Microsoft

Microsoft two different logins for their services:

• Microsoft Account (former Live ID)
• work or school account (Azure AD)

Both are located in different directories. The Microsoft account is located in another user database at Microsoft, as a work or school account. Latter are located in a Azure AD, which is associated with a customer. Both account types are identified using the email address. Microsoft accounts are used for service like Skype, OneDrive, but also for the Microsoft Certified Professional portal. Work or school accounts are mainly used for Office 365 and Azure.

In the last months I came across several customers that were in the process to evaluate, or to deploy Office 365. It usually started with a Office 365 trial, that some of the IT guys started to play around with. Weeks or months later, during the proof-of-concept or during the final deployment, the customer had to choose a Office 365 tenant name. That is the part before .onmicrosoft.com.

Update

On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting:

No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.

I have wrote about the installation of PowerShell Core in Linux Mint 18 yesterday. Today, I want to show you, how to install Visual Studio Code on Linux Mint 18. The installation is really easy:

1. Download the deb package
2. Install the deb package
3. Run Visual Studio Code

You can download the latest packages for Windows, Linux (deb and rpm, if you want even a tar ball), and Mac on the Visual Studio Code download page. Download the deb file. To install the package, open a Terminal window and run dpkg .

Beside my Lenovo X250, which is my primary working machine, I’m using a HP ProBook 6450b. This was my primary working machine from 2010 until 2013. With a 128 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM and the Intel i5 M 450 CPU, it is still a pretty usable machine. I used it mainly during projects, when I needed a second laptop (or the PC Express card with the serial port…). It was running Windows 10, until I decided to try Linux MInt. I used Linux as my primary desktop OS more than a decade ago. It was quite productive, but especially with laptops, there were many things that does not worked out of the box.

Last month, I wrote about a very annoying issue, that I discovered during a Windows 10 VDI deployment: Roaming of the AppData\Local folder breaks the Start Menu of Windows 10 Enterprise (Roaming of AppData\Local breaks Windows 10 Start Menu). During research, I stumbled over dozens of threads about this issue.

Today, after hours and hours of testing, troubleshooting and reading, I might have found a solution.

The environment

Currently I don’t know if this is a workaround, a weird hack, or no solution at all. Maybe it was luck that none of my 2074203423 logins at different linked-clones resulted in a broken start menu. The customer is running:

Today, this tweet caught my attention.

Windows Patching As You Know It Is Dead https://t.co/X3y6rkspUY via @xenappblog

— Trond Eirik Haavarstein (@xenappblog) June 28, 2017

Patch management is currently a hot topic, primarily because of the latest ransomware attacks.

After appearance of WannaCry, one of my older blog posts got unfamiliar attention: WSUS on Windows 2012 (R2) and KB3159706 – WSUS console fails to connect. Why? My guess: Many admins started updating their Windows servers after appearance of WannaCry. Nearly a year after Microsoft has published KB3159706, their WSUS servers ran into this issue.

When I talk to customers and colleagues about cloud offerings, most of them are still concerned about the cloud, and especially about the security of public cloud offerings. One of the most mentioned concerns is based on the belief, that each and every cloud-based VM is publicly reachable over the internet. This can be so, but it does not have to. It relies on your design. Maybe that is only a problem in germany. German privacy policies are the reason for the two german Azure datacenters. They are run by Deutsche Telekom, not by Microsoft.

A RemoteApp is an application, that is running on a Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH), and only the display output is sent to the client. Because the application is running on a RDSH, you can easily deliver applications to end users. Another benefit is, that data is not leaving the datacenter. Software and data are kept inside the datacenter. RemoteApps can be used and deployed in various ways:

• Users can start RemoteApps through the Remote Desktop Web Access
• Users can start RemoteApps using a special RDP file
• Users can simply start a link on the desktop or from the start menu (RemoteApps and Desktop connections deployed by an MSI or a GPO)
• or they can click on a file that is associated with a RemoteApp

Even in times of VDI (LOL…), RemoteApps can be quite handy. You can deploy virtual desktops without any installed applications. Application can then delivered using RemoteAPps. This can be handy, if you migrate from RDSH/ Citrix published desktops to  VMware Horizon View. Or if you are already using RDSH, and you want to try VMware Horizon View.

One of my personal predictions for 2017 is, that Microsoft Azure will gain more market share. Especially here in Germany. Because of this, I have started to refresh my knowledge about Azure. A nice side effect is that I can also improve my PowerShell skills.

Currently, the script creates a couple of VMs and resource groups. Nothing more, nothing less. The next features I want to add are:

• add additional disks to the DCs (for SYSVOL and NTDS)
• promote both two servers to domain controllers
• change the DNS settings for the Azure vNetwork
• deploy a Windows 10 client VM

I created a new repository on GitHub and shared a first v0.1 as public Gist. Please note, that this is REALLY a v0.1.