Wade Wegner

I find myself doing this over and over again, so I figured it would be worthwhile to post.  Below you’ll find a really useful way for installing a Windows O/S from a bootable USB device.  I am particularly dependent on USB drives, as I have a Lenovo X61 Tablet that doesn’t have a CD/DVD-ROM (unless I’m docked, but I’m hardly in the office).

A couple of notes:

• This assumes you’re running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008
• I’ve tested by installing the following O/S’s: Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008
• You must have a machine capable of booting from a USB drive

Without further ado, here are the steps:

1. Open an elevated command prompt.
2. You must make your USB drive bootable.  Type the following in the command prompt:

   diskpart
   list disk (FIND YOUR USB DISK)
   select disk 1 (OR WHATEVER YOUR DISK NUMBER IS)
   clean
   create partition primary
   select partition 1
   active
   format fs=NTFS
   assign
   exit
   

3. Mount your Windows Server ISO (or unpack it) and copy the contents of the CD/DVD onto your USB.  Make sure you get all files, including hidden ones.

You should now be able to use this USB drive to install a new O/S.  Good luck!

As I am new to Illinois, I recently started looking around to find out about some of the local user groups.  My friend and colleague, Dave Bost (developer evangelist and co-host of The Thirsty Developer), recently sent me the following list of user groups in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.  I’m not yet sure if this is an exhaustive list or if I’m missing some key groups.  Please let me know if I’m missing any.

Illinois

Chicago .NET Users Group – http://www.cnug.org
Chicago VSTS Users Group – http://vsts.sogeti-chicago.com
Bloomington (IL) – http://www.bloomingtondotnet.org
Rockford .NET Users Group – http://rockforddotnet.net

Indiana

Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (+ C# SIG, ASP.NET SIG, VSTS SIG) – http://www.indynda.org
Evansville .NET Users Group  – http://www.evansvillednug.com
Michiana .NET Users Group (South Bend) – http://www.madnug.org

Wisconsin

Wisconsin .NET Users Group (Milwaukee) – http://www.wi-ineta.org
Fox Valley .NET Users Group (Appleton) – http://fvnug.wi-ineta.org
Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group (Eau Claire) – http://cvnug.wi-ineta.org
Madison .NET Users Group – http://www.madisondotnet.org

I attended the Chicago .NET Users Group (CNUG) last night and had a great time.  I hope to see you all at the next meeting!

I know that Twitter is nothing new and that many of you are already using it, but until recently I had managed to resist.  However, upon joining Microsoft and getting to know my evangelist peers, I found Twitter to be a great way to both keep in touch and coordinate with my friends and coworkers.  Furthermore, having recently moved from Colorado to Illinois, I found that Twitter is also a great way to keep in touch with distant and remote friends.  It’s great to hear what’s going on with my friends, like Rich Finn and Ryan McCutchen; also, unlike instant messaging technologies, we don’t have to be online at the same time.

So, as you have probably guessed, I have started to Twitter; you can follow me at: http://twitter.com/wadewegner/.

There are tons of people twittering away all day long, and one of the challenges I’ve had is filtering out the the noise.  Consequently, the one bit of advice I will give to newcomers is to start slow and resist the temptation to start following hundreds of people all at once; I did this at first, and I found it overwhelming.

As a RESTful service using simple SMS, Twitter makes it easy to interact via many different clients.  One that I’ve started using on my Windows Mobile 6 device is TinyTwitter.  This tool allows me to read the messages of people I’m following and post updates when I’m away from my computer.

Neat stuff.  Try it out, and feel free to follow!