I thought I'd be smart this time. I installed Virtual PC 2004 on my Windows XP Pro desktop. Inside Virtual PC, I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1.

Well, the good news is, everything works.

The bad news is, it runs as slow as a 95-year-old in a buffet line. What should take under a minute drags on for 10 minutes. Visual Studio takes 10 minutes or so to start, and a 95-year-old takes 10 minutes or so to take a spoonful of potatoes and put it on their plate.

(With apologies to 95-year-olds.)

Part of this is not a surprise. I recently saw some benchmarks comparing Virtual PC to VMWare, and VMWare was an order of magnitude faster at most tasks. Overall, the article gives VMWare a rating of “166.5”, and Virtual PC a rating of “131.4”. VMWare is 26% faster overall, but this masks some tasks (2D graphic) where VMWare is 400% or more faster.

So to summarize, I have not been able to play with Visual Studio 2005 as much as I would like, primarily due to the enormous amount of time required to do anything with it.

I guess I am going to have to either find a dedicated machine for this, or try to install it alongside my existing version of Visual Studio. My fear is that this “beta” software will be hard to remove, or will do something horrendous that requires a complete machine repave. And I don't want to do that...

Hmmm.

It's been a great few days, and I do not want to jinx it by talking about it, but my mood is excellent.

* My book deal is becoming official. The book was originally going to be about J2EE, but has now changed to be about Visual Studio 2005. I am way more comfortable talking Microsoft technologies anyways, so this is a good thing.

I have a separate blog that deals with my progress in writing two (soon to be three) books here. Activity on that blog should pick up once the ink is dry on the contracts, later this week.

* I transitioned from one project to another at NewCo. My new project leverages the skills and knowledge I have developed here, and takes it further. I'll have to remember to write another blog entry about how great it has been working here.

My 6 month contract is coming to an end soon, and so I think this means I will be renewed. Yay!

* I tried an online game called BlogShares, and I am addicted. I went from $500 worth to $27 Billion worth in one week, thanks largely to the gift of $15 billion from a couple of players. But I turned $15 Billion into almost $30 Billion, so some of the credit goes to me. ;)

Sadly, this money is only virtual and not real. But it's fun once you get the hang of it.

* I was in Vancouver, Canada the weekend before last, and loved it. Have to go back. My wife and I even half-joked about moving there. It's definitely pretty, although I am not sure I can stand the weather. Although the weather was great when we were there, bad weather seems to be the norm.

Anyways, I have to get back to work. I didn't want this entry to degrade into a sappy love letter to myself, but it did. Forgive me, I'm not my normal self.

A special hello to Paul Wakeford, who lives near Leeds, UK.

Paul has me listed under his “People I Don't Know” category in his blog roll... sniff, sniff. Brings a tear to my eye.

Google just refreshed my supply of Gmail invites. I have five to give out, to anyone who wants one. Leave me a comment, and I'll send an invite to you ASAP.

What is Gmail?

Simply put, it is a free web-based email account. It's two main features are 1 gigabyte of mail storage, and improved search capability.

Why do I need to be invited?

Gmail is in a beta period, so access is by invitation only.

Why shouldn't I just wait until Google makes this available to everyone?

Well, say you have a cool email address like coolguy@hotmail.com. If you don't act fast, someone will then register coolguy@gmail.com. Essentially, the quicker you get a Gmail account, the more likely your favorite email address will still be available.

OK, OK. I want one! How can I sign up?

Leave me a comment on this entry. You'll have to leave an email address so I can get an invite to you. My blog uses some (primitive) obfuscation for email addresses, so your address should be safe from spammers.

Update: I am all out of gmail invites. Sorry.

I recently read a weblog entry that claimed, in order to run both the client and server portions of Visual Studio Team System on a single PC (using Microsoft Virtual PC 2004), you would require 3GB of phyiscal memory. Well, my puny home PC only has 1GB of physical RAM, so I might have to go out and buy a new computer in order to experiment with the server aspects of this software.

According to the official Microsoft web page, these are the minimum specs:

Servers:

• 2.6GHz Pentium 4 CPU
• Windows Server 2003
• 1GB RAM for application tier, 1GB for database tier
• 20GB hard disk for application tier, 20GB hard disk for database tier

Client:

• 1GHz Pentium CPU
• Any modern Windows OS
• 256MB RAM
• 3.5GB to 6.0GB hard disk space

So I can certainly see why, if you chose to run the client and the two servers on the same machine, it has to be a hefty machine.

Also realize that the beta software has not yet been fully optimized. So hopefully the “production” version of this application will require less horsepower.

Perhaps a good way to start off my new VSTS blog would be to introduce this exciting new software package to everyone. Some of you may already know of it, but I am sure many others don't.

Disclaimer 1: First, I will preface everything by saying that this software is still in Beta testing. If I do a really good job convincing you of how amazing this software will be, you cannot then drive to the local Best Buy and purchase it. It is not yet for sale. Microsoft expects the software to go on sale mid 2005. I would guess May 2005, but that is still 9 months away from today!

Disclaimer 2: I don't work for Microsoft. (Yet, anyway.) So I do not have access to any secret future plans for VS or VSTS. So if I say “May 2005”, I am really just making a guess. I will try to keep guessing at a minimum, however.

OK, so on to the questions burning on everybody's lips...

Q. What is Visual Studio 2005?

A. Obviously, it is the next version of Visual Studio. The last version was “Visual Studio .NET 2003”. As you can see, Microsoft has dropped “.NET” from its name.

Q. What's new in Visual Studio 2005?

A. VS2005 formerly had the code name Whidbey. Most of what is new falls into four broad categories:

• Integrated software development tools for the full-life cycle (known as Team System)
• New language features for VB.NET and C#.NET
• IDE improvements including support for code snippets and refactoring
• A line of “express“ products for novice users

Q. What is Visual Studio 2005 Team System?

A. Modern software development is a complex process, requiring coordination between many different people. Most of the time, this coordination happens in a chaotic manner: email, project meetings, status reports, and/or “bumping” into people in the office hallway... Do you wonder why 90% of all software projects are behind schedule or fail completely?

VSTS comes with a set of tools designed to improve the entire software development process: from the project management aspects of a project, to the architecture and design, to development, and to testing. Some team members already use versions of the software: the project manager may use MS Project, the architect may use Visio, and the tester may use NUnit. But Microsoft has combined all of those tools under one IDE, and designed them to seemlessly work well together.

(Geez, I sound like an advertisement. If you act now, I will throw in a set of Ginsu knives!)

Q. What tools are in Visual Studio 2005 Team System?

A. The list is long, and at this point I do not have the definitive list. But I'll try to point out some cool features:

• Project workflow: project managers can assign tasks to individual developers within the Visual Studio environment. As developers complete these tasks, the project progress is updated instantly for the project manager.
• Software architecture: has application design tools built in, similar to UML, which allow developers to design an application thoroughly before writing any code. When the time comes to begin development, the tool will automatically generate the code you need to get started.
• Source code control: a vast improvement over Visual SourceSafe
• Unit testing tools: a tool similar to JUnit or NUnit built-in
• Code analysis: a tool that analyzes your code, and reports bad coding practices to you (FxCop)
• Code coverage: a tool that analyzes your unit tests and your code, and identifies areas that are not being tested

Whew! There is more. But my fingers are getting tired.

Q. Any good links?

A. Why, yes! Thanks for asking.

• Visual Studio 2005 Home
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System Home
• Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Overview
• Tools Affected - A long long list of tools that will ship with VSTS and Team System

Til next time!

Today I received the CDs for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 in the mail. Yipee! Can't wait to install it and start playing around. Sadly, since Microsoft took so long to ship me these CDs (several weeks backordered), they have since come out with Beta 1 Refresh, which includes the Team System bits that I have been dying to get my hands on.

It appears I am going to be working on a big project over the coming months relating to Visual Studio 2005 Team System. I will get into more details about it here, once the project is official. Needless to say, I am extremely excited about the possibilities.

I should mention that the dasBlog software that I use allows me to assign my entries into categories. You can see a list of them at the right. All of my VSTS entries will be under the “Visual Studio 2005” category, so if you want to only view those and ignore the rest of my entries, bookmark the category or subscribe to the RSS feed as you wish.