If you like me get errors when you click Well, here is a way around that, so you can get what you expect, and not have to suffer through a lack of download!

Simply right click on the “Download E-Book” icon, and just “Save Link As” or whatever you see in your browser of choice (FF or IE).

It will pull down as a pdf_loader.pl, so you’ll need to rename it, but it should work fine.

(Just completed the download myself, and it works! Hooray!)

So, Incase you’ve been missing this whole trend of Free MS Press Books – Here it is again!

And incase you’ve never seen this pretty logo of it I’ll kick off with it.

It’s literally this simple, go to a page, click a link, and BAM! (after signing in) books downloaded!

What’s on the Agenda for late Feb you may ask?

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
By Patrice Pelland  
Download here!

Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition
By Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, and Jerry Honeycutt with the Windows Vista Team
Download here!

Be careful about the Vista one, I’ve been having trouble downloading it, so you may experience that as well.

Also FYI: I download every one of these books not only to make sure the links work, but seriously.. free books? I OWN a number of these books in paper form, and I love digital!

This offer only valid Feb 19th through Feb 25th, so download today!

Sweet! Yea, you heard me, sweet!

The VMware ESX Host Utility Kit v5.0R1 was just released! Hooray!

And one of the coolest parts of it – mbrscan!

mbrscan – interrogates a disk file and reports on the primary partitions’ alignment

For those of you who haven’t used mbrscan, you can use it to check the alignment of your vm’s in order to determine if they’re properly aligned on disk.  I’ve done it on countless vm’s with great success.

The even greater success will come about when you use mrbalign which I hope to see get approved and added to the HUK sometime in the near future! (Though if you want/need access to mbralign, which actually –aligns- your vm’s for you – contact your local Sales/PS org :))

No, that wasn’t a pitch, that was merely a factual statement, it’s a sweet tool though! I used that to align my VM’s I run on VMware fusion :)

You ever watch a snowball fall down a hill?

As it collects more snow, it gets bigger it collects more snow and moves faster, and as it moves faster, it collects more snow and gets even bigger.

This is the twitter (and frankly every successful explosive growth resource in the past 2000 years) growth and scale-out model.

Now, imagine for a moment that a snowball had a limited amount of snow it was allowed to collect at a limited speed.   It would continue to grow at a linear rate, linear speed and quite frankly might even stop or MELT at the pace it was moving.   That’s not scale-out, that’s called a collapse and melt methodology.

This not only stifles innovation and integration, but it out right cripples an entire community working at growing at hockey-stick sized projections.   The kind of partner ecosystem which promotes growth and self-innovation is what has brought us ultra-successful business models (take Microsoft for example, heard of them?)

However, what it appears they’re taking in this ultra-conservative approach, with little action on raising the bar will go the route of eBay tactics where the community finds itself hands bound and tied, unable to help grow and scale the business, eventually leaving for other opportunities because this ship has sailed, and sadly sunk.

Check out the Social Too entry on this and perhaps Twitter might do something to stop itself from chopping its own head off.

Wow, two more totally rocking books! I even actually own the Server Core book!

Windows Server 2008 Core Administrator’s Pocket Consultant
By Mitch Tulloch with the Windows Server Core Team at Microsoft
ISBN: 9780735626263

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Step by Step
By Paul Turley, Joe Kasprzak, Scott Cameron, Satoshi Iizuka, and Pablo Guzman
ISBN: 9780735624054