Technical Jargon

Today Microsoft released the March CTP for Visual Studio codename “Orcas”. Hilights of this version include rich LINQ support, the ADO.NET Entity Framework and several language enhancements such as lambdas, anonymous types and extension methods.

The CTP is available in two formats. A Virtual PC Image can be found here and a standalone installer can be found here.

I’ve been using Windows Vista on my work laptop since it was released to businesses in November and up until now I’ve had no problems with it. The other day, I turned on my laptop and immediately received the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. The problem seemed to be related to the virtual disk driver that comes with Virtual Clonedrive.

Virtual Clonedrive is a program that allows you to mount ISO images as virtual CD drives. I carry a 100gb 2.5″ USB2 hard drive with me that contains ISO images of all my CDs (Windows, Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server etc) rather than needing to carry around a CD case.

I booted from the Vista DVD and ran system restore which allowed me to boot the laptop again. Unfortunately, Virtual Clonedrive was left in a semi-installed state and was unusable. I backed up my important files and then restored last week’s backup (I clone my laptop weekly and store the backups on a 400gb external disk). Virtual Clonedrive is now running without any problems.

I’ve been using Virtual Clonedrive since I installed Vista and it had worked flawlessly up until this happened. Strangely, I hadn’t made any changes to the system that should have affected Virtual Clonedrive so I’m uncertain what caused these problems. Oh well, at least I’m back up and running again.

First post

My name is Jeremy and I work as a software developer for The Sixth Form College Farnborough which is a college in the UK.

I’ve blogged in the past using my own homegrown blogging engine (written in PHP) but I never got around to writing many posts so the blog got rather neglected. My aim is to make sure that doesn’t happen here!

At the moment, I’m not completely sure about what I’m going to write about but it’ll probably mostly be about technology related issues that I encounter in my day-to-day work.

So I thought I’d make my first post about virtualisation. Last week, Microsoft released their 2007 edition of Virtual PC, a program that allows you to run a ‘virtual’ computer inside a window. This comes in handy when testing software as it means I can play around with a program in a clean environment without having to install it on my main computer.

One thing I like about Virtual PC is its lightweight nature and small file size. Just compare the size of the installer file to the beta of VMWare Workstation 6. 30mb for Virtual PC vs 280 for VMWare Workstation 6. Unfortunately, the reason for this is the lack of features in Virtual PC, and the 2007 edition is no exception. Sure, some important features have been added (such as support for Hardware Virtualization and Windows Vista) but essentially its the same product as Virtual PC 2004. Does it really take 3 years to add Windows Vista support? :/

Well, at least its free.

VMWare Workstation is more complex than Virtual PC due to its large number of features such as snapshots, linked clones, support for a greater range of virtual hardware devices (including USB2 devices) and the ability to set up multiple virtual network adaptors. They’re also planning on adding 3d graphics support. Now, I don’t use most of these in my day-to-day use except one: snapshots.

The ability to create a snapshot of a virtual machine, install and test some programs and then rollback to the clean snapshot is extremely useful when testing various programs, and I wish virtual PC had this feature. Now, virtual PC does have something called “Differencing disks” which allows you to create a ‘base’ installation and then use this for the basis of other virtual machines but the process of setting this up is rather cumbersome.

Overall, I *want* to like Virtual PC. I like its lightweight and the fact that it is free, but its lack of a decent snapshot feature keeps me going back to VMWare. Oh well, maybe we’ll have snapshots in Virtual PC 2020.