Alpesh Nakar's Blog

Microsoft has launched DreamSpark for millions of students in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium.

What is DreamSpark?

DreamSpark is simple, it’s all about giving students Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools at no charge so you can chase your dreams and create the next big breakthrough in technology – or just get a head start on your career.

What do you get for being a student?

Other free tools

How do I get these?

If you are a student in one of the 11 countries, just select a product and follow the steps below.

• Sign In with your Windows Live ID. If you don’t have one, go get one here. Pretty basic stuff.
• Get verified as a student. The system is linked to schools and organizations around the world that can confirm student status. Simply choose your country and school, enter your info and hit submit.
• Download your products. Now remember these are professional tools. This means they are pretty big files so make sure you have the bandwidth and space to bring them to your machine. We support the latest versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox for your download.

What if my country is not listed yet?

As of now Australia is not on the list. So what do I do?

1. Wait.
2. Get ISIC (International Student Identity Card) at the cost of AU$ 18 from one of their offices. Enter ISIC number here to verify and you are on your way to downloads!

This is not a public release yet. It has been made available to all Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and TechNet subscribers. The final candidate is expected to be released in the first half of calendar 2008.

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Microsoft have released a white paper on how they have deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

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If you want to make that move to Vista, you need these tools to do it.

The tools include Windows Vista Hardware Assessment (WVHA) 2.0, the Windows Vista Business Value Assessment, and Microsoft LicenseWise.

Hardware Assessment
With the ability to scan up to 25,000 PCs per domain, WVHA 2.0 is an updated version of a network-wide assessment tool Microsoft introduced in February.

WVHA 2.0 lets you or Microsoft’s partners determine whether your hardware can support Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. With your cooperation, a partner can remotely and securely connect to your network, without installing agents, and collect relevant hardware information through Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

WVHA could return results within one hour and give you guidance on driver updates. WVHA 2.0 is available to IT pros, as well as partners, and you can download it here.

Vista’s ROI
Microsoft has developed the Business Value Assessment tool to help customers “realize an increased value of up to $130 per PC annually. Value-added resellers, systems integrators, and managed service providers can use the tool to calculate Vista’s potential ROI and build a business case for deploying it. This tool isn’t available to IT pros without going through a Microsoft partner.

Microsoft LicenseWise
The Microsoft Product Licensing Advisor (MPLA) became available in November 2005 to address midmarket IT pros’ complaints about the complexity of Microsoft’s licensing.

Microsoft has now released a companion product, Microsoft LicenseWise, for Microsoft partners. 

LicenseWise provides information across programs such as Open License, Open Value, Select License, and Enterprise Agreement and informs users about product prerequisites and programs such as Software Assurance.

LicenseWise is linked with the MPLA to strengthen collaboration between partners and their customers through a seamless, consistent and predictable interaction.

So you can use MPLA to compile a quote for licensing a particular product, then call a Microsoft partner and give the product-specific quote from MPLA. LicenseWise will automatically pull up a fully configured partner UI and let the partner customize the quote to add in partner-specific products and services.

MPLA available here

What command do you use for copying of files from the command line? COPY would be the most obvious answer for single-item copying of files.

For copying multiple directories you would use XCOPY command, since it preserves the attributes as well. What about preserving NTFS extended attributes such as access control lists and alternate data streams? Use Robocopy. It is available as part of Windows Resource Kit, designed to overcome unreliable network conditions or other possible interruptions of services e.g., for copying files to drives mapped across WAN links or via wireless networks.

Robocopy is now a a standard-issue item with Vista, meaning it’s all the easier to get hold of and work with.

Derk Benish, systems engineer in Microsoft’s MSN Search Group, has a simple GUI for Robocopy! Maybe because Robocopy is a command line utility and has not gained as much ground as it should have.

The GUI is divided into six tabs, each dealing with one aspect of the Robocopy command set:

• Path allows you to set the source and target paths for the copy operation, or use the standard Windows folder-picker to select them manually. The “Map Drive?” box lets you map to a folder on a remote server if needed.
• Copy Options lets you set all the needed switches for the copy operation. If you don’t know what each switch does, hover your mouse over them for an explanation.
• Drive Mapping allows you to provide a target server name, username, password and domain if you’re using the drive-mapping option in the Path tab.
• Filters defines any file-filtering operations (again, as described by the program’s command switches). Hover your mouse over any of the options for an explanation.
• Logging lets you enable any logging options for Robocopy.
• Monitoring enables real-time monitoring for the copy operation.

Save the configuration to a script that can be reused, so the GUI doesn’t create a dependency on the GUI in order to make Robocopy functional. Use this GUI to learn how Robocopy works and slowly move to using the command line.

Till now, what did you use to copy files/folders?

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