Blog posts by Nicholas Dille

When Helge Klein and Ingmar Verheij publicly displayed their start menu, I found this to be a very intruiging idea. As I have switched to Windows 8 starting with the Consumer Preview in February 2012, I don’t have a start menu anymore. But still there are several applications that I use regularly.

But that brings me to a thought that has been nagging me for some months now. Why does it have to be about the application? If you are a consultant like myself your work is focused on documents of various types. I should be thnking more about document types instead of the apps used to author them. Unfortunately, this is not supported by current platforms. On Windows 8, I have taken some pains to make small steps away from a start menu and pinned applications.

Several months ago I moved my entire demo environment to the cloud. Before that I was struggeling with the limitations of my laptop. Instead of sacrificing mobility for performance, I decided that its worth the extra money to rent a hardware box in the cloud. But then I was facing new obstacles when demonstrating use cases. The virtual machines are isolated in a virtual LAN which is not accessible publicly. In the end, it became a question of using destination network address translation (DNAT) or a reverse proxy to seemlessly access the virtual LAN.

I am really proud to announce that I have been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) in 2012. It has been for the third time in a row

With the release of Windows Server 2012, I wanted to upgrade my test and demo environment as quickly as possible. As with many hosting offerings, I do not have physical access to my dedicated server but do get two hours of remote console access for free. Therefore, I needed a way to deploy Windows Server 2012. This article documents how I successfully installed Windows Server 2012 on the second hard disk from a running Windows Server 2008 R2.