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Recently I bought a new soundbar for my Samsung television. I connected it with TOSLINK/SPDIF (digital audio) to my Samsung television. I didn’t like using the second remote control of the soundbar, so I used the “Learn” functionality from Yamaha to ’learn’ the volume and power functions of my Samsung remote control. After a quick setup I found out that - of course - when you use the television remote to control the volume, both the television and soundbar will adjust to this. ...

2016 has been an amazing year for me. One of the biggest highlights was Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta. With a group of 5 Avanade people we went to the conference to find out where Microsoft was working on for the last couple of months. I’m still convinced that I gain most knowledge on conferences like Ignite, because people from Microsoft present the latest innovations. Also a lot of features are planned to go Generally Available (GA) during events like this. I want to thank Avanade for this fantastic opportunity. ...

Some error outputs are not always useful. Especially when they make no sense for the issue you have. Error message: New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name ‘YOURPARAMETER’ Solution: This error occurs because of at least the 2 following issues: You didn’t specify a parameter for ‘YOURPARAMETER’ in your JSON template. That’s what the error says. If you forget to specify a parameter with the New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment cmdlet, you’ll see a prompt to insert a value for that parameter. But if you add a paremeter like -Name “VM01” to the command while it’s not specified in the JSON template, you’ll see this error. The JSON code you provided isn’t valid. Always validate your JSON code. You can use http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/, paste your code and look for the red “X” buttons after a line number. Did you find another issue where this error occurs? Please let me know in the comments section. Cheers!

Today I met Jeffrey Snover and had a lot of conversations with new IT Pro’s. That’s what I like about Ignite: connecting with Microsoft Experts and other IT Pro’s! Tonight is the Attendee Celebration at the Olympic Park. Tomorrow is the last day at Ignite and the conference will end at 14:00. Below are the sessions I can recommend and followed today: Understand Credential Security by Paula Januszkiewicz If you can attend a session of Paula, always do it because she has interesting sessions about security. She will demo how cached credentials work and will show you how to get the users credentials with Classic Data Protection API. Paula will demo how to decrypt KeePass if you use Windows User Authentication with the Data Protection API. Paula will show you how to extract credentials from a Windows service. You need access to the registry for this hack. She will show you how you get access to the password in a SID-protected PFX certificate file and how to access Windows with smart card authentication turned on, without a smart card. ProTip from the session: know and limit your domain admins! Domain admins can also do tricks as other users from the domain. Conduct a successful pilot deployment of Microsoft Intune You’ll learn how to start a successful pilot and get tips from the field. Follow me on Twitter for live news from Ignite!

Yes, a new day at the Microsoft Ignite conference! All the sessions are spread across 3 buildings (A, B, C) and I must say that this keeps you fit during the conference. On Monday, my iPhone showed me the following stats for the day: [ ](/images/2016/09/ignite-health-stats.png) 18.8 kilometers is around 11.6 miles! Today I really enjoyed the session with Jeffrey Snover and Don Jones about PowerShell. I don’t know if it was recorded and will be available later, but I can highly recommend it. ...

Day 2 of the Microsoft Ignite conference at Atlanta started early for us at 9:00. We had breakfast at 8:00 and where travelling by metro which costs us probably 30 minutes. Below are the sessions I followed today and recommend: Explore Microsoft Azure Stack “State of the Union” - Foundation 1 This was a presentation with a high overview of Azure Stack. Didn’t learn a lot about the technology, but some announcements where quite interesting: Azure Stack will be General Available in Mid-CY17. From the template deployment blade in Azure Stack, you can now easily select a QuickStart template from the GitHub QuickStart Template repo. Azure RM Template Validator and Azure RM Policy for Azure Stack can be downloaded from the Azure GitHub repo. You can manage Azure Pack from Azure Stack with an extension. You can download images directly from Azure to Azure Stack. For example, you want the SQL Server image in Azure Stack. Now you can go to the “Marketplace” blade in Azure Stack and download the bits. Key Vault, Queue Storage and the VPN Gateway features are added to Azure Stack. Discover what’s new in device management New lockdown capabilities for kiosk PC’s. Create read-only devices. Only allow specific approved USB devices. Block Edge swipe gestures. Learn about Windows 10 Secure Kernel The presenter (Sami Laiho) takes you into a deep-dive about the secure kernel of Windows 10. Very interesting but difficult session. Master Windows 10 Deployments - Expert Level Interesting session with lots of deployment tips and tricks. Windows Containers Containers are slowly introduced to the public with Windows Server 2016. This is definitely something that I’ll work on in my home lab shortly. Docker Images can be found at hub.docker.com. E.g. use the Microsoft/IIS docker image to create container with IIS. The presentation slides are shared with docs.com. Between all the sessions I took some time to work with my home lab in Azure and get some hands-on experience with all the new features. You can sit outside in the sun in comfortable seats if you want. I also took some time to visit all the stands in the expo. ...

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Buckhead, Atlanta thinking about all the Ignite sessions of today. It’s around 23:00 and we will visit Ignite early tomorrow, so I’ll keep it short. The day started at the C-building with a nice breakfast. The keynote was presented in the Philips Arena which is the arena of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. We went to the keynote quite early in the morning but still it was hard to find a good seat. ...

[ ](/images/2016/07/monitor-u3415w-hero1.jpg)This week I received my new monitor, the Dell UltraSharp U3415W Curved as a replacement for my Dell UltraSharp U2312HM Triple Screen setup. My workplace is going to be part of my living room this year, so I don’t want a triple screen setup there. After I placed the screen on my desk, I had a “WOW” moment. Absolutely beautiful screen and design of the Dell screen. Don’t expect a full review here, but just some things you should know before you buy this monitor. ...

Today I was working on an Azure project where the deployment of Azure resources needed to be automated. Problem You’ll see the following error message: ERROR: New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment : 7:27:39 AM - Resource Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/extensions 'test01/dscExtension' failed with message '{ "status": "Failed", "error": { "code": "ResourceDeploymentFailure", "message": "The resource operation completed with terminal provisioning state 'Failed'.", "details": [ { "code": "VMExtensionProvisioningError", `“message”: “VM has reported a failure when processing extension ‘dscExtension’. Error message: "The DSC``Extension failed to execute: Cannot process argument transformation on parameter ‘ConfigurationFunction’. ...

Microsoft is pushing everything to an “As a Service” model. I think that’s great because of - for example - staying in control of licenses and costs. Microsoft recently announced the “Windows 10 as a Service” and “Surface as a Service” services. The Surface Pro 4 is a fantastic device, but in my opinion lacks a couple of essential features to classify it as an Enterprise Device. I worked with large organizations and the first 2 check boxes on the acceptance list are: ...