Have you ever wanted to share your desktop with another user somewhere on the Internet or in another office?  There are a few tools available to do this but I recently found Microsoft SharedView.  This is great free utility that works everytime. 

You can share your whole desktop or just a single window with as many users as you like.  You can grant control to any of those users and chat with them online.  Users connect via HTTP over port 80 and are authenticated with a Live login so it's pretty safe.

I've found this a life save several times recently, most recently today when I needed someone in our Wellington office to configure a VM on my local machine.  Access through the domain wasn't working for some reason - firewall issues or something like that - but SharedView just cut through the noise brilliantly.

Check it out!

Yesturday Microsoft announced the Visual Studio 2008 version of Visual Studio extensions for WSS (v 1.2). It is available for download now!  This took me by surprise as I thought it was scheduled for next month - but earlier is better!

Also, checkout the spunky new site for SharePoint developers:  http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com/.  This is a great central resource for getting started with SharePoint dev.  It contains a bunch of FREE learning material - 10 Virtual Hands On Labs to be precise - and links to other goodies.

FYI: A gang of kiwi's were heavily involved in creating some of this material, including myself and some other's at Intergen and of course Paul Andrew.

So here is how to loose a server off the domain without even touching it.

1. Grab any old machine (or VM in my case) that is in a WORKGROUP and give it a name the same as a machine on the domain.  Reboot.
2. Rename the machine but dont reboot.
3. Join the machine to a new workgroup but dont reboot.
4. Join the machine to the domain.
5. Bingo!  The real machine with the old name will be removed from the domain!  Cool eh?

In my case this was bad.  VERY bad as the VM in question had the same name as our TFS server.  After joining the newly named VM to the domain our devs started whining about TFS being down.  There was a brief OMG moment.  But then it got worse when we found that the local machine account password wouldn't work.  To cut a long story short, phycially disconnecting the server from the network allowed us to login with my domain account (using cached credentials) and from there we were able to rejoin the machine to the domain.

Phew!