Mark Russinovich held a session today following on from his popular “case of the unexplained”. The session focussed on problems that are hard to diagnose with Windows.
Russinovich went through several examples of probems customers have sent direct to him and problems he has experienced himself at home or at work.
The main tools used were:
process explorer
process monitor
autoruns
strings
zoomit
windbg
Autoruns is a great way to check what is running at system start and far more powerful than msconfig. Russionvich demonstrated that you could disable processes that could not be found elsewhere in mscnfig or the registry.
Process explorer and monitor allow you to perform better analysis on specific processes and even the threads they are calling or have been called from. This allows you to work out exactly what is running on the system and what it depends on and how it started its life. Helpful for when you are troubleshooting issues.
Strings allows you to check information on DLLs that you might not be able to see otherwise to see if it is specific to a 3rd party manufacturer.
windbg allows you to analyse debug files and dumps from blue screens or application crashes. This ill let you work out if this is a known issue or specific to 3rd party manufacturers.
The session was the most popular yet and many of the seats in the room were taken 30 mins before the session was about to begin. Overall the session was a great insight into the workings of someone who has built many great applications and offered some memorable blog posts, namely the sony rootkit fiasco.
Bob Muglia kicked off todays Tech-Ed 2008 Professionals keynote focusing heavily on virtualization.
Muglia introduced several Microsoft workers to demonstrate Hyper-V beta, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization beta and Microsoft Online beta.
Microsoft purchased its subsidiary named Kidaro in March this year. Kidaro provides premier enterprise-class platform for deploying, managing and securing virtualization across corporate desktops and laptops. Kidaro eliminates key desktop computing challenges, presenting mobile and roaming users with the same managed, familiar corporate infrastructure, and allowing IT to apply the same authentication, connectivity, control, patching and security practices employed for internal users. Microsoft has rebranded the offerings as Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization. This will allow seamless virtual sessions on desktops and to offer applications fully virtualized.
Microsoft believes application virtualization is a good opportunity for them and customers and they are working hard with companies like Citrix to ensure their systems are inexpensive, offer great performance and are rock solid stable.
Muglia announced that Hyper-V performed as good as and better than the main competitor, VMWare ESX. Microsoft is committed to releasing Hyper-V in August and they want to try and beat that date.
Microsoft demonstrated their online beta which introduces exchange, sharepoint and live meeting hosting for businesses. Muglia believes most businesses could require hosted services in future but confirmed Microsoft will still be working on versions of Exchange that the enterprise can manage themselves.
The keynote ended with a quick demonstration of SQL Server 2008 and the announcement that this is now at the RC0 stage.
Bob Muglia is due to kick off Tech-Ed 2008 Pro in 1hr 30mins time. You can follow this with Neowin live and I will post an overview after the Keynote is finished.
Just a reminder you can follow me on Twitter for updates from Tech-Ed next week
We are planning to attend the IT Pro event from the 10th June - 13th June 2008.
Stay tuned for coverage
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