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I’ve been fairly silent recently, and the reason is I’m involved in rollouts of Win7, Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, SCCM 2007 R2, and Office 2007 with 2 distinct organizations (not to mention the movement of physical to hyper-v servers at the same time).  I’ll probably blog something about this later, but I wanted to give http://www.windows-noob.com some credit for getting me “unstuck” when the Microsoft documentation is lacking on SCCM 2007.  Bravo .

EDIT 9th January 2010 – the script has gone a fairly major revision due to changes in the Office 2010 product key storage location, as well as migrating this to a class-based script for speed.

Again, another side project – a computer info VBScript. I’ve modified it a bit to output information to screen (execute with cscript from a cmd prompt), but this could be modified to do a lot more. This is just a simple script template, and as usual I’m posting here for consumption in the event anyone finds this useful:

Had to work on one of these for a client, and decided that while there’s a whole host of documentation out there, there aren’t a lot of good working examples of how to use the proxy auto config functions properly in a complex file.

Since I spent the better part of 8 hours getting something that works properly in the environment (including site blocking to a custom server), I figured I’d share it with the users of this series of tubes in the hope it helps someone.

This has been posted about the web many times, but I wanted to post it here for folks who read this blog as well.  I love space imagery, so using the NASA picture of the day as a theme/wallpaper seemed interesting, and I know it had been done but had never really figured out how to do it (I didn’t really try hard, either, but that’s neither here nor there).  I managed to make a .theme file that works with the NASA Large Image Of The Day RSS feed, so I’ll post the contents here in the off chance anyone wants to use it.  Obviously it can be modified to use any RSS feed containing images, I’d suppose, by changing the DisplayName (for cosmetic reasons) and the RssFeed parameter (for obvious functional reasons).  I used the post on this from the Engineering Win7 blog as a guideline, so read that if you want more info.
Here’s the file, in it’s entirety:

OK, so I haven’t had a chance to finish up either of the two posts I’ve been working on, so to start I’m merging them into one larger MDT post.  Secondly, however, I’ve also been working with a friend of mine on creating a logon script for his environment that will replace a certain other tool they are using for logon management for their mix of 9x and 2000 workstations.  They’re slowly upgrading their back-end environment in preparation for a migration to Windows 7 on the clients, and they wanted to see if they could move from <product> to logon scripts and group policy (they are going to be using MDT and SCCM for deployment and lifecycle management).  They had to try and completely replace their current solution with group policy and a logon script (or scripts), and this has been accomplished.

I’ve been a little inactive, but life’s been a bit crazy as of late.  Things have calmed down, and I’m working on getting posts together to integrate things like Microsoft Security Essentials, Windows Live Essentials, and Visual Studio 2008 (including SP1 and updates, if possible) into a task sequence to use with your installer.

Check back in a week or two to see if I’ve made any progress or not .

Just a quick note to point out that the final release of MDT 2010 has released to web (RTW) and is available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3bd8561f-77ac-4400-a0c1-fe871c461a89

One of the more interesting things in MDT is the “Application bundle” application install option.  What an application bundle allows is the ability to install multiple applications, in order, as dependencies.  Think of it more as a logical container for applications that need to be installed, perhaps in a specific order, or as prerequisites for another application (like, for instance, installing Visual Studio 2008 prerequisites, Visual Studio itself, and then the latest service pack).

Adding the application(s)

To create an application bundle that will show up in the list of applications to install (or be available to configure via a task sequence), you first need to add all of the applications to MDT that will make up the bundle.  This is done similar to adding Office 2007 as I documented in my post on creating an MDT deployment point – you must create a New Application and add it’s source files to the deployment share.  I’ll document quickly how to add the Windows Live Essentials components to your deployment share and “bundle” them (instructions on getting the .msi packages you’ll need from the Windows Live Essentials downloadable package can be found here, if you do actually want to try this).

Having a USB key that will install multiple versions of Windows is great, but what if you want to add other Windows PE images to it, above and beyond the installers?  For example, what if you wanted to add a recovery environment, like the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT), or a BartPE environment, or any other Windows PE-based environments?  Well, it’s not that hard to do, and I’ll document how to do it with the Microsoft DaRT x86 and x64 recovery ISOs that it creates in this example.

Adding the DaRT files

First, you will need to copy the files from the MS DaRT WinPE ISO image to your “Content” folder that was created when you used MDT 2010 as per my previous post.  The content folder should look something like this:

And the contents of the MS DaRT ISO image, once extracted to the hard disk, will look something like this:

To go along with my previous post on deploying Windows via MDT 2010, here is a list of the “default” keys that Windows uses when you choose not to enter a product key during setup.  These keys of course will not activate, but you can enter them into your task sequences when you are prompted for a product key to use.  This will make your setup more unattended.

Here’s the list:

Windows Vista:

• Ultimate  -  VMCB9-FDRV6-6CDQM-RV23K-RP8F7
• Business  -  4D2XH-PRBMM-8Q22B-K8BM3-MRW4W
• Home Premium  -  X9HTF-MKJQQ-XK376-TJ7T4-76PKF
• Home Basic  -  RCG7P-TX42D-HM8FM-TCFCW-3V4VD
• Starter  -  X9PYV-YBQRV-9BXWV-TQDMK-QDWK4

Windows 7:

• Ultimate  -  D4F6K-QK3RD-TMVMJ-BBMRX-3MBMV
• Professional  -  HYF8J-CVRMY-CM74G-RPHKF-PW487
• Home Premium  -  RHPQ2-RMFJH-74XYM-BH4JX-XM76F
• Home Basic  -  YGFVB-QTFXQ-3H233-PTWTJ-YRYRV
• Starter  -  7Q28W-FT9PC-CMMYT-WHMY2-89M6G

Note that these were easy to acquire – simply install Windows Vista or Windows 7 without a product key, and then run a utility in the OS to display the current product key.  I used GetKey written by GunSmokingMan on the MSFN forums, but anything that’ll run in Vista or Windows 7 will work.