Heading to TechEd Australia 2012

I’m looking forward to heading off to Microsoft’s TechEd 2012 conference on the Gold Coast in a couple of weeks. This year I’ll be joined by colleagues Ben and Imran, who will both be first-time attendees.

It promises to be a particularly good year for getting up to speed on new products, with Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 and Server 2012 hot off the press, and Windows Phone 8 just around the corner.

I’m again working for part of the conference as a Technical Learning Guide assisting in the hands-on labs. I’ve also been selected to lead an instructor-led lab on “Designing Windows 8 HTML apps in Blend” (Session ‘DEV ILL100’), and an exam cram session on 70-599 “Pro: Designing and Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications”.

It will also be great to have Narelle along, who be enjoying a few days holiday while I’m busy learning, instructing and cramming.

MatrixGroup is hiring

Are you a ~good~ great .NET software developer who’d like to work for a company providing solutions to the commodity handling industry (eg. grain and mineral ores)?

You might want to apply for this position with MatrixGroup, and have the pleasure of working with a bunch of enthusiastic, smart people… and yes I work there too 😀

Windows 8 Mail and Exchange using a self-signed certificate

The following steps allowed me to get the Windows 8 Mail app to talk to an Exchange server which uses a self-signed certificate:

1. Open up Internet Explorer in ‘Administrator’ mode
   1. Go to the Windows 8 desktop
   2. Right-click on the Internet Explorer icon
   3. Highlight ‘Internet Explorer’
   4. press Shift-Ctrl-Enter to launch IE in ‘Administrator’ (elevated permission) mode
2. Browse to the Exchange server’s Outlook Web Access page – eg. https://yourexchangeserver.com/owa (broken link)
3. Ignore any warning about certificates – click on ‘Continue to this website’
4. Click on the red certificate warning in the address bar
5. Click on ‘View certificates’
6. Click on ‘Install certificate’ button
7. The ‘Certificate Import Wizard’ appears
8. Leave ‘Store Location’ as current user
9. Select ‘Place all certificates in the following store’, and click on the ‘Browse’ button to select ‘Trusted Root Certification Authorities’
10. Complete wizard
11. Click on ‘Yes’ to install certificate
12. Close IE and reopen (in non-admin mode) to confirm when browsing to the OWA URL that you no longer are warned about an invalid certificate

You should now be able to use the ‘Add an account’ to add your Exchange account.