RunAs Radio

Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow (www.stackoverflow.com) fame about being a developer who also maintains infrastructure. Jeff also talks about his new site, Server Fault (www.serverfault.com), which is a Question and Answer site for the IT Professional. Great discussions about adventures in RAID controllers and NIC drivers and how FireBug can diagnose your network problems.

Richard and Greg talk to Pedro Manfredi from Microsoft about High Performance Computing. HPC is the next generation of supercomputing - using off-the-shelf hardware rather than custom built supercomputers. Pedro digs into the new style of applications that are best served with HPC and how development is done. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/hpc for more information.

Richard and Greg talk to Robert Smith from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering about understanding storage performance. The discussion digs into SAN, iSCSI, direct-attached storage, also looking at tools like PerfMon and the Windows Performance Toolkit. Check out WPT at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc305187.aspx and the disk performance issues talked about in the show at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=929491.

Richard and Greg talk to Allan Hirt about failover clustering in SQL Server 2008. SQL Server got a major update in the clustering side of things for 2008, Allan talks about the changes, improvements and why you'd want to do this in the first place. Check out an alpha version of Allan's book at http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219661.

Richard and Greg talk to Rhonda Layfield about what's coming in the Microsoft deployment tools for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. They talk about Windows PE - the Windows Preinstallation environment that presents a minimum install environment (fits on a CD or USB key) which is part of Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Improvements in the new Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT 2010) that deploys operating systems and application software. Finally, they explore the Windows Deployment Service (WDS).

Richard and Greg talk to Kim Tripp about how developers and DBAs inter-relate around SQL Server. Kim tells a story of how she encountered developers who saw SQL Server as a "set it and forget it" technology. What should the relationship between developers, DBAs and database be? We tackle the topic!

Richard and Greg talk to Bill Graziano about performance tuning in SQL Server. Bill digs into using SQL Profiler to focus on where the problems lie. The discussion digs into the procedure cache and how you can optimize your queries for caching. He also talks about ClearTrace, a free tool he distributes to help understand trace data. Check it out at http://www.cleardata.biz.

Richard and Greg talk to Randy Williams about how Sharepoint fits into an organization. Is it a developer's product or an IT product? Who brings Sharepoint to the table? Why use it over other document management solutions or good old ASP.NET? Randy digs into the answers to these questions and more.

Richard and Greg talk to Alan Sugano of ADS Consulting about everything storage. The conversation ranges over the different types of RAID, direct attached storage, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel Over Ethernet, SANs... you name it!

Hey, its our 100th show! Just for fun, Richard decides to interview Greg, and ends up in a serious discussion about security. Who knew? Anyway, thanks for sticking with us for 100 shows! Here's to the next 100!