Wednesday, February 17, 2010

OCS Voice Exam 71-404 period extended 2 weeks

Due to extreme winter weather conditions, Microsoft is extending Beta Exam 71-404, OCS 2007 R2 Voice Specialization for another two weeks.

Register for FREE with code OCR2J for BETA Exam 71-404  Prometric sites http://www.prometric.com/Microsoft/default.htm.

Candidates should plan for up to four hours to take the Beta exam and provide feedback on every question (versus the typical two hours to take Released version exams.)

It is highly recommended that candidates for Exam 74-404 (Beta 71-404) have experience with OCS 2007 R2 and have completed the Unified Communications Voice Ignite v 2.0 (R2) Workshop. A preparation guide for the exam is available at  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=74-404&locale=en-us

I’ve heard good feedback from people who have taken the Beta exam – so go ahead and try (Last available date is February 26th ;-)

Monday, February 15, 2010

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Information Overload and Social Impact of UC

Michael J. Killian has created a 3-series post on his view on Unified Communications, Information Overload, the Social Behavior Impacts and Social Networking in The Enterprise.

Interesting and well written perspectives for anyone interested in the non-technical side of working with Unified Communications!

Thursday, February 04, 2010

NET acquires SmartSIP from Evangelyze

Good news for users of NET Gateways for their OCS implementations (and future customers ;-) NET has acquired the smartSIP product from Evangelyze -

The SmartSIP product line includes both the SmartSIP and SmartVoIP products. SmartSIP enables UC presence and interoperability for SIP phones while providing integration for Microsoft's Office Communications Server with IP-PBXs and integration for ITSP voice providers. SmartVoIP, a 2008 Internet Telephony Product of the Year, is an extension of SmartSIP that provides branch office integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server.

Read the full press release here.

Invoking the PowerShell Debugger from Script

With PowerShell v2, a new and much improved command line debugger was introduced. The old one is still around though. Anyway, more information can be found in the help subject about_Debuggers.

The strange part is that Set-PsDebug –Step invokes the old debugger and there does not seem to be a way of invoking the new one. You can only invoke the new one by setting a breakpoint. Even though, breakpoints are a very useful feature which I use a lot, I would also like to do it from inside a script.

I have played around with some ways of doing this.

First, a self-contained function

Function Invoke-Debugger{
function debug{}
$bp=Set-PSBreakPoint -Command debug
debug
$bp | Remove-PSBreakpoint
}

function test{
write-host 1
Invoke-Debugger
write-host 2
}

test





It works great, but has the downside, that the current execution pointer is inside the Invoke-Debugger function -




1
Entering debug mode. Use h or ? for help.

Hit Command breakpoint on 'debug'

x.ps1:4 debug
7 $docs>>> l

1: Function Invoke-Debugger{
2: function debug{}
3: $bp=Set-PSBreakPoint -Command debug
4:* debug
5: $bp | Remove-PSBreakpoint
6: }
7:
8: function test{
9: write-host 1
10: Invoke-Debugger
11: write-host 2
12: }
13:
14: test





No matter how I try to tweak it, I end up in the same way.



Next, lets try using a two part approach (setting the breakpoint and doing some action to invoke it) -




$null=Set-PSBreakpoint -Variable InvokeDebugger

function test{
write-host 1
$InvokeDebugger=1
write-host 2
}

test



This is much better, now the execution pointer is right in the code -



1
Hit Variable breakpoint on '$InvokeDebugger' (Write access)

x.ps1:5 $InvokeDebugger=1
9 $docs>>> l

1: $null=Set-PSBreakpoint -Variable InvokeDebugger
2:
3: function test{
4: write-host 1
5:* $InvokeDebugger=1
6: write-host 2
7: }
8:
9: test
10:





Eventually, this led me to this piece of code. It is easier to write than the variable assignment and you can also define an easy-writeable alias for it -




function Invoke-Debugger{}
New-Alias id Invoke-Debugger
$null=Set-PSBreakPoint –Command Invoke-Debugger

function test{
write-host 1
id
write-host 2
}

test







The execution pointer is right at the call. If you include any statements in Invoke-Debugger, this will not work as well while ‘step’ will take execution into the function -















1
Hit Command breakpoint on 'Invoke-Debugger'

x.ps1:9 id
13 $docs>>> l

4: New-Alias id Invoke-Debugger
5: $null=Set-PSBreakPoint –Command Invoke-Debugger
6:
7: function test{
8: write-host 1
9:* id
10: write-host 2
11: }
12:
13: test
14:







This method also enables you to make conditional break using straight, normal code (compared to making the logic in the –action argument of Set-PSBreakPoint) -




filter test{
write-host "got $_"
if ($_ -eq 3) {id}
}

1..5 | test







and the output -




got 1
got 2
got 3
Hit Command breakpoint on 'Invoke-Debugger'

x.ps1:9 if ($_ -eq 3) {id}
14 $docs>>> l

4: New-Alias id Invoke-Debugger
5: $null=Set-PSBreakPoint –Command Invoke-Debugger
6:
7: filter test{
8: write-host "got $_"
9:* if ($_ -eq 3) {id}
10: }
11:
12: 1..5 | test
13:





You can include the Invoke-Debugger function and the Set-PSBreakPoint in your profile, so they are available in all our scripts.



Happy debugging..