GivingSomethingBack Blog

Seattle – If you have a stupid idea, stick to it! 1

Seattle – If you have a stupid idea, stick to it!

Just came back from a short trip to Seattle and have to say it’s a really nice city. Nice skyline, not to large, interesting architecture, a lot of green areas inside and around. Felt a bit like a mixture of San Francisco and New Orleans with a lot of musicians...

ELMAH – a great way of Troubleshooting Web Applications 0

ELMAH – a great way of Troubleshooting Web Applications

Recently I found an incredible useful solution that will be able to help you troubleshooting errors and especially exceptions of web applications like the MDT Web FrontEnd (Sadly not for pure web services). One typical way of troubleshooting them is to write all important information into a log file as...

Add logging to your applications. NLog for beginners. 3

Add logging to your applications. NLog for beginners.

One of the most important aspects of your applications and scripts (beside their actual purpose)  is to log information about the currently running actions. On daily usage it might be useful to just verify if everything is working OK, or to have some kind of reporting based on this (logparser...

2010 Scripting Games 0

2010 Scripting Games

OK, even if they have started already it’s not to late to still join this years Scripting Games. If you are like me and not yet that into PowerShell and would like to start digging more into the topic, that’s a good starting point. You have several events all covering...

Coalesce noncontinuous and/or unjoined lists into a single sequential variable list in ConfigMgr OSD Deployments 0

Coalesce noncontinuous and/or unjoined lists into a single sequential variable list in ConfigMgr OSD Deployments

Wow, great title. What does it mean? Well, yesterday I was watching a couple of the recorded sessions of last weeks MMS. One of them was held by Michael Niehaus about dynamic Deployments and he mentioned a problem you might experience mainly in ConfigMgr OSD using collection variables and presented...

PrettyGoodFrontEndClone 0

PrettyGoodFrontEndClone

I’ve always been a big fan of the PrettyGoodFrontEnd written by Johan Arwidmark. Originally written as a FrontEnd for ZTI deployments on SMS with BDD 2007 it has recently been updated for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 Deployments with MDT 2010 integration. Similar to the Custom Boot Wizard I’ve mentioned already a...

Finding computer in Active Directory based on the netbootGuid 2

Finding computer in Active Directory based on the netbootGuid

A couple weeks ago I got a question from a norwegian fellow. They prestage all computers in Active Directory based on their UUID and he wanted to be able to query AD to get the computer name for their Deployments. The UUID of a computer can be stored in the...