I use a VirtualPC environment for all my software development work, usually using a unique environment for every customer. This eats up the drive space in my laptop pretty darn quick. So after reading about running a VirtualPC image from a USB Flash Drive I decided to give it a try. I purchased a 32GB memory stick and plugged it in.

After a little experimenting I can now confirm it runs the VirtualPC nice and fast. But writing data to the disk and reading at the same time is horrendously slow. So you need to do two things:

a) Make sure the .vmc file is NOT located on the flash drive
b) Enable UndoDisks

These two steps will create a temporary file on your harddisk, in the folder where the .vmc is located. This means that while using the drive you only read from the flash drive, but never write.

When you shut down the VPC you can choose to commit the changes to the flash drive, this may take a little while, so only do it when you have time to wait for it to complete.
I usually choose 'Save State' which allows me to restart the VPC where I left off.

It seems there is some controversy (1) (2) around whether Live Mesh is good or bad. Here is my 2 cents: I've installed Live Mesh Tech Preview about a month ago and am pretty impressed by it so far. It seems to me Microsoft may have found the tool that will unify the desktop (where they make their money) with the cloud (revenue?). Currently there are two features that I use and like:

a) Sync files automatically with all machines in my Live Mesh group of devices
b) If my Live Mesh device is on, then I can use Remote Desktop Connection (or a Live Mesh version thereof) to remotely connect to that device. Even if it is behind a firewall and on a dynamic IP DSL connection. This is great because my machines at the office are connected to the Internet via a dynamic IP connection and now I can just connect to them, by clicking them via the Live Mesh icon in my icon tray.

The sync files feature will be further improved in the future when Peer 2 Peer synchronization will be supported. I suggested this feature on MS Connect, but it was already planned
Here is the response I got:

We plan to include selectable direct Peer to Peer (P2P) as a sync scenario in a later milestone, which is in effect what you have asked for here I believe.
Thank you for this report!
Tim

I use a lot of Virtual PC images. I'm hoping I can use this P2P sync service to create continuous backups (don't know if the bandwidth needed will prove to be a killer).

What is interesting is that files on Live Mesh will sync, even if the user is not signed in. This means that on the client Live Mesh is connected to the cloud without a user logging on. This offers potential for an interesting feature like 'Live Mesh Lockdown'. Suppose my machine is stolen. I could use some other device, go to the Live Mesh Desktop on the web and mark the device as stolen. This could lead to the machine being locked for further use. I have no idea what information is stored on the server with regards to the device. Perhaps this feature could even become part of the next version of Windows. That way if the thief re-installs the machine the server can still recognize the device (based on MAC address?) and still lock the machine.

Anyway, can't wait to see what the developer API for Live Mesh looks like.

The Software Developer Network user group will be hosting it's quarterly event on Monday, June 23. The theme of the event will be Collaboration, but plenty of general topic sessions will be held as well (a total of 30 sessions!).

Go to www.sdn.nl/sde to sign up.

Here is an overview of the sessions:

Heroes Happen in Bangor! The BAND is proud to announce we will be putting on a mini-launch event for Microsoft's Heroes Happen Here launch of the 2008 products.  Come to the event at Kominsky Hall at Husson College in Bangor on Tuesday, May 27 at 6:00 pm.

Greg Howe and Jeff Hall, BAND co-leaders, will be talking about Visual Studio 2008 and how it will impact your development efforts.  There will be two 45-minute talks, one focusing on the web world, and one focusing on the IDE.  You will leave this event knowing how you can benefit from the new products, including Windows Sever 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

More info here.

My blog runs on dasBlog version 2.x and when I started blogging I did all my typing online. Then Office 2007 came along and Word offered the feature of creating a blog entry offline and then upload it to dasBlog using the MovableType API.

This wasn't too great though, since Word markup would end up in the HTML and sometimes the publish process just froze or refused to logon to my web site. Also, uploading pictures was kind of a hack.

Last week I installed Windows Live Writer and this runs as a charm. Definitely a recommendation!

The Maine Developer Network is hosting a Geek Lunch tomorrow at the State of Maine, Harlow Building at 18 Elkins Ave in Augusta.
Chris Bowen will be presenting on LINQ & Language Improvements in C# 3.0/VB 9.
Sign up here.

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a unified approach for querying data using coding syntax that remains consistent regardless of the data source. It WILL change the way you work as a developer and architect and this session will help you on your way to using it effectively. To understand how LINQ works, we'll first navigate the new features of C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 that enable LINQ functionality. Then, we'll dive into .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 to explore the various realms of LINQ: Datasets, XML, Database/SQL, in-memory objects, and more. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of how LINQ works and what it can do for your applications.

The Boston Code Camp 9 is over and done with. It was a great two day event and kudos to Chris, Chris and all the presenters that put their time and effort into making this an excellent happening!

Here are the two presentations from the session that I did:

The Bangor Area .NET Developers are meeting tonight at the Hampton Inn, Bangor (directions).

Converting VB6 Apps to .NET – Eric Burdo

You feel stuck in VB6 land...there is all this .NET stuff people are talking about.  You know you want to get there, but what does it take?  Eric will show you!  Come learn how to make the jump from VB6 to .NET and find out some of the pros and cons to converting your older apps.

Plus there's a random drawing for your own wireless desktop (keyboard and mouse), among other cool door prizes!

If you haven't done so already: Register For This Gig.

Today is a good day for a laugh... I love this one.

Chris just posted the schedule for Boston Code Camp 9!

Go to: http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2008/03/28/code-camp-9-the-schedule.aspx.

See you next week!

The Boston Code Camp 9 "I Came, I Saw, I Coded" will be held on April 5th and 6th at Microsoft New England District: 201 Jones Rd, 6th Floor, Waltham MA USA.

There are over 50 sessions planned (http://www.thedevcommunity.org/Events/PresentationList.aspx?id=6) and I will be presenting on two topics:

Building a State Machine Workflow
Workflow Foundation offers 2 types of workflows, sequential and state machine. This presentation walks through the process of building an application using a State Machine workflow, including state design, state transitions, data exchange services and handling external events.

Building applications with logic
This session presents a view on how datasets and business logic can be organized to build a working application.
Use basic architectural patterns to enable team development and improve maintainability of your sources.

Hope to see you there!

The 22nd of April the Maine Developer Network is organizing a Geek Lunch. We'll be meeting at the State of Maine offices in Augusta to listen to Chris Bowen present on LINQ & Language Improvements in C# 3.0/VB 9.

Pizza will be provided and attendance is free and open for everyone!

More info and RSVP here.

Slowly but surely more website are starting to support CardSpace. I’ve recently blogged about using Cardspace in conjunction with an OpenID from MyOpenID.com to log on to http://dev.aol.com/. Just the other day I discovered that that my hosting provider has started a beta program allowing me to sign on to my website’s control panel using CardSpace. Never one to shy away from a beta program I gave it a swirl.

After logging in to the website using my regular username/password I proceeded to my account page. Here a new button has been added ‘Bind card to account’, after clicking the button the CardSpace cardselector on my Vista machine opened up and I was allowed to select a card. Press OK and all was good. Time for a little test. Log out of the website. Then go back to the logon page and now instead of using my username/password I can use my CardSpace card to logon. And sure enough it worked!

Next came the real test. Since I also have DiscountASP hosting the website for our user group (Maine Developer Network) I tried to logon to this account using my CardSpace card. While doing so I discovered that this did not work. I could not bind the same card to two different accounts. I had to dive in a little deeper, but soon discovered this not to be a limitation of CardSpace, but rather, the website does not support multiple accounts to one card.
The way to solve this would be to implement an account selector which would become available after logging using the CardSpace card. The same would be true if DiscountASP would support OpenID. Then one ID would have to be attached to multiple accounts.

Moral of the story: We’re a long way away from the ‘one ID to rule them all’. There is more to it than replacing your username/password validation with an OpenID or CardSpace control. You will have to reconsider the relationship between user accounts and your customer.

Just a quick reminder to all who haven't RSVP-ed yet: the Maine Developer Network user group meeting this Friday is still on.

The weather forecast for Friday looks good. So hope to see you all there!

Topic
An introduction to Unit Test, Test-Driven Development and Mock Objects As software development projects grow over the course of months and years, it can be increasingly difficult to manage quality and consistency. With the help of Visual Studio 2005, Test-Driven Development (TDD) can be used with very little effort to insure constant, high-quality code is written during the lifetime of your projects. In addition, you'll see how to create and use mock objects to logically separate development efforts on different tiers of your application to prevent blocking issues.

Speaker
Speaker will be Russ Nemhauser.
Russ Nemhauser is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and has served as an Architect, Developer, Team Leader, and Project Manager over the past several years. His projects have included enterprise applications, online commerce sites, and corporate intranets for Wall Street, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Seagram, and others. Russ actively participates in the development community, speaking at several conferences and user groups each year. He also writes for several technical magazines and industry web sites.

On Friday the 28th of March 2008 the Software Developer Network in the Netherlands will host the 'Expedition 2008' Software Developer Event.

Below is an overview of the sessions. For more information and registration go to: http://www.sdn.nl/Default.aspx?tabid=280

Sessions

Maine is getting another .NET User Group and this one is actually close to where I live,yeah!!!

The B.A.N.D. (Bangor Area .NET Developers) will meet monthly. More info at: http://www.bangordevelopers.com.

Bill's last day...

Hurray! What a great way to start the new year. I got an email this morning informing me I've been awarded the MVP award for the fifth year running.

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way of saying thank you for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - Visual C# technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated.

Thanks to Microsoft, and in particular Rafael Munoz, for the award. Excellent!

I just created my first PopFly mashup.

Last month Russ Fustino did a presentation in Portland, ME where he showed a little tool to grab areas of the screen. I looked on his blog, but could not find a link to this particular tool, but a little Googling did the trick.

Screen Grab Pro is a very nice (FREE) tool from Traction Software that allows you to easily grab a region on the screen and save it as a file, or paste it in a Word document.

Update: Windows Vista also offers a build in tool called 'Snipping Tool'. On some machines this tool does not get installed by default, read more on the Snipping Tool here (thanks Marcel!).

Online video services like YouTube and AOL Video may appear to be a global phenomenon, but when you try and view some of the higher quality videos you'll find that the ad-riddled Flash wrappers around the movies contain DRM which implements region encoding. Today I emailed Amazon support because I purchased a couple of episodes of Shark while I was at the airport in the States, waiting for my flight to Amsterdam. All was well, and I downloaded 2 out of 5 episodes, the last three were queued since I had to get on the plane. After reaching the Netherlands I discovered that Amazon Unbox refused to let me download the remaining three episodes since my IP-address is showing that I'm no longer within the US. When is the video industry going to discover that region encoding is a bad idea?!?!

With all the excitement about .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 being release you might almost miss the release of .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1.

It can be downloaded here (x86) and here (x64).

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 provides cumulative roll-up updates for customer reported issues found after the release of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. In addition, this release provides security improvements, and prerequisite feature support for .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1, and .NET Framework 3.5.

Amazon Unbox is an online video service, allowing you to download videos to your laptop. As a frequent traveller I've started using this service recently and am extremely pleased with the quality of the video, the ease of use and availability of titles. I like to watch series (currently Shark season 2) and this is a great way for me to keep up with what I like to watch, even if I'm on the road. Episodes seem to appear on Unbox within a week, often one day, of airing on TV.

Wikipedia says:

Amazon Unbox is an Internet video on demand service offered by Amazon.com which according to their website is available to "U.S. customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia". The service became available on September 7, 2006 and offers television shows and films for rental and purchase from eight major television and film studios.^[1] Rental pricing for feature length films range from $0.99 to $3.99, while television shows can be purchased for $1.99. Additional discounts are given for full season purchases. Downloaded films includes two versions of videos requested, a full resolution video file and a lower resolution copy for portable devices.

Maybe 70-291 is comparatively easier than 70-296, still, merely studying for 156-215 or 350-001 is not just enough to go for the latter certifications. Just in the way preparation material for 642-552 differs from that of 642-176 and cannot be used to go for a 350-030, same is the scenario in the previous case.

This thing is amazing. Last night I was at a party where one of the people had one of these and the clarity on the screen is great and very comfortable to read. I want one!

With the build in phone service, called WhisperNet, which I'm told runs on the Sprint network, you can download books without going to a store, needing a hotspot or network connection. Now Sprint does not have coverage throughout the States, if you're unlucky and live somewhere without service (like in Lincoln, ME) then you can download books from Amazon and copy them to your Kindle using a USB connection.

Wikipedia says:

Amazon Kindle is an electronic book (e-book) service launched in the United States by Amazon.com in November 2007. It uses an electronic paper display, reads the proprietary Kindle (AZW) format, and downloads content over Amazon Whispernet, which uses the Sprint EVDO network. This means that unlike previously existing e-book readers, the Kindle can be used without the need for a computer. Whispernet is accessible through Kindle without any fee. ^[1] The Kindle sold out in five and a half hours,^[2] although Amazon has not stated how many units were available in the launch offering.

This month Omnext presented their solutions for controlled outsourced development at the Gartner IT Expo 2007 in Cannes.

"The dynamics of today’s world demand a quicker and better reaction from organizations to internal and external developments.
This can be taken care of with, among other things, “Agile” system development.

Furthermore, outsourcing and offshoring have now become a permanent part of IT.
All of this needs to come off in accordance with the diverse regulations in the field of governance, compliance, and control. This relates to, amongst others, Sarbanes Oxley, SAS70, and ISO20000.

These trends are, primarily, in the domain of EDP auditing."

The solutions include products like Source2VALUE to quantify your (existing) software, Source2UML to document existing software and Source2WIKI to create a WIKI based documentation environment for your application. These solutions are all cross platform and work on a multitude of languages like C#, T-SQL, VB.NET, Java, Delphi, Cobol and Powerbuilder.

Omnext teamed with Gartner to produce an excellent whitepaper on governance.

Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite has just become available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

Tudor posted a couple of pictures from my visit to Cluj, Romania on his website.

Update: Sorin Dolha also posted some photos from the presentations:


Windows Live Spaces

A Dutch buddy of mine has been running a (fun) website called 'Het Late Nieuws' (the late news). Check it out.

Yesterday I spoke at the iSDC and Ronua Community Workshop. We had a great day and it was a pleasure meeting the people at iSDC, meeting the developers in Cluj and surroundings (some drove over 200km to make it to the meeting) and Petru Jucovschi (the DPE for Microsoft Romania).

Here are the two presentations that I did:

11-09-2007 - Developing Windows Vista gadgets.pptx (431.43 KB)

11-10-2007 - 2008.NET.pptx (252.91 KB)

In the Visual Studio 2008 presentation I also talked about the work I've done for AOL. The AOL developer site can be found at http://dev.aol.com and for more reference material on Vista gadgets you can visit my AOL blog.

Sometimes you just run into something so geeky, yet so cool that you just have to post a link

Andrew Dugdell experimented and found out he can use his iPod to store a VHD file (the file format used by VirtualPC) and run the virtual machine from his iPod. Excellent!!!

Somasegar has told the audience at TechEd 2007 that Visual Studio 2008 is on schedule for RTM before the end of November. Huh? Wasn't the release date set for February 2008? Yes it is. There is a difference between RTM, which means Release To Manufacuring and 'launched' in terms of marketing effort. It used to be that software was not available until the CD/DVD was in your hand. Nowadays RTM means: 'send to DVD factory AND make available for download'. So when VS2008 goes live this month it will be available to MSDN subscribers on via their MSDN Subscription account and it will be available on DVD in February 2008.

Our (=SDN) quarterly event is coming together. The session schedule is complete and registration is open. The topic this time is 'Usability'. Want to learn, share, see, meet and have fun? Sign up now!

Sessions

I just reinstalled Plaxo for Outlook 2007. A great tool which I used to use for Outlook 2003, but initially I had some problems running the integration on Vista with Outlook 2007. A couple of versions down the line these problems appear to be solved and my address book now synchronizes quite smoothly with my Plaxo account. The great thing about Plaxo is that it will automatically update all the contact info of my friends and contacts as soon as they make a change in their info, assuming ofcourse that they also run Plaxo.

To join the social network frenzy there is now also something called 'Plaxo Pulse' a kind of Facebook like way of keeping track what your friends and contacts are doing. It's interesting and since I upgraded to the latest version of Plaxo I seem to automatically be on Pulse. So I'll give it a try and see how it compares to Facebook.

As far as I can tell there is no Pulse API available yet. Although several parts of Plaxo are accessible through the Plaxo developer API. Personally I believe the Open Facebook API to be a great part of Facebooks succes.

Here are some events that I'm involved in, either as speaker, and/or as (co)organizer:

• iSDC Master Class (by iSDC & RONUA), 10-nov-2007, Cluj, Romania.
• VO/Vulcan & FoxPro Software Development Event (by SDN), 12-nov-2007, Ede, The Netherlands.
• MDN Usergroup meeting (by the Maine Developer Network), 29-nov-2007, Waterville, ME, USA.
• December Software Development Event (by SDN), 14-dec-2007, Ede, The Netherlands.

After taking a look at becoming an Amazon.com affiliate last week, I decided to place some Google Ads on my blog page as well.

Steps to take:

1. Sign up to