Virtual PC 2007

Very often you have the requirement to support multiple OS platforms, or if it is a Web app - multiple Web browser types. For this reason, in order to make a real test case, you need to have clean installations of all those OSs with no additional software or no more software that is actually needed by specification. However, sometimes you can't host multiple OS versions on one HDD, and even if you can, chances are that you won't use all of these distributions on daily basis, but rather only while running these system, integration or basic functional testing scenarios. One solution that I've used in this regards is Virtual PC which proved to be ideal and lightweight but very powerful. You may have different OS as images on your HDD (or DVDs in my case) and whenever you say need Windows 2003 with SP1, just take out the image and run the Virtual PC. Simple and very convenient.

Today I figured that a new verion of Virtual PC has been pushed out - Virtal PC 2007, which now supports Windows Vista natively. Take it for a spin from here.

Scaling out with Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Scaling out is a major architecture factor to most heavy-traffic Web solutions. Turning back time, I see most of the Web solutions that I've been involved with having significant requirements for data load and performance. The bottleneck in most of those cases has been on the database layer, where at some point we have had to think about scaling out. Not surprisingly database performance and tuning have been very interesting to me and I am trying to constantly educate myself. This is how I found the following very good papers related to scaling out technologies with SQL Server 2005. They will give you a broad perspective on what SQL Server 2005 can give you to make your application more scalable. These papers have been written by Bob Beauchemin, who is a well-known speaker and profound database guru.

Planning, Implementing, and Administering Scaleout Solutions with SQL Server 2005 (link)

Internals, Troubleshooting, and Best Practices for use of Scaleout Technologies in SQL Server 2005 (link)

Configuring XBOX 360 with Wndows Vista Media Center

I spent some time today trying to figure out how to hook up my XBox 360 with my new and shiny Windows Vista. I am sure that many other people will bump into the same problem. So to make long story short, I have a XBox 360, which used to be connected to my Windows XP Media Center. However, I've recently upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate and thus I had to made a transition. So at first, my XBox wasn't able to look up any Media Center PC in the network. I though it could be related to some security settings on my PC, tweaked this and that for a while, but still no result. Then as all developers do when they cannot solve something right away (without reading manuals :)), I searched the Net. I found this article, which turned out to be the one-stop-shop for what I was trying to do:

Enjoy Windows Media Center on your Xbox 360, with your Music, Pictures, Live and Recorded TV*, and Online Media (link)

So the important part of this article was that I have to "disconnect" my XBox 360 from any previous PC partnerships. Another thing that I took care of was really related to security and Windows Firewall in Vista. This matter is explained in detail in the following article:

Troubleshoot problems with a Windows Media Center Extender device (link)

However, to be honest, when you add the new XBox extender to your new Windows Vista Media Center, one of the steps in the setup process will ask you whether you want to open these ports on the Firewall so pay special attention to it.