Vista Squad

Following on from Gavin’s blog, and looking towards 2009. I believe that Vista Squad is uniquely placed within the user group community due to the fact that we combine both Developers and IT Pros within one group.

We have certainly had a great year and had some great meetings covering a great many topics from Windows Vista to Robotics and also to the future developments of Visual Studio so may I pass on my thanks to everyone that has participated.

With 2009 in mind I believe Vista Squad is well placed to become one of the most popular community groups out there, with this in mind I also believe with the coming of the next incarnation of Windows we will have to also evolve and rebrand to embrace all new technologies.

We have a great group and we have already covered topics well beyond the scope of Windows Vista so I think Vista Squad has matured and deservers to be able to encompass a greater expanse.

What do you think?

If you’re into the latest information on Windows 7 I would highly recommended that you check out the Win HEC website www.microsoft.com/whdc/WinHEC

The on demand videos are great, packed full of interesting tech on the latest development’s and Microsoft aims in providing a great new O/S.

This is the 3^rd event that Microsoft have run in their “After Hours” vein, for which I attended both of the previous sessions and would highly recommended going to.

There very entertaining and informative, giving a lighter side to the technologies that we get bombarded with 9-5, and showing great ways to enjoy being Geeky away from the work place.

Viral Tarpara's  http://blogs.technet.com/Tarpara/

Will be leading this event demonstrating some of the following:-

Sending photos to family, sharing a holiday video, and creating DVD’s.

Windows Live, Xbox, and Media Centre demos.

Sign up here:-

https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=1032388314

As I have only just brought myself an XBOX 360 Elite, I will be very interested in how this will be configured to my Media Centre and possible Home Server, so I’ll be there.

Well an interesting evening not quite to plan, just like to say a  quick thank you to both Ray and Ravi for stepping up and hosting an impromptu Q & A session for this evenings DEV Talk.

And at last thanks to Viral Tarpara http://blogs.technet.com/Tarpara , we are all now painfully aware that we fall into the category of Geek. An interesting talk in which Viral described the modern day Geek and how he or she have evolved through the ages into the perceived leaders in the field of IT and all things gadgetry.   

Another great turn out so thanks to everyone that turned up. (& Microsoft for hosting) I hope you all enjoyed both these evenings  presentations.

What's new in Silverlight Beta 2
(Mike Ormond, Microsoft)

Intro to Live Mesh
(Paolo Barone, Microsoft)
Live Mesh intro

Thanks guys, both these presentations were full of useful info and some great questions and interaction from the group as well.

I particularly like the idea of Live Mesh and the ability of being able to sync all my important documents between my devices so no matter were I am or what I am doing I will have access to them.

 It would be even better in the future if they were able to include a remote boot feature so I don’t have to leave my main pc on all the time. (the green theme running here) but I’m sure there will be many new great features included as this product is fully launched and people start to integrate their life styles into the cloud more.

Looks like our next meeting is also lining up to be just as interesting so stay tuned to  Vistasquad and details will be posted shortly.   

I’ve recently been playing with the Windows PE boot environment and found a really good collection of information and free guides from Microsoft.  So I thought I would give some of the ideas a go, I have followed the Malware Removal Starter Kit

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/disasterrecovery/malware/default.mspx

This is a great guide and well planned out, helping you build a customized pre boot environment designed to tackle worms, viruses and many forms of malicious spyware. Easily completed in about an hour including downloading the free tools required via Google etc.

The guide helps you become familiar with the Windows PE environment and Imagex controls utilising some of the following free tools to help clean and manage infected computers without having to boot into infected Operating System.

Avast! Virus Cleaner

McAfee AVERT Stinger

Microsoft Software Removal Tool

Spybot-Search & Destroy

Drive Manager

System Spec

This then is built into a bootable CD-Rom and can be used on any pc with any O/S as long as it has a minimum of 512MB of RAM installed.

As I’m sure you guys and girls are all pretty busy, so I created a custom image especially for Vistasquad that boots with our logo. The ISO is downloadable from here.

 http://www.vistasquad.co.uk/assets/pebootdisk/WinPE_Tools.iso

Just put it in your cd-rom (remember to set Bios to boot from cd-rom) and once launched use the cmd prompt to navigate to the X:\tools\dir and away you go. This has both USB and mouse support so you should be able to transfer and save data in the worst of cases onto an external hard drive.

Have fun.

What a great evening two fantastic presentations, and what a fantastic turn out from over 100 sign ups to well over fifty people turning up with a few more IT Pros than normal, (come on guys and girls we really need a good showing way to many developers!)

Our biggest and best event so far so thanks from us all and thanks again for your support, hopefully you all had a good evening.

The 2 presentations were as follows

Mike Taulty from Microsoft on LINQ to XML

And Matt McSpirit on What’s New In Windows Server 2008

Both presentations were highly interesting and some great content, I especially found the info on Hyper-V and Server Core of particular interest, Thanks Matt

Thanks again goes to Microsoft for Hosting and supplying the much needed Pizza and also thanks to both the presenters and everyone for turning up. This was most by far the best meeting to date and long may it continue. Thanks should also go to Ray and Ravi for their continued hard work and organisational skill for which VistaSquad would not be what it is. Thanks Guys.

Photos to be uploaded later to day.