Re-Professing My Love of WSPBuilder

Say what you will about SharePoint as an application development platform; it adds a significant crapwork overhead to your everyday asp.net development.  Especially when it comes to organizing folder structures, creating xml files that point to other xml files, the lovely ddf syntax, etc.

WSPBuilder on the other hand…

To create a new artifact:

To deploy your solution (even includes an MSI installer in the Deployment Folder):

Vista SP2 Includes Hyper-V…

...but you can’t actually access it:

“Hyper-V *

• “Windows Vista SP2 includes Hyper-V™ technology, enabling full virtualization of server workloads

“*To clarify, Hyper-V is not included in Windows Vista SP2, it is part of the Windows Server 2008 service pack. This means that when you install SP2 for Windows Server 2008, or if you install a slipstreamed version of Windows Server 2008 with SP2, the RTM version of the Hyper-V role will be included. Hyper-V was released after Windows Server 2008, which means that the role you currently install is a pre-release role and needs to be updated to bring it up to RTM. This update will be applied (only if necessary) automatically when you install SP2.”

http://blogs.technet.com/springboard/archive/2008/12/02/windows-vista-sp2-what-s-inside-what-s-important.aspx

The post goes on to state that*:

“There Is Now Free Lunch*, (*to clarify: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)”.

*To clarify, the post does not actually state that.

Microsoft News: Dick Hardt joins Microsoft

Good news from out of the cold, damp north: Dick Hardt of OpenID and amazing slide-deck fame is joining Microsoft.  This should speak well both of Micorosft’s current attention to claims based authentication, as well as improving the chances of Microsoft creating truly first class identity solutions.

“I will have the title Partner Architect and will be working on consumer, enterprise and government identity problems. My open source, open web and digital community experience will continue to guide my thinking. For me, this is an opportunity to work on the identity problems I have been toiling over for the last six years, but now with massive resources.”

http://identity20.com/?p=171

And in Unrelated News… Vista still sucks?

I’ve had an interest in Citigroup lately, and so I found this headline in BusinessWeek interesting:

As the story usually goes, my part-magpie brain then zoomed in on the first of the MORE FROM BUSINESSWEEK stories – is Vista still considered slow and dangerous – really?  But, check the date:

Why is BusinessWeek suggesting I read a 20 month old article about software when I go to read a current financial article? (I mean we all hate the UAC feature in Vista, but this is bordering on persecution…)

For that matter, why does it suggest an almost as-old story about the failure of a REALLY old business?

Installing Security Update for SQL Server Service Pack 2 (KB954606) takes a LOOOONG time

While I’m ranting, I might as well point out that installing the Security Update for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (KB954606) takes forever and a day, with no info in the “Overall Progress” bar.  That said – don’t try to cancel the update, the Cancel operation takes just as long.  So the longer you waited before you gave up on the update, the longer you’ll have to wait for the cancellation to finish.

Yay.

<rant> The Bane of my VPC Existence

Aaaargh.  Other than simply plugging the plug on my VPC (Action – Close – Turn Off), there just doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to quickly suspend my VPC work: 

Since I work on an external drive with a standalone power supply I don’t dare simply suspending my laptop.

Finding that this is an issue that basically has been around since 1998 does not make me any more happy:

Still Some Bumps -- We mentioned in TidBITS-397 that changing the Mac's state, such as swapping a CD-ROM drive for a floppy drive in a PowerBook, could wreak havoc with Virtual PC's "saved state" feature. This is somewhat understandable, since when Virtual PC saves the state of your emulated PC clone for quick launching later, it has to assume that the physical machine will remain the same.

However, Virtual PC could handle these situations more gracefully. The current procedure - informing the user that the saved PC state could not be restored, and then restarting the PC - nearly guarantees the same kind of directory damage and hurt feelings that suddenly restarting a real PC would cause. The software should tell the user what's wrong and either allow an opportunity to set things right before proceeding or cancel the launch and let the user try again later with the proper hardware present, resorting to a restart only as a final option.

TidBITS, Mac News for the rest of us: Virtual PC 2.0: Not Just a Minor Upgrade

Oh – and in case you’re thinking this talks about a different product, no – it’s the same…:

Virtual PC was originally developed by Connectix for the Macintosh and was released in June 1997. In June 2001 the first version of Virtual PC for Windows, version 4.0, was released. Connectix sold versions of Virtual PC bundled with a variety of operating systems, including many versions of Windows, OS/2, and Red Hat Linux. As it became clear that virtualization was important to the enterprise, Microsoft became interested in the sector and acquired Virtual PC and an (at the time) unreleased product called "Virtual Server" from Connectix in February 2003. 

– Wikipedia, Microsoft Virtual PC, Version History

I’m oh so happy to see that Connectix/MS did NOTHING to address this in the 8-9 years between v2 and v2007.

</rant>