to find the solution. I wanted to use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to the virtual machine. In order to find Remote Desktop Connection in Windows 8, while on the start screen, type ‘mstms’. That will bring up the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC). To make the connection, I would type in the machine name of my virtual. But, after a couple of minutes, it would time out and say that the machine could not be found. I figured that this was a networking issue that I didn’t understand. Well, I found the fix.

On the virtual machine, click on configure remote desktop:

and allow connections to the machine. When you do this, you will be prompted to allow the firewall to be changed to permit these connections. Allow it.

Then I realized that by default the type of network is Public. Switch it to Home and enable Sharing. With all that done, you can now use RDC on the host machine to connect into the virtual machine simply by providing the machine name. 

I have an external hard drive connected directly to my router. Now, in the virtual machine, I can explore the network, find the router and connect to the external hard drive. I then created a mapped network drive to it. So I can freely and easily pass files back and forth between by host and virtual. All very easy to do. Just had to get pointed in the right direction.

Hope this helps others!

Kinect for Windows SDK 1.7 released

If you haven’t checked out programming Kinect for Windows yet, now is an absolute golden time to start checking it out. In the latest release of the SDK, they have included Kinect Fusion! (If you are not familiar with Kinect Fusion, read no more until you have checked out Kinect Fusion!)

And if that wasn’t enough, they now include a gesture recognition engine and have events for right/left hand open and close. These are pretty big features to get incorporated into the SDK. I certainly am excited.

To get the latest edition just go to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/ and check it out! Already Kinecting? Shoot me some of your ideas and questions!

Publishing from the Content Type Hub

So, you’ve got your Managed Metadata Service and Content Type Hub. You’ve created a Content Type that has Managed Metadata columns from the MMS and you’ve published them out. At some later point, you make an update to the Content Type, maybe adding a new column. You publish the changes out, go to another site collection that is consuming from the Content Type Hub and waa-laa… Nothing! Nothing? What gives?

In order to see the fruits of your labels, there are two timer jobs that have to run. You can either wait for them to execute in the proper order (which could take a full day) or you can manually kick off the timer jobs. We’ll do the later here.

Go into Central Administration, select Monitoring and then Check Job Status. That will give you  a screen like:

The first job we care about is the Content Type Hub. Select this timer job and click on “Run now”. Once it has successfully completed, the second timer job needed is Content Type Subscriber. Select it and then click on “Run now”. Once both have been successfully executed and in this order (and of course, make sure you re-published the Content Type before starting any of this!) then you should see your changes pushed to the site collection that is consuming.

Nice and simple once you know the tricks! 

Cannot consume from Managed Metadata Service

So here is the scenario I ran into. I created a Global Term set in my Managed Metadata Service in SharePoint 2010. When I went to create a site column that would consume that managed term, I got the following error:

“The required feature is not enabled for this Content Type.”

It turns out, there is another piece that was hidden to me, but that is simple to fix:

Open a Cmd Prompt and run the following:

STSADM -o activatefeature -id 73EF14B1-13A9-416B-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C -url http://sitecollection –force

 

Then it worked like a charm.

Future Possibilities

Here is one of my favorite videos of what the near future of IT may look like:

Microsoft Research

Check out this project built and demonstrated by the folks at Microsoft Research:

 

In 2011, Microsoft spend over $9 Billion in research! It is phenomenal to be part of a company that puts so much emphasis in forward thinking. To put that in perspective, Microsoft spends roughly 4 times as much on research and development as the US Department of Defense spends on research, development, testing and evaluation! Or, maybe more relevant to some, Microsoft spends more on Research and Development than Apple and Google combined!!

Another Fantastic Blog

I think I may have found my favorite blogger – check out this post on how to make meetings more productive. It’s funny how in life sometimes you need to stand a concept on its head (think counter-intuitive) to get the results that you really want.

Anyway, check out this blog at The Anti Meeting Culture.