Some randomness
I’m currently undergoing the long but not terribly painful process of getting a new Windows 2000 VM patched up for some specific testing, and while I watch a bunch of status bars, I thought I’d toss out a few random things I’ve been collecting, of varying interest to varying people.
First off, the Microsoft MacBU people have had a couple of amazingly good posts this week about some of what makes running software teams so hard. Schweib has an amazing post about MacBU’s decision to drop support for VB in the next release of MacOffice. He gets into some architectural details of the VB implementation and of the necessary changes to support Intel, Xcode, and 64-bit.
The technical stuff is fascinating - on-the-fly C++ object morphing, runtime-generated assembly, etc. - lots of interesting[1] stuff. But more than that, the detailed discussion of the tradeoffs is great. You might have to be a developer or dev manager to really grok what he’s saying, but man, I know *I* have been in that situation before, and it’s painful.
And finally, a plug for corporate bloggers - Schweib’s post is, in my opinion, the very best PR Microsoft could dream of in selling this (painful) issue to its customers. No amount of money can buy the level of trust that’s built by knowing that there are real humans sitting over there wrestling with hard problems like this just as conscientiously as I would.
Another MacBU developer, David Weiss, has a post up about the tradeoffs involved in automating software testing. If you do software test for a living (or manage someone who does), you’ll like this. It’s interesting to remember that the very same problems that apply to small dev shops (like mine) apply to one of the biggest (and certainly richest) shops in the world. Resources simply can’t fix some problems. Then again, we’re all computer scientists here, so we knew that already. 
To complete the trifecta, I just downloaded the newest build of Parallels Desktop, which is a VPC and VMware competitor for MacIntels. Maaaan, it’s fast. We’re talking 7 seconds from the end of the BIOS screen (which is pretty short itself) to the windows XP login prompt. And this is on my fully patched XPSP2 dev VM, with a dozen DDKs, half a dozen SDKs, various Visual Studios, a couple of WinDBGs, and all of the other crap it takes to write code. Plus, my USB smartcard reader now works, which was my biggest remaining beef. I do tons of driver development of software-only drivers in it. Recommended!
Status bars are still crawling across the screen. Oh well, at least they’re fast. 
[1] if you happen to be a big old geek
August 15th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Well this is a question instead of a comment, but I am giving a thought to the idea of buying a macbook, installing windows as well, of course. But just the possibility of Visual Studio or Windbg or DDK or SDK not working properly in the new platform gives me the creeps. Do you think is a good idea or have any relevant experience on the matter?
Thanks in advance, this is a lovely and useful and entertaining blog!