Ken Schaefer : Other

Microsoft MVP - 2009/10

Ken — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:30:00 GMT

It seems I must have snuck back in by the skin of my teeth:

Dear Ken Schaefer,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Internet Information Services technical communities during the past year.

The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

Toby Richards
General Manager
Community & Online Support

MVP Summit 2009

Ken — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:05:00 GMT

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend the 2009 Microsoft MVP summit in Seattle. The bulk of the summit consisted of two days of sessions with our product teams (I popped across to some Directory Services sessions as well), and a one day executive keynote session.

Some heavy hitters turned up for the executive keynote - Steve Ballmer was good value as always

Soma managed to rope in four of Microsoft's technical fellows - some of the heaviest technical hitters in the company for a Q&A around Microsoft's future developer direction. It was a pity that so much of the Q&A time for this session was wasted with questions and general complaining that wasn't relevant to any of the people on stage.

For two days I was out at Redmond - building 42 - where the IIS team is based:

Conference Room 2200 was where our sessions were held:

Tomorrow I'll be writing up a follow up post on topics covered.

On an unrelated note I've also become a bit addicted to FlightMemory - a site where you can record flights taken. Inputting the flights that I still have records for, I've flown 274 flights totalling around 588,000 kms in the last 6 or so years. The site generates nice maps as well:

Broken teams can't react quickly - what can we do?

Ken — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:11:00 GMT

Mitch talks about the problems encountered when SysAdmins struggle to provision the infrastructure necessary to support developers - and I entirely see his point-of-view.

In my opinion, it is rare for an organisation that has SysAdmins that are already skilled up on the issues required to deploy new technologies when the development teams are cranking out brand new products. Most SysAdmins are busy keeping the existing infrastructure working properly and trying to optimise it - not out learning new technologies that aren't being used yet. That's not necessarily a fault of the IT staff (though I think it would be much better if more IT staff showed initiative and self-drive) but sometimes the culture of the organisation.

on the other hand, most developers are woefully equipped in terms of understanding the implications of what they are doing. The last thing an enterprise needs is rogue DHCP servers being setup that network build/provisioning systems, or rogue IIS boxes that can be compromised (NIMDA/Code Red anyone), or Exchange servers that become open relays. I've seen first hand, developers struggle for weeks to get Exchange, MOSS, DCs etc all functioning well together. And a typical solution to solving a problem is to open access to everyone, not follow best practices. In general developers seem to care about getting the thing working to spec - not worry to much about the side effects!

So how do we address the issue? In two ways I think.

1. Multiple Environments
Firstly we can create various environments within the organisation. The less impact that the environment has on production, the more control can be handed to developers and end users. In the most extreme case, you can have a completely segmented development environment, where developers can install whatever the want, configure it exactly how they want, and reconfigure it without needing to tell anyone else.

As we move closer to larger impacts on the production network, we need to increase the level of change control measures and the involvement of other parts of the business (namely the sys admins, the network guys, the security team and so on). And when we finally come to deploy the application into production, we have the full set of change control procedures (and division of responsibility) that applies to everyone else (it's not just developers that have to jump through hoops to get Active Directory changed - all the rest of the IT staff have to as well!). This change control process means that all relevant stakeholders know what is happening in the production environment, and that the production environment moves from one known state, to another known state.

2. Better Project Management (which is a prerequisite for agile IT)
good project managers know when to engage other parts of the IT organisation. This allows SysAdmins to research the product and its optimal configuration, work how how to provision the product, and even get a delegation tool in place to allow developers to manage select parts of the infrastructure. The project plan should look something like:

Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, it seems to look like this:

And that type of poor project planning results in low agility IT.

Tech.Ed Australia (hopefully!) and Tech.Ed South East Asia (yes!)

Ken — Mon, 14 May 2007 11:31:00 GMT

Early Bird registration for Tech.Ed Australia closes 27th May (two weeks away). Tech.Ed Australia will be on the Gold Coast again this year (like 2005) from 7th-10th August. At this stage I'm not sure I can make it - hopefully I can get a speaking spot again this year, or maybe work will send me - I think my boss is reading this blog! :-)

I will be at Tech.Ed South East Asia, which will again be held at the KLCC in downtown Kuala Lumpur. Tech.Ed SEA will be held from 10th-13th September.

Tech.Ed is Microsoft's premier IT-Pro (and Developer) conference (alongside PDC, WinHEC etc). Whilst the US and European Tech.Ed events are huge (I was lucky enough to present at Tech.Ed in Boston last year), the other Tech.Ed events around the world are still well worth the cost of entry. Hopefully my attendance isn't going to scare you away - in fact I hope you'll come up and say "Hi" if you're reading this and will be attending.

Climate Change - get the facts (to the best of our knowledge...)

Ken — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 08:14:00 GMT

Whilst IT, and solving problems with IT (both business and technical) is undoubtably one of my passions, climate change has been another for quite some time. In my day-to-day life I run into quite a few people with strong opinions one way or the other on climate change. A lot of what people think is incorrect - either completely or by degree. Partially this is because people get their information from any number of ill-informed or unscientific sources - of which the interweb is rife.

Whether the climate is changing is ultimately a scientific question. It should be reseached using the scientific method. What we should do about it (adapt, mitigate or just hope fo the best) is a socio-politico-economic question that is best answered through the political system. I won't delve into the latter question, but if you want the facts on what is happening to the climate, then there is a single pre-eminant source: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC). Every few years, working groups at the IPCC produce summaries of all the scientific data to-date on what is happening with our climate. These working groups are constituted by hundreds of the world's most pre-eminent scientists in their respective fields. Their output is then rigorously examined by other organisations, including governments, before being approved and presented.

The last fully released report - the 3rd Assessment Report was delivered in 2001. Here is a picture of the approximately 3100 pages of information presented (and to help show I'm not some pink-leftie-greenie nutter, a copy of Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist sits next to the pile)

The IPCC's 4th Assessment Report is due to be delivered this year. The recent spate of articles in the media relating to climate change were brought about by the recent release of the Summary for Policy Makers document (equivalent to the thin one in the pile above) that provides a summary of what will be contained in the main reports.

If you think that climate change is a scientific question, then get your facts from the scientists. Read the IPCC reports - all it contains are summaries of all the published research on climate change. If you want to get your information from conspiracy theory websites and random blogs, by all means you are free to do so, but don't expect to be well informed on the situation.

Tech.Ed 2006 - the "secret handshake"?

Ken — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 12:18:00 GMT

Mikal thinks it's a bit creepy that you need a secret handshake to submit a session breakout paper for Tech.Ed 2006 in the US. For as long as I've known (but that's probably only been the last few years) open submission of papers has not been accepted for Tech.Ed US. You've had to have been invited to submit a session (though the invites have been widely distributed amongst MVPs, RDs, authors, other influentials, former speakers etc).

I suspect that the organisers for the US event are overwhelmed as it is dealing with the large number of submissions. I was lucky enough to present at Tech.Ed 2006 (Boston), and when you're up against the likes of Mark Russinovich (Sysinternals) and Mark Minasi (the author) let alone Microsoft's internal top-guns (everyone from Raymond Chen through to Steve Riley) the competition is pretty fierce. For what it's worth, there are plenty of non-Microsoft people presenting as it is...

A new techTalkBlogs editor?

Ken — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:00:00 GMT

Frank says we're getting a new editor. He mentions that the editor is:

an MVP
Based in Canberra
Well known Aussie Blogger
A speaker at the upcoming Ready Summit
Member of the blogger list on TechTalkBlogs

Let me add my own predictions - the editor will:

Work for Readify
Be a developer

because that's not common (1, 2, 3, 4) :-)

No offence to any of the previous editors - they are all, absolutely, great guys at the top of the tree. But on the other hand, variety is the spice of life - maybe some more variety might get some other ideas into the mix?

(Edit: deleted duplicate word, fixed spelling)

David Wang resumes blogging - a comment on corporate blogs?

Ken — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:03:00 GMT

David Wang (formerly of the IIS Team) resumes blogging at his new blog. His second post is revealing - it alludes to a tension between what a blogger wishes to write about, and what image their employer wishes to convey publicly. I mention this tension because Avanade (my employer) is about to launch its own corporate blogging site (similar to MSDN/TechNet blogs).

If your immediate management is supportive, your blog can be an independant voice direct to interested parties (customers, peers, clients etc). On the other hand, if management is not supportive, you blog may end up being no more than bland nothings and corporate approved marketing messages. Whilst that might keep the blog "on brand" it means that no one is going to read it - which defeats the purpose of having a corporate blog in the first place.

If the firm already has established bloggers (and I've noticed that Avanade has quite a few), then it will need to demonstrate that it's going to be able to manage the tension between the desire to project a corporate message, and the independant thoughts and interests of its bloggers. Otherwise I suspect those bloggers (and there's a number who have a lot more reach and influence than my little blog) will simply choose to remain outside the corporate fold.

I wonder if any of those responsible for circulating our proposed policies are reading this? :-)

What to blog about, when you can't talk about what you do?

Ken — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:45:00 GMT

Brad Smith, from MCS Canberra, seems to have started blogging. He asks a legitimate question: as a consultant (whether for MCS, or for Avanade like me) what do you blog about when all the interesting work you do is off-limits? I know that most of the time I can't even list the clients we have, let alone the work we are doing, the technologies we are using, or even our technical output. It's all bound up in confidentiality agreements, or the IP belongs to the customer outright. Other consulting firms may have some more latitude to talk about what they do, but in the enterprise space (say, projects >10,000 seats) it seems things are a lot more restrictive. Over the past two years, I've worked on two platform migration projects (amonst other things) for big enterprise customers, and we've just almost every infrastructure technology that Microsoft sells. But I can't talk about it unfortunately. So I have to find other things to boost my post count.

Brad: I would agree with Frank. Blog about what you are passionate about - maintaining a blog requires persistance (especially if work doesn't give you time to maintain it). And like all things you do day-in and day-out, that requires you have some dedication towards it.

If you want readers, then try to have content that you can't find elsewhere. Things you've had to work out yourself that have helped others generally make for good blog posts. If you don't care about readers, then by all means shovel whatever information you want to have available for your own benefit into your blog. Google and MSN Search will find it for you later on down the track. For what it's worth my personal opinion is just don't have a blog about blogging. They've got to be just about the most boring blogs in existance! YMMV

Microsoft MVP for another year!

Ken — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:37:00 GMT

Looks like I'm a Microsoft MVP for another year. Yay!

From: ...@mvpaward.com
Sent: Sunday, 1 October 2006 9:37 PM
To: Ken Schaefer
Subject: [MVP] Congratulations! You have received the Microsoft MVP Award

Dear Ken Schaefer,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide. As a recipient of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft. Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry's success everyday. To learn more about the MVP Program, visit www.microsoft.com/mvp.

Tech.Ed, TechNet, Channel9 ... and Melbourne

Ken — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 12:45:00 GMT

It's been a quiet month blog wise, but very busy otherwise.

On August 25-28th I was at Tech.Ed Australia 2006 presenting two sessions on IIS (Everything web administrator needs to know about MOM 2005 and IIS 7.0 An End to End Overview).

In mid-August, my IIS Insider article went up on Microsoft TechNet.

Then on September 5th to 8th I was in Kuala Lumpur at Tech.Ed South East Asia (SEA) again presenting IIS 7.0 An End to End Overview. A nice touch at this Tech.Ed were the personalised, and colourful speaker shirts. I'll have to get a picture later on.

Before flying into KL, I stopped by Singapore for the weekend to visit my ex-Avanade (now Microsoft Developer Evangelist) colleague Chewy Chong, who talked me into a short (albeit unscripted) screen cast on IIS 7.0. You can view it up on MSDN's Channel 9

And in between times I've been flying up and down between Sydney and Melbourne working on a few things for a large Avanade customer migrating from a legacy platform to Windows Server 2003/XP, Active Directory etc. I've been working on some MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) designs, and also some ISA Server 2006 designs.

And lastly, the MVP program gave me a very nice award. So thankyou Microsoft (Micheal, Ed, Tyson, ChrisA, Cally, Rose etc) for all the opportunities over the past month.

Shots of the glass thingie

Petronas Towers (KL) from my hotel room in KL

Too much travel

At least QANTAS has online checkin (OLCI) now

Global Enterprise Services and Technology Partner for 2006 - Accenture and Avanade

Ken — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 20:38:00 GMT

Something that came across my inbox a week back. At the World Wide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced their 2006 Partner winners. Accenture and Avanade took out the award for Global Enterprise Services and Technology Partner of the Year. You can see a list of all winners here. Good to see some Aussies in the list as well!

Thankyou Microsoft

Ken — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:38:00 GMT

I recently received a nice surprise from Microsoft. A number of MVPs (and others) were given a Microsoft ACE award for their contribution to the VS.NET 2005 Beta. Mine got delivered a few days ago. Some pictures below (with Channel 9 guy to show size). There are some clearer pictures of the cube available on other websites (1, 2). Thanks Microsoft!

Tech.Ed 2005 in Australia - blatant plug!

Ken — Mon, 23 May 2005 21:49:00 GMT

Registration for Tech.Ed Australia 2005 is open. Register before 30th June for $400 off the regular delegate's fee. For those who'll be attending and reading this (all two of you!), I'm currently scheduled to be presenting a session on IIS Troubleshooting and Debugging, including coverage of the upcoming IIS Debug Diagnostics tool which is currently in beta.

My colleague Chewy Chong will be presenting a session on Microsoft Identity Integration Server.

Clearing IE's credential cache (logging off a user)

Ken — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:05:00 GMT

When using HTTP based authentication (e.g. Basic, NTLM, Digest, Kerberos), Internet Explorer (IE) will continue sending the same credentials for each subsequent request to the server until one of two things happens: either (a) the user closes their browser or (b) the server refuses the credentials with a 401 status code. This behaviour is described (about 1/3 of the way down, under Notes) in KB 264921.

A common request I see is how a programmer force a user to reauthenticate after a certain period, particularly after a period of inactivity. This might address a situation where a user has accidently left their machine unlocked and their browser window open, or where an application based session has expired, and the programmer wants to simultaneously force the user to reauthenticate.

In the past I would have recommended one of three strategies:

Programmatically send a 401 HTTP status to the client (e.g. Response.Status = 401)
Redirect a user to http://fakeuser:wrongpassword@www.yoursite.com (this doesn't work with patched IE6 anymore). Since fakeuser/wrongpassword isn't a valid Windows account, the user will be prompted to enter valid credentials
Use the client-side ActiveX control described in KB 195192

With the exception of the first option (setting the Response.Status), the methods are mostly ugly hacks IMHO.

Now, we have a new way of clearing the IE authentication cache. Beginning with IE6 SP1 the following piece of javascript code will clear IE's credentials cache. Note, that this will clear the credentials cache for the entire iexplore.exe process, so users will be forced to re-authenticate to any site being accessed by that process (in case they have multiple windows open pointing to multiple websites):

// Clear current credentials
// Requires IE6 SP1 or later
document.execCommand(ClearAuthenticationCache, false)

More information can be found in MSDN: ClearAuthenticationCache and execCommand