Ben Peterson

Today, Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 were officially released. I won’t talk about VS2015 yet, but in regards to .NET 4.6:
I noticed a lot of the news sites covering it either didn’t provide a download link for .NET 4.6, or provided the absolute wrong links. The only “real” download link I can find is at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads – From there scroll down a bit and in the left-hand column there’s a section for .NET

Seeing that it’s released got me excited, because hopefully that means a PowerShell 5 for Win7/8 release is coming soon. I was reading over the new features list again and the ones that I’m most excited about are:

• ConvertFrom-String – sounds like it takes regular text output and does a ghetto conversion into making that text more like an object. Takes some work to build a template for it, but could be handy in many situations, especially when getting output from Linux bash scripts or something
• Direct support for managing symbolic links in New-Item
• Using Copy-Item to copy files through a PowerShell remote session. Huge win for feature parity with linux ssh/scp
• Get-Clipboard and Set-Clipboard built in support
• Out-File, Add-Content, and Set-Content support -NoNewLine
• Get-ItemPropertyValue makes it a much more intuitive and straightforward process working with registry stuff via PowerShell
• Smaller delay between when you open a new PowerShell session then try to tab-complete. Waiting that few seconds is always so annoying!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-server-2003/

Good news! If you have Server 2003 systems sitting around, after today you’ll only have one more set of Windows Updates to apply. Then you’re free from scheduling those maintenance windows ever again! I suppose after you’ve done that, you could even remove 2003 from the list of products on your WSUS servers and free up a chunk of space.

Oh wait, you still want security updates and support when something goes terribly wrong on your OS? Just do what the US Navy did and pay 9 million dollars to Microsoft. I suspect there might be some hidden additional costs when you encounter scenarios like virtualization where Citrix or VMware stop supporting 2003 as a VM guest. But like the cool kids were saying back in the day, YOLO. I mean, that OS is only 14 years young.

So I didn’t even make it to Ignite, but with all the online videos and whatnot, I was able to virtually attend and gather a lot of notes. I focused on the SCCM / OS Deployment / Win10 stuff and this is a buttload of reading, but in case it’s helpful to someone…

At work, we’re currently stuck with an old version of SCCM (2007) and it just doesn’t cut the mustard any more for OS deployments. I’ve set up an interim MDT server because it’s easy and required no specific budget, but the hard part is getting it able to PXE boot without squashing the SCCM stuff already in place.

There’s a few guides out there like this one that are excellent, but a little out of date. They reference Syslinux 3, and we’re up to 6.x now. Below is all my notes that you need to get SCCM, MDT, and Linux all working with PXE boot options and all the latest version tools. No VLAN switching magic or DHCP option trickery required. You can mix and match components all you want. No MDT, no problem. No Linux deployment needs, no worries.