Windows 10

 

I've had Windows 10 on my laptop for the last few weeks and thought I'd give a little report.

 

Hardware used for testing

Most Windows 10 testers seem to be installing it in a virtual machine. I have an older, but high end laptop that I was going to upgrade to an SSD drive to extend its life a bit. After putting the drive in, I thought… lets throw Windows 10 on here for a while, and then reformat and install Windows 7 again. Well, Windows 10 is still there.

Laptop:

• HP Pavilion DV7-2185dx quad core
• 8 GB RAM
• Crucial 500GB BX100 SSD

If you have been to one of my presentations in the past, this is the 17" HP gaming boat anchor that had all of the stickers on it. It has been a good reliable machine, but the RAM could not be expanded to the 32 GB that I needed to make SharePoint 2013 VMs happy.

 

Hardware Issues

Really, I had very few issues, especially for a beta! The install was fast and worked the first time, except for the two issues below. Overall the install was a good experience.

Touchpad: The first issue I ran into was just touching the laptop's touchpad locked up Windows 10. Completely froze it. For a few weeks I checked after each Windows Update and searched the web for updated drivers. Could not find a solution. All was OK if I remembered immediately after startup to press the little button to disable the touchpad. Finally I decided it was just better to completely disable the touchpad. So I did, And it still crashed. I then decided to just "kill" the touchpad and uninstalled the drivers. Magically, the touchpad started working perfectly!

SD card: The SD card slot also did not work correctly. The machine beeped when you inserted a card, but it could not read it. I tried a new card and every attempt to read or format it just timed out. Solution… "kill it"! I uninstalled the drivers and it immediately started working!

Uninstalling the Drivers is the Solution?

I ran the Troubleshooter and the other Windows tools. I ran Windows update. Nothing fixed my issues. But uninstalling drivers immediately fixed things! Maybe the Windows 10 installer misidentified the devices and installed incompatible drivers, and uninstalling those returned me to the generic drivers. I may now be missing some features like the "three finger" actions, but it all now works.

 

Before I Nitpick…

I really like what is being done behind the scenes with Windows 10. For that matter, I'd be a very happy camper if Windows 10 was available with a Windows 7 desktop. There's a lot of new interesting things going on under the hood. A lot has been published in blog articles and in the Ignite presentation videos, so I won't repeat it here.

 

The New Start menu

Better, much better than Windows 8, but not as good as Windows 7. I never liked the Windows 8 tiles and typically ended up doing what I saw every Microsoft rep doing in their demos… typing the name of the program or feature. I'm one of those people who use a computer for work. I don't spend all day playing with things. I want a user interface that will give me quick access to my tools. I don't want randomly sized, randomly placed, blinking tiles, even if I can, with a lot of time, move and resize them. While titles are useful on my Windows Phone, and maybe a keyboard-less tablet, my work machines all have keyboards and mice. I'm not saying to get rid of the tiles… I'm sure someone likes them… but give us keyboard and mouse users a useful option.

As it does not look like I can customize the Start menu to include a Windows 7 like selection and navigation I have:

• Removed all of the default tiles.
• Added my most often used programs (I can't bring myself to call everything an app!) to the Start menu and then reset the tile size to Small. These include, Word, Excel, etc.
• And for the rarely used programs I use the tedious, alphabetical only, "All apps" button to find my programs.
• And if I can't find it, I'll do a search.

(Yes, I know about the 3rd party replacement start menus, and may end up using one. But for now I'm trying to stay "out the box" as much as possible.)

 

The Search Box

I really want to remove the "search the web" feature from the "Search the web and Windows" box. As a trivial example, I did a search for Solitaire. It's not included in the default install and the search only gave me links to the "Store" and the web. If I don't have it, just tell me "not found".

 

Privacy

Windows 10 does not assume you want privacy. By default all of the apps have access to the camera and microphone. I turned those off along with most of the other privacy related stuff like the Cortana "Getting to know me" feature that monitors my typing, voice, calendar and contact info. At least the "Location" tracking feature is disabled for apps by default. I know that this is not what Microsoft wants me to do, as the Windows 10 Cortana search feature depends on knowing all of my personal stuff to do "smart" searches for me.

 

Edge/Spartan and IE 11

Edge/Spartan just seems to simplistic so far. I can't find options that I need like Open New Session (I do a lot of testing with multiple logins.). Funny thing is it seems the IE 11 shipped with the Windows 10 beta has issues. Can't really pin them down, but it just behaves differently than the IE 11 running on my Windows 7 machine. One issue I found is that it will not play Amazon Prime videos due to a "Silverlight error". Edge will work with Amazon videos, but much of the video player navigation does not work and it won't go full screen. (Firefox works perfectly!)

Edge is new, and not a final product, so I'll withhold judgment for now. I do like the idea of Microsoft starting over from scratch with a new browser.

 

 

Now moving back to my Windows 7 machine to get my work done!

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Cincinnati PowerShell User Group Meeting this week!

Info. and RSVP here: http://meetu.ps/2JkRsx


The PowerShell User Group is back! (But the future is up to you!)


     PS C:\> Get-Speaker | Plan-Meeting | ShowUp-AndLearn!

Sponsor:  SAPIEN Technologies
is supplying the food!

Ed Wilson "The Scripting Guy" from Microsoft will be here to help us (re)kickoff the PowerShell User Group. If you would like to see future meetings, place your vote by showing up for this meeting!
Wednesday, June 3rd 6:30 PM at MAX Technical Training. (Food and networking starts at 6:00!)



Speaker: Ed Wilson "The Scripting Guy"
Title: Garbage in, Garbage out: Data grooming with Windows PowerShell
Everyone has heard the old adage, "garbage in, garbage out" when talking about databases, or other online data storage / retrieval systems. But do you know that Windows PowerShell can help you with your problem? In this session, Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson talks about using Windows PowerShell to perform data grooming. He shows how cleaning up names, street addresses, cities, states, and even zip codes by using basic string manipulation techniques. By focusing directly on the data transformation itself, he extracts principles that can be used regards of the database, or other data storage system. After focusing on the individual components of the process, he puts the whole thing into a single script for transforming the sample data. This session is heavy with live demonstration.

Bio
Ed Wilson is the Microsoft Scripting Guy, and writes the daily Hey Scripting Guy blog. He is the co-founder of PowerShell Saturday, and the Charlotte PowerShell User Group. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, user groups and other places where groups of computer people may be found. He has written books about every version of Windows PowerShell, as well as other books related to automation and operating systems.  His most recent book is Windows PowerShell Best Practices.


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SharePoint 2013 Asset Library Secrets and Wierdness!

 

Asset Libraries are… weird. When you just upload videos using only the Upload button, and just view the videos, then all is good. But if you want the link to the video file, or you upload without the Upload button, or you want to search for all videos, then weirdness happens! Especially in Office 365 / SharePoint Online.

In this article:

• Finding the URL to an Asset library video.
• Two Three ways to upload a video, with TWO THREE different results!
• Searching Asset Libraries.

Finding the URL to an Asset library video

The Asset library does a pretty good job of hiding the full URL to a video file. A "video asset" item is actually a folder. The folder contains the video and supporting files like preview thumbnails.

So, if you upload a video named butterfly.wmv to http://yourSite/sites/demo/Assets the path to the video would be http://yourSite/sites/demo/Assets/butterfly/butterfly.wmv. If you changed the Name property while uploading the file to "Pretty bugs" the URL would then be http://yourSite/sites/demo/Assets/Pretty%20Bugs/butterfly.wmv.




There are two ways to discover the "real" URL, mouse over a download link or use SharePoint Designer.

Mouse over:

1. In SharePoint 2013, click the video to display the VideoPlayerPage.aspx page.
2. Mouse over the DOWNLOAD link and right-click and select Properties.
3. Copy the Address (URL), paste into Notepad and "un-escape" the SourceUrl parameter. (Not fun!)

 
SharePoint Designer:

1. Launch SharePoint Designer and open your site.
2. In the Navigation area click "All Files". (If you don't see All Files then your administrators may have partially locked down SPD.)
3. In the list of files and folders click the Assets library.
4. Find and click your video (you will see the "Name" as entered in the file's properties during upload, not the file name.)
5. Find the video file, right-click it and click Properties.
6. Copy the Location.

If you just want to display the video in the page using a Media Web Part:

1. Edit the page.
2. Click INSERT.
3. Click Web Part.
4. From the Media and Content category select Media Web Part and click Add.
5. Edit the web part (click the web part's dropdown).
6. From the MEDIA ribbon click Change Media.
7. Click From SharePoint and navigate to your assets library and pick a video.

 

Two Three ways to upload a video, with TWO THREE different results!

Uploading a file to a library is just uploading a file, right?
The Upload Button
Click the Upload button and the video will be uploaded as a full featured "Asset Library Video"!  A folder will be created with the "Name" entered by the user and the video will be stored in that folder with the original file name.


(I didn't have Silverlight loaded on the test workstation.)
 
The Upload Button (with a duplicate file!)
Here again, Office 365 is different than On Premise. With 365 if you upload the same file again, using the Upload button, you won't get a "Duplicate" error, it will just upload the file as an ordinary library file, but with a default Content Type of "Video Rendition". BUT… click OK and the file disappears! No error messages, just no file in the library! (Best guess… there was a server side error when trying to create the duplicate folder and no error was returned to the user.) With On Premise the upload just seems to freeze and never completes.
 

Drag and Drop (Office 365 / SharePoint Online only!)
Note: This is only a problem in Office 365!
Drag a video from Windows Explorer onto the Asset Library page and you will get a "plain old library file" with the Content Type set to "Image". (Image is the default Content Type.)

• If you edit the properties of the file you can only change the Content Type to "Image" or "Audio".
• SharePoint does not stop and ask for any metadata and simply uploads the file and assigns the "Image" Content Type.
• There is no folder created.
• Clicking this video only displays its properties. The link there only offers to download it, not display it in the browser.

You can actually upload the same video twice, once as an Asset Library Video and once as a "plain old library file". Remember that the Asset Library Video is really a folder.
 
 
 

Searching Asset Libraries

If you search an asset library by file extension you will not find any Asset Library Videos. You will only file the "plain old library file" videos that were uploaded using Office 365 drag and drop. The examples below are from the library's search box, but you get the same results from the site search box or the Enterprise Search Center.

   
  
Search by file extension will find other file types uploaded to the Asset library:
   
  
Best way to search? Cover all of the bases! Use the Videos vertical in the Enterprise Search Center or the following search (borrowed from the Local Videos result source).

searchKeywordsHere
AND
(
 ContentTypeId:0x0120D520A808* 
 OR ContentTypeId:0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012* 
 OR (
     SecondaryFileExtension=wmv OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=avi OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=mpg OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=asf OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=mp4 OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=ogg OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=ogv OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=webm OR 
     SecondaryFileExtension=mov
    )
)

The first content type for "Video" as found in the Asset libraries. The second content type is for the Office 365 Video Portal videos. The "*" is added to include any content types you create that inherit from these two.

Takeaways

• In an Asset library there are "videos" and "Asset Library Videos". Which you get depends on how you upload them.
• "Asset Library Videos" files are well hidden in a folder and their true URLs can only be discovered using SharePoint Designer, PowerShell, code or from the "DOWNLOAD" link in the videoplayerpage.aspx page.
• Searching for videos where the videos could be in a library, an Asset Library or an Office 365 Video Portal is best done using the "Videos" vertical in the Enterprise Search Center.

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