16Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Powershell SMO Problem

PowerShell
We've been running the Enterprise Policy Management tools available from Codeplex for a few months now (Thanks to Buck Woody's (blog | twitter) session at the PASS Summit). They're honestly great. It's a fantastic way to use Policy Based Management on 2000 and 2005 servers. We did hit some issues with timeouts and looking at the script, it made a call to invoke-sqlcmd, but didn't pass the -querytimeout value. That means it default to 30 seconds and the import to database process was taking more than a minute for some of our queries. I did a little looking around and decided to just disable the timeout by passing a value of zero (0). But, I still got timeouts. Finally, after a bit of searching around, I found a closed (because…
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13Oct 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Operations Manager Feedback

Tools
If you're involved with maintaining Microsoft Operations Manager, you probably have a few things you'd like to tell the developers, such as, couldn't you get some sort of override manager/explorer built into the system? Well, they've built a new feedback mechanism through the updated Connect interface. Get on over there and make your voice heard. Yeah, I wasn't really tracking it either until I saw this post from the OM development team's blog.
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04May 2009 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Help Make Connect Work Better

Misc
I've posted several times about how useful I find Microsoft Connect. I've seen issues introduced there get resolved through hot fixes and service packs. I sincerely believe it's a very important tool in your arsenal to get the kind of service you need from Microsoft. Here's a post on Connect that's trying to make Connect itself easier to use. I'd strongly recommend you swing by and vote positively for this. And for those who are unclear, click on the stars to submit your vote.
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17Apr 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Pushing Connect

PASS
I have posted multiple times that I think Microsoft Connect is one of the best tools you can use to communicate with Microsoft. It works. Buck Woody is reinforcing my position from the Microsoft side of the fence. Look, Microsoft is not a small nimble company like Red Gate. And again, unlike Red Gate, you might not find yourself in a conversation with the CEO of Microsoft on the floor of a conference like the PASS Summit. And short of going to PASS or TechEd to track down some of the developers and project managers (many of whom attend these conferences), you need to have a mechanism to communicate with the company. You can try standing on your front door step and screaming (trust me, the neighbors just call the police)…
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27Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Connect Works

Uncategorized
Microsoft Connect works. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but it really does work. You will get the attention of MS developers and they will respond. It's not always fast, but it gets there. Of course, I was trying to create samples for the book, which came out almost two weeks ago, so this is a bit late for me personally... HA! But it really does work.
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04Jun 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Microsoft Connect and DBPro Enhancement

Visual Studio
I've mentioned it before and I think it's worth mentioning again, Microsoft Connect really works. I've seen bugs and enhancements listed there receive enough attention that they were in the next release or service pack of the product in question. That brings me to DBPro. We use DBPro for all our database development. It's a great tool. However, it's still a bit to geared toward the individual user and not the team, despite it's moniker (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals). One thing that really does bother me is how it stores some settings, such as Target Connection in the .user file within a project. This means that each individual sets the connection for the project each time they check it out after another user has had it. Another…
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