In Place Upgrade - Windows Server 2008 R2 to Server 2012 (Including Hyper-V)

I upgraded my developer workstation yesterday and it was unbelievably painless. I think this is especially noteworthy since my workstation is a fully functional desktop with everything from Office and Visual Studio to Chrome and mRemote. It also acts as a Hyper-V host for a number of machines I need to do my work.

Before starting I took several precautions, all of which were unnecessary:

• Back up My documents
• Back up Downloads
• Defragmented my hard drives

and for my Hyper-V setup:

• Compacted one of the drives that was too big
• Shut down all machines
• Deleted all snapshots
• Set machines to use static MAC address
• Exported VM's (in case I had to start from nothing)

I upgraded from a DVD. Server 2012 setup gives you one button - Install now. A little over an hour later, it was done. Everything still worked. One virtual machine needed to be set to allow MAC spoofing. I was back to work just like that!

How to Disable Themes in SharePoint 2010

Once you establish a particular look and feel and you don't want users with lots of permissions to mess it up, you need to lock down themes. If you don't want to do anything stupid like mess with the page in _layouts and you don't want to add screwy code to look for the themeweb.aspx you can do it a simple way ...

For the site scope where you want to disable it, run from the SharePoint Management Shell:

Disable-SPFeature -identity enhancedtheming -url http://hostname.net/sitename

Then delete all the themes from the gallery. Done.

I will be monitoring the fallout from this as we move to QA, but this seemed obvious!

Cleveland Makes it Big (Bing) Time

Cleveland was featured on Bing today:

Fremont Street Experience Las Vegas - Exceptional Cell Phone Video

Cleaning up some my folders I stumbled on this video I shot last November. It was done with my Samsung Captivate (Galaxy S) cell phone. The original is true 720P. I'm not sure if the YouTube is really that good. It gives you a good idea of what it's like to be there when the video is playing. If you are in Last Vegas, be sure to check it out.

Rant: What kind of CSS could do this?

I have thousands of SharePoint 2007 sub sites that use some old custom branding, but I don't blame the custom branding for the crazy behavior I have been observing.

I am doing one last version of the site template before we redo the whole thing for SharePoint 2010. In creating the site template, I noticed that the site home pages (webpart pages) started showing the webpart titles with a different color after opening the document library by clicking the title. This is sort of normal browser behavior for visited links, but it doesn't do it all the time.

When I first create a site from my previous template the links do not change after you open from them. I tried this on my North America, Asia and Europe farms and they all did the same thing. I really don't have time to debug the CSS (and I don't want to mess with it) - but I have time to rant. We don't want them to change after visiting.

Anyway, I need to edit the home page. So I add a new webpart to the page, edit it in a couple wonderful SharePointy ways (other screwiness and fun), and .... VOILA the other links all start changing. Definitely one of the funnier WFT SharePoint things I've seen lately.

Schoolboy Makes Disciple

I have to admit that I have been trying to manipulate my BeerAdvocate.com "Beer Karma" rating (my BeerAdvocate personna is Schoolboy). Their ratings are based on a secret formula. I think that part of that rating is based on having a subscription to the magazine. There are initiates ad disciples that have contributed very little content - they have to be subscribers. I do not subscribe, so I have to have lots of content.

Lately I  have been trying to post to forums and such whenever I contribute a review, just to try to get the points over 500. It happened today after 271 beer reviews, 23 forum posts, etc. Woo hoo.

Rock Hall Refresh

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum seems to be making good progress on their refresh of the major exhibit areas. Some stuff has reopened. It's still worth visiting during the upgrades. I've been going at least once or twice a month. It's cool in the winter because you almost have the place to yourself (but it's cool in the summer because there are so many people).

Come on down to the most rockin' museum!