Don Smith : Rambling

Roger joins the fray ... w00t!

donsmith — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:32:00 GMT

My good friend Roger Lamb has just joined the blogsphere and I assure you that if you are interested in anything remotely related to Sharepoint, you'll want to subscribe now. Check out his first post.

You see how I just did that? How I increased your expectation, and thus, his commitment around his blog?

Isn't the blogsphere wonderful? haha

Welcome to the chaos bro!

Well spent morale money

donsmith — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 22:13:00 GMT

The patterns & practices team have been selected for a pilot program that will completely renovate our workspace. The new workspace will be highly collaborative and should be done in a couple of months. We were instructed to not come into the office yesterday because the movers will be getting us out of our old space and into our temporary space. Instead of working from home, me, Tom, Eugenio, and our manager Shaun, decided it would be the perfect day to spend some morale money.

I decided in the Alpental lodge over a pitcher of Mack & Jack's that I just had to blog about this day. The weather was awesome, we had a great time, and no one got hurt. I just wish I knew why I feel the need to strike the dorky muscle-man pose everytime I see a camera :)

What-We-Are-Up-To Webcast

donsmith — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 21:01:31 GMT

I'm sitting here with Ron Jacobs, Eugenio Pace, and Tom Hollander in the MS Studios as we're getting setup to do this live webcast about what each of us is up to here in patterns & practices. You see, Eugenio owns the smart client program, Tom owns the line of business program and I own the Integration & Web Services program. Unfortunately I don't have a link to the webcast right now, but I'll be sure to post the link to the on-demand version (as soon as I get it) in the comments section of this entry. You'll want to check this out if you don't attend it live ... I'm sure it's going to be a good time and heck, you'll even be able to learn what we each having coming down the pipe.

You're out of excuses

donsmith — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 20:39:17 GMT

Admittedly this guide is probably late for some of you ... but others of you still have VB6 apps out there that you need to evolve, manage, and support ... wouldn't it be easier if they were .NET apps? Chances are, you've decided that your new development will be in .NET, but it sure would be nice if application XYZ was on .NET, huh? Well, Eugenio has come to your rescue. patterns & practices has just released a VB6 migration guide to its community. If you have VB6 apps you plan to migrate, don't do it without checkin' out this guide. If you've already migrated your VB6 apps and had some particularly sticky hangups, be sure others can learn from your experiences by letting that team know.

I know what you're thinking ... what does this have to do with Web services? Okay, not much ... unless you're using the SOAP toolkit, which is no longer supported. Come on, you don't want to be that weird uncle of yours that still refuses to use windows over DOS ;-)

Okay, I think I'm straight

donsmith — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:45:00 GMT

I was dorkin' around with my workblog the other day and it dawned on me that I never posted about how I recently switched jobs ... everyone blogs about this ... cool, so let me tell you what I'm up to these days ... and why you care.

I've been at Microsoft for about 5.5 years now and that whole time, I was a dev consultant helping customers with their enterprise applications focusing on Web services and XML technologies. On the 27th of June, I started a new position as the Product Manager for the Web Services & Integration program in the patterns & practices group and moved from Charlotte, NC to Redmond, WA. In my new role, I determine what assets we need to build based on customer and community feedback. Does that kick ass, or what? Everyday, I get to work with customers who are building Web services, the Web service community, and the WSE and Indigo product teams. I've only been doing it for 5 weeks, but so far ... it's awesome.

Alright, so why do you care? I've been asking myself a similar question ... what am I going to do with my workblog? Initially, I was thinking, I don't want to just talk about patterns & practices all the time. But the more I thought about it, I realized that's exactly what I should do - here's why. My program represents 1 of only 3 in the pattern & practices group. That should indicate we're pretty serious about it. And, we're 100% committed to letting the customer drive our actions (sometimes the product groups don't do this as well as they would like to). A lot of people think the Microsoft blogs have been successful because Microsoft as a company and our products are more transparent and it's easier for everyone outside of the company to communicate with us. We're really liking that too!

So yeah, I think I'm straight. I have a pretty good idea what I'm going to do here and why you should care. Unfortunately, you're going to have to go over here to find out ;)

OT: If you're not using Virtual PC ... you should be

donsmith — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:58:01 GMT

Okay, before I go anywhere, I want to give 100% credit for this post to John Bristowe. He showed me this at Tech-Ed. He was going to do a Grok Talk on the subject, but just got too busy I think. He (and me too now) is genuinely shocked more developers aren't using Virtual PC. Now I've used VPC quite a bit since its release (and even before it was called Virtual PC). However, during our conversation, John showed me a very cool feature I didn't even know existed ... Differencing Disks. If you already know what Differencing Disks are in the context of Virtual PC, you can click next in your RSS aggregator ... because the rest of this post is about how to use them to create many different development environments with very little effort and hard space.

Differencing Disks allow you to use an existing VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) as the parent for a new VHD. For example, if you want to have one VPC for Visual Studio 2003 and a different one for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, and you wanted them both on Windows XP Professional, you can create a parent VHD with Windows XP Pro on it and use it as the parent for each of the two Visual Studio VPCs. This saves a ton of hard disk space because the OS only exists in a single VHD. It also saves a lot of time - have you ever created copies of VHDs or installed the same OS on several VHDs? Yuck. This is how I'm setting up my VPC hierarchy.

The beauty of this is each of the product are only installed once even if I have several different systems using it. Nice, huh? Okay, let me show you have to put this into practice ... just in case you were curious.

In the next few screen shots, I'm going to create a new VPC for a Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 release based on an existing Windows XP Professional VPC. This is what my Virtual PC Console looks like:

The first step is to create a new VPC. Be sure to put it exactly where you want it using the Browse button (I keep mine on an external USB drive). Define the amount of memory you want it to have and create a new VHD. Now go to the Settings of the VPC and click on the new VHD.

From here, click on the Virtual Disk Wizard button and create a new VHD.

For the location, choose the same VHD that was just created with the new Virtual PC.

When you click the Next button here, you'll be asked if you want to overwrite the existing file. You do. The next step is deciding what kind of VHD it is. Of course you want a Differencing Disk.

The rest is self explanatory. When you start up this VPC, you'll notice that Windows XP is already up and running for you ... no duplication ... and no wasted time. I am totally using this snot out of this. THANKS JOHN!