Virtual Dogfooding

One of the cool things about using VPC to host my dev environment(s) is that I can easily dogfood and experiment. For example, I can run my VPC in “undo” mode so that when I shut down, I can choose to merge, keep or throw away all the changes I made to that VPC. This is a great safety net when dogfooding a bunch of different stuff. I’ve got a VPC with Whidbey and Indigo. Instead of creating a separate VPC for Yukon, I can install it into the Whidbey/Indigo VPC and see how well they play together. It does mean I have a long merge cycle when I shut down (assuming I don’t want to rollback the changes) and the VPC is runs slightly slower. But it’s a heck of a lot easier than finding out after the fact that build of this doesn’t work with this build of that.

Even for my “production” dev environments (I have two – client and server), I can make a back up of the entire system as easily as copying the multi-GB virtual hard drive file to a safe location. Of course, it helps that I have 1GB of RAM and nearly 85GB of HD space in my laptop.

The only downside is that actually dogfooding Virtual PC is a bit of a pain. We have prebuilt XP and WS03 images available internally. But since I’m on a later build of VPC, the additions aren’t always compatible with my build. Our website lists “late in calendar year 2004″ for the availability of Virtual PC 2004. So I guess there’s a light at the end of that dogfood tunnel.

Give SOAP a Chance (Reprise)

I see my illustrious colleague Pat Helland is tearing it up on the gong show @ HPTS. He showed me some stuff he was working on for Band on the Runtime. It’s going to be a fun PDC.

Reading Korby

Finally got around to subscribing to Korby Parnell’s blog. I met Korby at Scoble’s last blogger’s dinner. He is a wealth of information on VSS. He’s also into Wikis, something I’m investigating as part of my new role. I like the idea one of his readers had on a .NET doc wiki. However, why would it need to be located at a MS-independent site? Wouldn’t it be more powerful if MSFT set up and hosted such a site as part of the “official” documentation?

Korby also blogged on my entry regarding MC++ vs. C#. He did leave out the part that read: “If you’re wrapping an existing codebase with a C or C++ API…”. Looking back, I think I should have written “If you’re wrapping an existing codebase that exposes a C or C++ API…”. I’m not sure it’s a law of nature, but I’ve found it’s easier to add the managed parts to C++ than translate the whole API into C#.

Syndicating Look and Feel

Neither SharpReader nor RSS Bandit renders my business card nicely. They both strip out or otherwise deactivate the CSS tags that are used in rendering the card. So go my web site if you want to see the card “for real”.

Raises an interesting question. How much support should syndication feeds like RSS have for look and feel?

Reading, Writing and Business Cards

Well, the darkness continues. I’ve been doing a ton of reading, both on and off line. I saw a post on Many 2 Many that lead me to Design for Community. My copy is on the way. But mostly, I’m busy getting as much stuff done before PDC as I can. In addition to the Architecture Symposium @ PDC, my group is doing two other big events the following week, so things are a little crazy around here.

One of the things that’s been taking up my time is getting my new machine configured. I’m doing a good job keeping my host WinXP install clean, while installing all my development tools into VPCs. One of the benefits of working on campus is that I now have access to Indigo and Longhorn. I’ve got one VPC with Longhorn already and I’m setting up an Indigo/Whidbey VPC. I also want to kick the tires on Yukon, but I think I’m going to build a separate VPC for that.

Finally, I got my new business cards. Our e-procurement tool includes a preview of what your business card will look like. My cards from my previous role first had the .NET logo, then I changed to the VS.NET logo. I decided to just go w/ the vanilla logo cards this time.

Since I’m doing community, I figured I should post my contact info where the community can get it. Our IT dept. just moved my mailbox to a bigger server plus I’m running Outlook 2003‘s Junk Mail Filter, so I should be able to handle any increase in email traffic, both legitimate and spam. (Though I did add spaces in my email address above try and avoid automatic harvesting.) If you have specific ideas around architecture, community and Microsoft, please send them along. I’ve already gotten a good suggestion from Jimmy Nilsson and Enrico Sabbadin.