RunAs Radio

During a break on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard chats with Steven Murawski about web farm management in the Microsoft space. Steve helps to organize the thinking around an array of free Microsoft products including Web Platform Installer 2.0, Web Deploy v2.0, the Web Farm Framework and the Windows Management Framework 3.0.

While on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Road Trip Richard chatted with Mark Minasi about some of the new features in Server 2012 - and ended up focusing on the new storage services. Mark explains that with Server 2012, Microsoft has taken software-based storage to a whole new level. No need for expensive SANs (at least at the low end) or even fancy RAID controllers, Server 2012 Storage Services will do it all for you!

While on the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard sat down with Robert Bogue to talk about ten of the most common mistakes made with Sharepoint. The conversation covers the gambit of Sharepoint infrastructure challenges including SQL Server, disk storage as a whole, networking, monitoring and more!

Richard chats with Rob Gillen about the myths and realities around WiFi security. Rob talks about how the release of passwords in the wild has weakened WPA2-PSK. You need to use an original SSID and long passwords to have a chance to keep your WiFi secure. The conversation also digs into the challenges of open WiFi access as places like coffee shops. Rob also talks about how WiFi Protected Setup has exploits like reaver-wps that can break into a home WiFi network in a matter of hours. He also debunks non-secure security features like hidden SSIDs and MAC address filtering. Finally, Rob rolls out the big guns to talk about WiFi Pineapple, a tool capable of exploiting the preferred wireless network features of smartphones to get them to connect to a man-in-the-middle attack system. Frightening and enlightening!

Richard chats with Mario Hewardt about what IT folks need to know about debugging Windows. Yes, that's right - IT folks should be able to debug Windows. Not the same way that programmers do, but rather focused on how Windows actually works so that they can solve program interaction problems. Mario talks through a scenario he ran into involving an occasionally crashing program and how he used the Debugging Tools for Windows tool kit from the Windows SDK and SysInternals Process Monitor to solve the problem.

Richard chats with former PFE Joe Sack about his work helping queries go faster in SQL Server. Joe talks about his techniques for figuring out what to fix as well as how to fix it, starting with studying wait statistics in dynamic management views - SQL Server knows what it's waiting for! From there the conversation digs into the ways that SQL Server fools itself to perform badly, including cardinality estimate issues and other problems with statistics. Joe also looks at the potential of column store indexes in SQL 2012 - still new cool stuff to come in SQL Server!

Mark Russinovich returns to the show to talk about his new book Trojan Horse and discuss the world of cyberwarfare and malware in general. After scaring the heck out of us with the potential exploitation of computing out there today, the conversation turns to solutions. Mark points out how the white listing approach of iOS and the Apple App Store has been so effective in keeping malware off iOS devices that it is being emulated everywhere, including Microsoft. Richard also pokes at Mark's role around Azure and the cloud - is that where the next generation of exploits will come?

Richard chats with Glenn Berry about SQL Server hardware. Microsoft changed the licensing of SQL Server in 2012 to per-core rather than per-socket, suddenly making SQL Server much more expensive if you've gone to lots of cores. Glenn talks about how to assess your workload to know if you need as many cores as you currently have, why you shouldn't upgrade in place and use old hardware for SQL Server 2012 and the differences between Intel and AMD CPUs in this new world. Lots of geeky hardware speak, but if you do it right, you can make your SQL hardware almost free! Glenn mentions a couple of important web sites related to SQL performance in relation to hardware, including the TPC-E stats and Geekbench to understand how your hardware performs.

Richard talks to Michael Steineke about the new clustering features of Windows 2012. Michael starts with the latest version of Network Load Balancing for clustering and goes from there - looking at how all the major products Microsoft makes, like SQL Server and Exchange, work with clustering. The conversation focuses in on the importance of the new file share clustering capabilities, combined with SMB3 to create awesome high performance shared storage with commodity equipment. Server 2012 changes everything!

Richard chats with Microsoft's Stephen Rose about Windows 8 in the enterprise. Does it make sense? Stephen talks about the specific features available in the enterprise edition of Windows 8. It's not just about tablets!