HANDS ON tek – 10 years anniversary

January 10, 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of HANDS ON tek, a blog that I started back in 2012 to write about technology and became a central repository for solutions and articles about Microsoft 365.

To celebrate this milestone, I’m offering 10 copies of my books during the next 10 days, If you would like to get a copy of Hands-On Microsoft Lists or Hands-On Microsoft Teams continue to read the post and fill out the form.

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Share your internet access with Hyper-V virtual machines

Creating a Hyper-V virtual machine is a straightforward process and can be done in just a few steps, however once you get your new operating system installed and depending on your network configurations you may find your self without internet access from the guest operating system.

If you already have your Hyper-V virtual machine configured and are not able to share your wireless internet connection, this article will explain you how to do it in just a 6 simple steps.

Share your internet access with Hyper-V virtual machines

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How to move Windows 11 start menu to the left

One of the biggest visual changes introduced in Windows 11 is the position of the start menu, that was shifted from the left to the middle of the taskbar.

The position of the start menu had not change since it was originally introduced in Windows 95 and it might be hard for old school users to get used to the new location.

Windows 11 left start menu

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How to make file extensions visible in Windows 11

Every clean installation of Windows requires some level of customization to adjust the operating system to the user needs. One of the first things I usually do is make the file extensions visible and with Windows 11 it was no different.

With Windows 10 the option to make the extensions visible was available from the explorer window context but with the more minimalistic Windows 11 layout this setting is only available in the folder options like what happened in older versions of Windows.

Show Windows 11 file extensions

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How to install the first Windows 11 build

June 28th, 2021 will be in the history books as the day Microsoft released the first Windows 11 build for all Windows Insiders in the Dev channel.

If you would like to test the new version of Windows now you can even if your computer does not meet all the requirements originally announced by Microsoft as this build has been extended to more CPU families and does not include the TPM 2.0.

Get started with Windows 11

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How to get YouTube thumbnail images in just 1 click

The other day while working in a solution to create a video gallery I had the necessity to get the thumbnail image of YouTube Videos. I had a look to the API but that required the use of an API key and the manual configuration of the user, after a while I found out that the images are publicly available for everyone to use in 5 different resolutions.

In this article you will find the generic URLs for each resolution and a small tool where you can paste the URL for your video and get the thumbnail and the URL for each image.

Get YouTube thumbnail

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My experience building a Free Touch Deck

I’ve being thinking about acquiring a Stream Deck for quite some time but always thought it was a bit pricy, so when I saw the Free Touch Deck project promising a similar solution for just $20 I immediately jumped into it.

Even though the it requires the manual wiring of the hardware, Dustin Watts the creator of the project has it very well explained in the online tutorial making the entire assembly a breeze.

Free touch deck

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Control how URLs are pasted in Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge has recently introduced a new way of pasting URLs in in the browser, creating a link format showing the site title as text and keeping the URL as a clickable link and not visible to the user.

While this creates a great experience for some users, there are scenarios where you would want to past the URL as plain text or scenarios where you are pasting the url in a web application and instead of getting a link you just get the site title.

Paste URLs Microsoft Edge

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I am a Windows Insider MVP

What a fantastic way to start the year! Last Friday I received the news that I had been awarded Windows Insider MVP.

This is my first award in the Windows category, and I am very honored to be recognized as MVP twice by Microsoft as I continue to be an Office Development MVP.

Thanks to everyone that helped me to achieve this milestone.

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2020 – The year review

Another year has passed and here is my usual review about everything I have produced and shared with the community during the last 12 months.

2020 was a year that no one will ever forget, the world was caught by surprise by a pandemic and in a blink of an eye we were all working from home trying to avoid getting caught by COVID-19.

Despite all the contingencies I did what I’ve doing over the last years and produced content to help others using Microsoft technologies covering essentially SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and even Windows 10 topics.

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I've been working with Microsoft Technologies over the last ten years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.