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VMware Fusion 2.0 was released yesterday and I was anxious to upgrade. Rather than feel the full pain myself, I let brewbie go first. He got it setup and installed and said all was good, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I was in a VM working on some new code that I had neither saved to disk nor commited to Subversion. I figured I’d live on the edge and just suspend the VM so I could upgrade Fusion. Once Fusion had exited, I downloaded the update and fired up the installer. Less than a minute later version 2.0 was installed and ready to go (no reboot required). I clicked the icon for my 2003 Server VM and it fired up just a few seconds, picking up right where I left off. Needless to say, I was very impressed.

The release notes said that previous VMs should update the VMware Tools to take advantage of the new features available in 2.0 so I went ahead and restarted Windows 2003 (1st time). Once it was back up, the new tools package installed and prompted for another reboot (2nd time). The reboots were amazingly quick and I was back up and running in no time.

Since it was all up and running, I started to configure the new features in Fusion 2.0. There is a new keyboard mapping feature so you can map certain key combinations to work within your VM. It works pretty slick, making it possible finally map a key for INSERT. There is also a new feature to make it so that clicking mailto links in the VM opens the Compose Mail window in Mac Mail. VERY COOL! I was less impressed with the browser linking since it changed my default browser to EverNote (WTF?). I changed it back to Safari and then disabled the feature.

After the short interruption, I felt that it was time to create a new VM for Windows Server 2008. I was following the guide on the Windows 2008 Workstation site to build a workstation-grade installation of Server 2008. Since VMware 2.0 supports things like Shader Model 2.0 with 3D graphics, I wanted to see it work. It took a couple of hours to get everything setup and configured, but the end result was a clean install of 2008 server configured for a workstation environment.

I then installed Steam, and downloaded a fresh copy of TeamFortress 2. I fired it up and it failed. It turns out that the tools by default only enable a certain level of hardware acceleration. I went to the advanced troubleshooting tab and cranked up the acceleration. I could now run everything, including Microsoft PhotoSynth and TeamFortress 2. The frame rate was pretty amazing considering it was running in a VM — seriously impressive actually. I experienced a lot of sound breakup when IO was being performed, so there is still some tweaking to do there I suppose.

Once play time was over, I installed Visual Studio 2008, TortoiseSVN, VisualSVN, Resharper, and updated. I pulled down the latest trunk of MassTransit and built it. The build took 16 seconds, compared to 21 seconds on my 2003 VM. However, when I ran the load test I was surprised to see that MSMQ performance was about half of what it was with 2003 Server. I ran the test a couple of times with the same result. I’m not sure what is at work here, but it seems like MSMQ4 has some different performance numbers than MSMQ3. I’ll do some additional tests and post more on this later. Maybe MSMQ was slowed down to make WCF look better (joking, of course).

In the end, the upgrade to 2.0 was painless - completely painless infact. I highly recommend it to take advantage of all the new features.

A friend helped me resurrect Microsoft’s entry into windowed applications:

Ah, it’s going to be a great 80’s week for sure!

This weekend I will be giving a presentation on MonoRail at the second annual Tulsa TechFest. The event is packed with technical information for anyone in IT including a variety of tracks on security, networking, software development and management.

Last year I talked about using Microsoft’s new ASP.NET AJAX (previously Atlas) tools for building browser-based applications, as well as how to leverage the tools with asynchronous web services. This year I’ve chosen to present a getting started level introduction to MonoRail. With the Microsoft announcement of an MVC framework (System.Web.Mvc), it’s no doubt that there will be a lot of interest in what MVC is and how it differs from regular WebForms development.

The excerpt for my talk reads:

MonoRail is a different way to build ASP.NET applications that enforces the separation of concerns. Built using the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, MonoRail uses controllers to handle application flow, models to represent data, and views for presentation. The end result is a web application that is maintainable and testable. This session demonstrates how to get started using MonoRail quickly and easily.

If you are anywhere near Tulsa, I highly recommend attending the free event this weekend. There will be a ton of technical content, free lunch, giveaways, and a whole lot of nerds. If you are shopping for a job, I can absolutely guarantee that there will be several consulting firms looking for developers to fill out their staff.

Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo, one of the CodeBetter bloggers, put up a pretty useful post on using the same virtual machine image between Windows/VMware Workstation and Mac/VMware Fusion. He makes some good points about the differences between the file systems and how to make sure your machines are portable between the two operating systems.

Some of the key points:

• Split the disk images into 2GB chunks. I’ve always done this to make sure I can copy them to my thumb drive to move them around.
• Keep the disk volumes on a FAT32 volume (such as a BootCamp partition) to avoid the files expanded on OSX beyond what can be supported.
• Keep an eye on VMX files to make sure the paths don’t point to the wrong locations

Check out the post if you want to know more.

I bought one of the new iMac keyboards for my Windows machine tonight (no, I don’t own a Mac). Since checking out the new iMac I’ve had a taste for the keyboard. The short stroke and quick action make it a breeze to type on, with reduced key travel easing the stroke on the fingers to type. I find that my strokes are adjusting to where I can type more quickly. In fact, the latency between my left pinky is still adjusting itself to the quicker speed of making an uppercase U, I, O, or P. I can see some real speed coming out of this board after some practice.

What’s a story like this without a picture?

You can see the Dell Latitude D620 in the background (work machine).

This week has been seriously fueled by technology. Things that have seriously elevated my excitement level this week include:

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
This thing is set to be seriously cool with the introduction of Silverlight. The ability to build applications that run in the sandbox and have the rich WPF UI is enticing, particularly for applications that are very UI intensive. With a solid web service back end and rich communication support in Silverlight, this could seriously rock. Using Expression Blend is a treat as well.

New MacBook Pro
The new release of the MacBook Pro, with Santa Rosa and LED backlighting is a sweet deal. While only the 15.4″ got the best upgrade (LED), the rest of the line got a minor refresh. Of course, no case redesign yet, but maybe that will come with Leopard, along with a 17-inch LED upgrade. The high resolution (1920×1200) 17″ display is a nice add-on for the biggest model.

Parallels 3.0 DirectX Support
While not anyone’s favorite desktop VM company, they have a solid support base in the Mac and continue to add new features. Their support for DirectX is a nice plus, but they say it doesn’t run Aero yet so Vista users have something to wait for for now. Depending up on the UI updates in Leopard, this could see another refresh soon.

VMWare Fusion Unity
Not to be left behind (well, at least in the desktop coherence area), VMware showed a video of Unity. This is some seriously cool tech, including Expose and Dock support. Very cool, VirtualSMP support for those dual-core systems, and basic DirectX 8.1 support (likely 9.0c or 10 by October’s Leopard release). I’m most excited about this due to the history of VMware and how well they work for us at work.

BlackBerry Curve
While not as big as I would have liked, the Curve is a nice upgrade. The camera and video support is slick, but the lack of WiFi (on Cingular) and GPS makes it sort of meh. However, being so close to the iPhone release, this consumer unit is going to get a lackluster reception at best.

iPhone
Okay, this thing is coming and the coolness factor is off the charts. Every day the hype gets higher and higher. And with the widespread availability of WiFi connections, everyone is going to want it. Cingular/AT&T is going to make a killing with this phone, and customers are going to buy them like crazy. I only hope I can resist the urge.

WWDC 07
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is always a fun place to get excited. With the expected release of a feature-complete build of Leopard, this should be a big week (or a dud, if your feature didn’t make the list). Expect to see a new UI for the Mac, some great file system improvements (ZFS), and likely a ton of slick overhauls that haven’t gotten any ink yet.

Put all these together and you have one hell of a month of June.

Last night I pulled down the latest RTM version of the Microsoft .NET 3.0 SDK, along with the integration tools to VS2005. At the TulsaDevelopers.NET user group meeting, BJ Pohl gave a demo on Workflow Foundation. When I first saw the technology, it was still pretty green. The latest stuff he put on the screen seemed to have a little more life to it. Since you can also define workflow via XML, it makes me wonder how you could allow end-users to define their own workflow and then dynamically handle that workflow at runtime.

Of course, the real issue with workflow is the expiration-style rules, such as an item sitting in a state for too long. Once I figure that out, I might have to look at how this could be deployed for a scalable application with multiple clients — each with their own idea of how workflow should (cough) work.

I’ve also been wanting to look at WCF and the dynamic bindings for internal communication over binary/TCP instead of dealing with the web service wrapper.

Looks like Microsoft has released PowerShell, an advanced scripting language for Windows machines.

Microsoft Windows PowerShell command line shell and scripting language helps IT Professionals achieve greater productivity. Using a new admin-focused scripting language, more than 130 standard command line tools, and consistent syntax and utilities, Windows PowerShell allows IT Professionals to more easily control system administration and accelerate automation. Windows PowerShell is easy to adopt, learn, and use, because it works with your existing IT infrastructure and existing script investments, and because it runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server “Longhorn”. Exchange Server 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager V2, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager leverage Windows PowerShell to improve efficiency and productivity.

Fancy marketing name aside, this was previewed at the PDC as “Monad” and is built on the .NET framework (2.0). Seems like it could be pretty cool based on the early demos I saw of the product.