October 2006 - Posts
I finally got around to trying the Sept. CTP of Orcas. I loaded up the VPC images on VPC7 Beta (which seems to perform much better than VPC2004). If this is going to be the way that MS is going to release CTPs in the future here are a few suggestions:
- Don't have undo disks enabled. This just slows things down. If I hose out the vm image I can redownload from MSDN or just recopy it from a backup. This just makes things slow.
- Don't install every single option of VS.NET. Are there really CTP changes to Crystal Reports in this release? This is just a waste of hard drive space and makes the experience more frustrating.
- Tweak the .vmc files so that they don't have some MS developers local paths to the E drive in them. This makes the end user have to relocate the hard drives on first launch. This is a little thing but its so simple to fix why not do it.
- Please, please, please allocate more than 384M ram for a VS.NET + SQL + IIS install. At least up it to 512M. I would not advise that anyone run the Orcas CTP in less than 512M ram. It was painfully slow on my 2 Ghz Core Duo MacBook Pro. I quickly upped it to 1Gig allocation and it was like night and day. I realize that not everyone can allocate 1 gig ram so a better compromise would be 512M. If you only have 512M mem in your host PC then your virtualization experience is going to be horrible anyway. Again this is a small thing but its so brain dead simple it should just be setup correctly to begin with.
- Make the simple tweaks to make win2k more developer workstation friendly. For example: do we need to have the shutdown logging feature enabled in order to preview a CTP? The performance options were still set to Background Services and System Cache!?! These tweaks could be made to the parent differencing disk at the beginning so that the OS install is set and ready to go for developer use.
One of the advantages of a virtualized CTP is that we developers don't have to sit through an install process. This is negated if we have to do alot of fiddling with the VM settings in order to make it run at an acceptable level.
These are all little nit picks but I think the effort is really small and would give the end users a much better experience when trying out the CTPs.
P.S. also consider using a tool like http://www.invirtus.com/ to shrink down and optimize the vm image. VM Optimizer works wonders for shrinking the size of the virtual machine which in turn improves over all perf.
I just downloaded beta 1 of ASP.NET AJAX today. Wow! Lots and lots of changes. The type system has been greatly simplified. I like this. The move to prototypes over closures was a good decision. The core scripts are much easier to read and comprehend as well. The CTP download has been a 404 for me this evening so I haven't had a chance to dive into it.
Looking through the core scripts there seem to many improvements. There used to be a bunch of prototype extensions to the Function object that were really only applicable to ctor functions. This seemed like it was pretty inefficient. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
All in all the script library feels less like a hodge podge of techniques from around the web and has more of a cohesive feel to it. Maybe that'll change once I get into the CTP add-ons. Overall I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. This definitely seems like a big step forward.
We used the CTPs for some back-end admin functionality on http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/ so as soon as I can lay my hands on the new CTP bits I'll have to see what the migration process is like.
Ok, time to get back to playing... :)
Update: looks like the CTP download is working now. I think its going to be a long weekend. ;)
I remember seeing the "Developers vs Programmers" article on digg recently. I did think at the time that it was a bit over the top. Mike has managed to capture my exact feelings on this subject in this post: http://weblogs.asp.net/miked/archive/2006/10/13/_2200_Developers_2200_-and-_2200_Programmers_2200_.aspx
The thing I like most about Mike's post is the theme of "teamwork". There are many aspects to software development. Being a "guru" at all aspects is becoming more and more impossible. It is all to common to think in black and white these days. Every subject seems to be polarized. In my opinion the world is a better place when we treat each other with respect and recognize each others abilities and contributions.
So thanks, Mike, for reminding me that not everyone in the world sees things in such black and white terms.
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