Fabrice's weblog : ThinkTank

Virtual machines everywhere

Fabrice Marguerie — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 09:55:00 GMT

The Visual Studio Hosted Experience allows you to either evaluate Visual Studio, or learn how to build applications for Windows and the Web with the MSDN Virtual Labs. Multiple subjects are covered, but what is interesting is that it lets you use a virtual machine to test the products.

This really looks like the future to me: no need to own a physical machine, but instead multiple virtual machine you can get access to from anywhere.
Join and use your personal workstation from the airport, from an Internet café or from wherever you want! No need to reinstall or setup everything each time you arrive somewhere. Access your office machine right from your laptop through a wireless connection.
Soon, you'll have a virtual machine for working, one for gaming, one with VS200X, one with SQL Server 200Y, and they can be active at the same time and see each other. Preconfigured virtual machines will be available and you'll just have to make a copy to start using them. Backups turn easy: just archive copies of the virtual machines.

Not a lot is missing to get to this picture. Just a little bit of bandwidth maybe?

How does this sound? Will we see a new business soon: virtual machine hoster?

Update: As Eric suggests in a comment, we may indeed carry virtual machines around on USB keys or portable music players.

Patcher: easy assembly patching

Fabrice Marguerie — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:16:00 GMT

This is an idea I had some time ago. I think this picture speaks by itself:

The idea is about a tool that would allow easily patching code (remove, add, update).

Typical scenario: you have this DLL (assembly) you'd like to modify to add some tracing code, but you don't want to (or can't) go back to the source code.
You can also think of this as Edit&Continue for every assembly...

Collector: an RSS Aggregator Web Service

Fabrice Marguerie — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 17:36:00 GMT

Collector is a new addition to the ThinkTank describing a web service that would aggregate RSS feeds.

Opening the ThinkTank

Fabrice Marguerie — Wed, 30 Jul 2003 22:13:00 GMT

I just started to publish some ideas that I'd like to share.

Feedback on these ideas is welcome, let me know what you think.
Let us know what you have in mind on similar subjects.

Have look inside the ThinkTank!

The ThinkTank will remain accessible on the main page of my weblog.
Keep in mind that this is work in progress, I'll keep adding new ideas (some are in the pipe).