Yesterday, I was so pleasantly surprised by a product, that I actually went and got all my colleagues, and showed this to them.

I was installing Virtual PC for the first time, and when it came time to configure my first virtual machine, a dialog asked me to name it.  So, quite predictably, I typed in "MyWin98". 

(Yes, we still do support the C# compiler on Win98, and part of my team’s job is to make sure all the newest and fanciest and greatest continues to work on your ancient heap.  In this case, I needed to install Win98, Second Edition, Japanese.  When I said ‘your’ back there, I was including myself since I still have a machine at home running Win95 that gets daily use. But I digress…)   

The next step of the dialog was to select an Operating System for the virtual machine.  Here comes the cool part.

Windows 98, had already been selected in the drop down list!

I have never seen a Microsoft product anticipate me this well.  Of course, my office-mate’s (soon to be my ex-office mate because he gets his own office next week) first reaction was to try a host of other names to see if he could trip it up.  Typical QA….. doesn’t want to know what it can do, just wants to find out what it can’t.  Well, suffice to say that I was happy it recognized versions of Win2k3 too.

Thanks Ben, and/or those on the Virtual PC team who thought this up and took the trouble to implement it.  (I can picture some Tester in a design meeting rolling her eyes and thinking, "Yeah, now we have to figure out what Norwegians like to call their personal electronic friends and test all variations of that.")  Actually, I am willing to wager that a tester thought up this idea."