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In order to become familiar with Windows Server 2012 and ensure application compatibility I decided to install Windows Server 2012 within a Hyper V machine. Virtual Machines are wonderful. The ability to create, snapshot, and restore “machines” without having to having all this hardware is wonderful.

I downloaded the Windows Server 2012 ISO from MSDN and attached it to DVD Drive media of a newly created virtual machine. I booted the machine and started down the road of a Windows Server installation.

The process started ok, however once I started the installation I received a driver error:

"A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB, or Hard disk driver. If you have a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive with the driver on it, please insert it now."

I reviewed all of the settings, hardware configurations and even verified that Windows Server 2012 runs within Hyper V. Everything checked out and I started the install again and received the same error. Needless to say it was a bit frustrating. The physical server is only 5 months old and I have installed several other test servers, from ISO files, running in Hyper V without an issue. I was pretty comfortable with the hardware configurations and even verified the ISO file was valid.

After several failed attempts to load the server from the ISO file I decided to burn the ISO to a DVD. I then loaded the DVD into the server and attached the physical DVD drive media to the virtual machine. This time the installation process started and finished without an issue.

It seems that the installation was not able to process/cache the full tree of files and using a physical disk did the trick.

While working on a report based on the results of a complex stored procedure I  encountered what I considered to be a strange behavior.  I noticed that when the stored procedure was executed directly the results were returned in seconds and they were returned in several minutes when executed from the report.

After further looking into the execution I realized that the parameters in the report were “prefetched” and analyzed where they were used in the procedure. which took some time.  I made a few small changes to the procedure and had favorable results.  I declared local variables, assigned them the values that were passed to the procedure and used the local variables within the procedure for filtering the data.  The report results were returned in the same interval as executing the stored procedure directly.

If you have used the default installation of Microsoft Excel 2010 you might have noticed that the macros commands do not appear to be readily accessible.  To access Macro options from the Ribbon you must customize the ribbon to display the Developer tab.

From the menu choose: File Options Customize Ribbon and place a check adjacent to the Developer option.