Windows 7 is to quote one Microsoft person “A lot closer than most people imagine”… in fact they just announced that general availability (ie. boxes on the shelves) will occur on 10/22/09.  Of course this was old news 5 minutes after it was posted and refers to general availability – not the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) date that really represents when the software will be done and start being available for download if you have an MSDN subscription.

However the focus of this post since I installed a few copies (or more) and since I’m using it on a few machines, are my three (yes only three, and in no particular order) top features and have some notes on using one of them.  (OK actually they are ordered inverse to how much I’m going to write about them…)

The first is the boot to VHD feature.  As I noted you need to ensure you’ve enabled hardware virtualization on your PC, but this feature rocks.

The second which I’m only just starting to work with is the backwards compatibility XP host support.  The idea is that there are several older apps which for a variety of reasons will not run on Vista/Windows 7 natively.  For example old Access applications which leverage the MS Grid OCX stop working when you move beyond XP.  To resolve this, while preserving the core security of the new environment, the Windows team created a compatibility mode which essentially uses a Windows XP VPC in the background, but allows these applications to ‘seem’ to run on the newer system.  The idea sounds like a good way to bring these two opposing needs (I need this old application, and I need all the newest security and capabilities on my computer) together.

My third feature is pinning.  Windows 7 makes it easy to add new items to the Start Menu and to the Windows Task Bar.  The feature makes it easy to keep the most frequently used lists from betraying you.  However there is a way to really leverage this feature better than the default.  You’ll note in the image below I’ve placed both Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Explorer on my start menu. 

By default Windows Explorer comes on the task bar in the RC and I’ve gone to the trouble of moving it.  The reason has to do with how the different locations behave.  When I click on an item pinned to my Start Menu, I get a new instance of that item, even if an instance is already running by default.  To be honest whether copying from one folder to another folder on my local machine, to a USB device or across the network there are a lot of times that I want 2 instances of Windows Explorer.  Similarly I often open two instances of Visual Studio, I’ll be working on one solution and want to review how I did something or examine some sample solution, or access one of my junk test code projects where I quickly test some code… the result is I’ve pinned these items to the start menu.

On the other hand items pinned to the Task Bar do not by default open a second instance of that application.  Thus you’ll note I’ve placed Outlook, Virtual PC, the Snipping Tool, Windows Sticky Notes, and although not shown in the image below SQL Management Studio.  In each of these cases I only need a single instance.  Yes I can ask for a second instance by right clicking on the icon and then selecting the application from the context menu – but creating a second instance isn’t the default and is thus more involved, and in the case of most of my choices isn’t really the desired behavior.

My suggestion to you as you might guess is consider where you want to pin items.  Keep in mind that when something is on the Start Menu not only can I open multiple instances, I can pin target documents/folders from the most recently used selection into the context menu next to that item. 

You also may not I skipped Internet Explorer in my list above.  I’m still deciding – for now I’m trying it on the taskbar on separate instances plus tabs.

Finally however, I have a request with regard to the task bar…. I know it won’t be a change to Windows 7 but let’s talk about icons vs. icons and description on the task bar.  When I pin a program to the task bar, you add the icon which is good.  However, For things which aren’t pinned to my task bar I like the description.  As noted above things I pin to the taskbar only typically have one instance – as a result I don’t really ever need to see the label associated with that icon.  On the other hand items like Visual Studio on the task bar show the name of the current project in the label, which is useful.  Yes I realize I can just hover over that item and you’ll give me pictures of what each instance contains – but if you are familiar with Visual Studio you know that isn’t the most useful way of recognizing which is which – on the other hand I can look down at the task bar and know which instance I want even before I can move the mouse to it when it’s labeled.  This isn’t to say I’m not willing to stack similar task bar items when I run out of space – just that if we could keep the items pinned to the taskbar as icons I would have more space for those items where the label is actually useful to me.

A few weeks ago while I was up at Tech Ed during one of the presentations, someone’s phone rang.  We’ve all had that person in the meeting… and in some ways, since everyone has on some occasion forgotten to turn off their phone, let me not cast the first stone here.  The offender headed out to take the call and headed back in after the call… and as soon as they sat down – AGAIN their phone starts ringing.   So at this point its fair game to throw stones… but I thought about my own situation.

I once rarely thought of turning off my phone but a few months ago I set it to vibrate… again… and something strange happened – I forgot to turn the ringer back on.  The next call came in and I knew it and that was it, I’ve just permanently left it on vibrate.  In considering this I thought about all the places where I ‘should’ have the ringer turned off vs. on.  Then I considered the cases where if my phone was in vibrate mode and I wanted the call I wouldn’t know.  For example if I’ve left my phone in another room while I’m playing with my son – I don’t care if it’s “ringing”.  The challenge of course – some women carry their phones in their purse as opposed on their body.  The result is that they don’t feel a vibrating phone – they still need ringers – as do kids who like the attention. 

But seriously if you’re an adult and you carry a cell phone – put it permanently on vibrate.  I recently got a Blackberry and all the messages come in with vibrate mode – not a ringer.  Do you know why they’re called “Crackberry” – because even without ringing those message vibrations are enough to keep people up to date on their messages.

As a virtual PC user, and in some cases now at work a VM Ware user, one of the options I’ve always wanted to leverage was acceleration for my virtual machines based on hardware virtualization.  It was something I always wanted while at Internowlogy but of course since I was using 3+ year old hardware, let’s face it the hardware didn’t support it, and odds are if you are using older hardware neither does yours. However, I’ve gotten new laptops since leaving Internowlogy 64-bit high end machines with lots of RAM.  Let me say up front since this post is obviously about how to enable this feature – my performance for my virtual Windows 7 hosting Visual Studio 2010 B1 has dramatically improved since enabling this feature (not to mention the performance of the virtual TFS server I set up here at Rubio’s.)

Originally I wondered if the problem was with the Vista OS so when I installed Windows 7 RC on one of my machines I was looking to leverage hardware virtualization – however, no change.  This became an issue because I wanted to take advantage of Windows 7’s ability to boot directly to VHD and thus set up a system with Windows Server 2007 R2 x64 RC – which isn’t supported by VPC.  Finally I found a little note that Dell doesn’t enable this CPU feature by default.

That’s right if you bought a new Dell you probably have a hardware virtualization capability for Virtual Machines that’s disabled.  To enable it you need to use F2 during startup to edit your BIOS settings.  Depending on which type of Dell you have you’ll either have 1 or 3 settings (based on my experience) related to hardware virtualization.  For those with slightly older PC’s will probably find just a single setting for hardware virtualization which is defaulted to [disabled].  Change this to [Enabled] and that’s it you are done.

Then there are those on the real cutting edge – like my Latitude e6500.  This brand spanking new system has 3 settings related to virtualization (actually closer to 4… but once I explain the potential issue you’ll see why I’ve ignored the 4th).  When you get to the BIOS for that machine there is a section on Virtualization Support.  Within this there are 3 settings: the first titled Virtualization should be enabled.  The second titled ‘VT for Direct I/O’ can also be safely.  However the third titled ‘Trusted Execution’ which deals with protecting information exchanged with the CPU – it’s an Intel ‘feature’.  For now enabling this setting reverses the previous two settings.  So if you are like me and your initial thought is ‘turn it all on’ then you will find that you still don’t have virtualization support, even if you carefully read the instructions under the trusted execution settings and find the TPM setting and enable it.  Don’t bother – it doesn’t help.

So to review: to take full advantage of your Dell’s virtualization capabilities use F2 during startup and go to the bios settings, enable virtualization support but do NOT use Trusted Execution.

So a couple weeks ago I posted a note prior to the start of TechEd (Time for Tech Ed North America) talking about how if I could have gone this year the one session I would have been certain to not miss was DTL336 Future Directions for Visual Basic with Anders Hejlsberg and Jonathan Aneja.  Well good news this video has been made publicly available.  The video is the full hour of the session and starts with Anders discussing the future of programming languages.

Before I give you the link, let me provide one important tip: Don’t watch it online… you can but you’ll not just below the default viewing window on the right hand side is a download button.  You’ll be tempted to click that – here again – pause and instead right click the download button.  Save the target (DTL336.wmv) to your local machine.  Attempting to watch a full hour of video over the network just isn’t going to be a good experience, and trying to do so in that tiny little window in the browser is just a measure of torture.  The video is available from Tech Ed online at:

http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=1d3d650b-a6b3-4c98-9240-571866969b89

Anders discussion of the future just as it relates to concurrent programming issues is enough to make the download worth it.  I think this was a great session, and speaks well to a very active future for Visual Basic.  I think someone in Redmond finally woke up wrt VB in terms of finally starting to provide the resources people need and which in the past were focused on C# so that more and more people will be able to move into VB on .NET and away from older technologies. 

It’s been a couple weeks but I wanted to record the results of my ride for Diabetes – Tour de Cure here in San Diego.  The 2009 tour used the same 71 mile route used in 2008, and since I still haven’t gotten back to where I’m riding my 40 mile weekend rides, I limited myself to the 71 mile route instead of the century (100 mile) route.

The 2008 tour – well it wasn’t one of my best. It took me 5 hours and 45 minutes to complete. My average speed with my Garmin was 12.6 for the route (note the Garmin’s speed is based on time stopped at lights and rest stops… which while accurate isn’t what I want to measure, which is jsut my speed when not being penalized for stops including traffic signals)

Unfortunately I didn’t capture my bike computer’s numbers last year but I recall it being pretty low. The Garmin also estimated that I burned ~4741 calories on the ride, and recorded a max heart rate of 185. (Note: the higher the max heart rate the worse baseline shape you are in.)

This year my bike computer had me completing the ride with an average speed of 15 mph – which was great since I was shooting for 14.5 and would have been satisfied with anything over 14mph.

As for the Garmin it said 5 hours 15 minutes to complete – a 30 minute improvement.

My average speed with my Garmin was 13.7 mph – this time I actually managed to mark the time spent at rest stops – I stopped at 2 rest stops, # 4 and #5 and so I can see they accounted for 20 minutes of time, and even if I get motivated average my speed for the 3 legs of riding between them. My average speeds on the 3 legs surrounding the rest stops were 14.0, 14.4 and 15.8 respectively. Admittedly there was a nice wind blowing from the NW near the end of the ride which helped push me down the coast on that last leg (although as always I had to fight it as headwind for 7 miles down the bike path first.)  By the way, the rest stops put together by the organizers are great on this ride (both years) and there is a great deal of support along the well marked route.

It was also a fairly cool day, a blessing since as I recall it was hot on April 19^th in 2008.  Overall it was a great ride, and they had a couple bands lined up to play after the ride.  The organizers learned from last year and did a much better job of spreading out the start time so people finished closer to the same time, instead of those on the long rides finishing after most of the festivities were over.  Of course I’ll be back to ride again next year, and encourage everyone to join me.

One of the ‘tools’ I’ve was most impressed with after departing Internowlogy is the suite of services hosted under the Live brand from Microsoft.  Let me clarify, when I left my job and didn’t have a new employer, it meant that while I had a personal email account, I didn’t have a professional account.  I was able to set up a professional email using Live and start managing my contacts, appointments and email both from my computer using Outlook and from my Mobile phone.  Of course, it hasn’t been all mistake free, one of my more important lessons has involved my Live identity management and one of my more challenging transitions with identity. But more on that in a moment.

I’ve not only continued to use Messenger and learned to leverage Live for email and such but I’ve leveraged the networking features of Live as well as the features of Skydrive to place documents that I need to share in a central location.  This is without even considering new development features like Mesh and Azure. 

Now onto my challenge with Live. Most people are at least reasonably familiar with Live Messenger and have used it.  If like me you’ve used it for a while – you may have set it up using your work email address – I now feel this is a mistake.  When I first signed up from Messenger, my thought process was that instead of setting up another email account that I would need to monitor. Instead I chose to point point my messenger account at my work email for a Live ID and go from there.  For most things this worked fine, but when it came time to leave Internowlogy this presented a problem. As you might imagine my old email address didn’t leave with me.  I however, wanted to keep in touch with the people I had added to messenger over the years.

The good news is that you can go to the account services and update the email address associated with your messenger account, the challenge is that even though it should only take one or two days, in my case it was taking well over a week.  Here I was looking to update my network and literally everyone – even the people who knew my new email couldn’t see me in Messenger and weren’t seeing my new email address because I was in this limbo state.  A coworker who left IK a few weeks before me (several people left IK in January of 2009) had the same problem and eventually just reverted his old account and created a new account and added all the new people.  I however, had contacted Microsoft and asked – hey what’s the status and was told yes, the change was working through.  So eventually even though it had been over a week I set up a second account on Live so that I could get contact with key people and over the next serveral days as my old account remained in limbo started to focus on this new account as my main contact point.

Eventually I had pretty much stopped checking the old account for a while, but I did a few weeks ago and lo and behold – the changes had finally made it so that I could see people and they could see me.  Now from the standpoint of email the change was easy – I just told account 1 to forward all my email to account 2 and then as I reply people saw the new address and did or didn’t update their contact.  No problem, and no different from having an alias on my main email account.  In otherwords from the standpoint of email everything still works fine.

On messenger however, I now need some way to combine these two Messenger contact lists.  I want to display/sign into both accounts at the same time.  I don’t want to bother some of my contacts with adding a new link for my other messenger account, so if someone has a good solution for that please let me know – because I know from experience that if a solution exists someone will let me know once I post this.

(BTW, as a note for all my contacts, you’ll see me online a bit less, my current employer blocks the IM ports so I’ll be online more from about 8PM Pacific onward.)

So I won’t be at Tech Ed this year.  I just started my job with Rubio’s (www.rubios.com) - home of the world famous fish taco.  I accepted a position in the corporate organization and only started last week which makes heading off to a week long convention a little unrealistic.  I will be up in LA at Tech Ed today (the day before it actually gets started, Microsoft is hosting a few sessions for MVPs today.)

Fortunately although I won’t be there Microsoft is making a great deal of technical information from Tech Ed available.  The current site for Tech Ed is: http://www.msteched.com/online/channels.aspx and as you’ll see by the page I’ve chosen it has online channels with materials related to Tech Ed.  I’ll be checking back during the week to catch some of what I’m sure will be Tech Ed highlights and some great technical information.

However, for those attending there are a couple of sessions I truly wish I could attend, of those there is one in particular that if anyone does attend I’d appreciate hearing more about:  DTL336 Future Directions for Visual Basic  - Wed 5/13 | 8:30 AM-9:45 AM | Room 152.  The presenters will be Anders Hejlsberg and VB veteran Jonathan Aneja.  The nature of the tech ed site makes linking to the session description difficult, so I’ve copied the description from the session catalog:

In this talk, we discuss the future direction of the Visual Basic language both in the near and long term. Exciting features from the next release are demonstrated and discussed, including extensions to LINQ support, syntax simplifications, and improvements to the IDE. Larger trends that are likely to deeply influence the direction of the language are also covered, including dynamic binding, meta-programming, and scripting. Finally, we discuss how all these tie together into the roadmap for Visual Basic going forward.

If anyone gets to this session please feel free to send me a link if you post a recap, I’ll also be searching but I’ll have to wait for the content to get indexed.  Now that the languages team has been merged and Anders is involved in the direction for all of Microsoft’s managed languages – including Visual Basic I’m very interested in his initial public thoughts for the direction for Visual Basic.

One of Tim Huckaby’s favorite sayings when out mountain biking can be paraphrased; ‘If you are really pushing you’ll leave a little blood on the mountain’.  The idea being that since really pushing it on a mountain bike tends to involve taking some risks and occasionally crashing… if you’ve gone all out somebody managed to crash.

Pictured below is my knee after a recent ride, the question though with any such injury is how did I manage to get these gouges in my leg?

Well at this point you are probably assuming that I was on my mountain bike, after all I haven’t laid down my road bike since I was like 13… well until Sunday that was.  Yes this is the visible portion of the painful results of a road bike crash.  I was training for the Tour de Cure.  As part of my training every year I head out to Sleeping Indian road (in Oceanside, CA) and ride my bike up the rather brutal climb on that road.  To get there my route takes me out College Ave to Old River Road and then it intersects with Sleeping Indian road. Near this intersection the Old River Road narrows briefly and a curb is added, just prior to where I need to make a left.

On Sunday I was rolling along at around 18mph as I approached and needed to check behind me before moving out into the lane of traffic.  As I did this I realized I had a car literally right behind me, and he caught me by surprise – at the same time my slight reaction put me into some sand on the side of the road.  At that point my first thought was ‘ turn into the road to regain control’ – to which my second thought was ‘no there is a car there’.

I’d like to put in a quick aside here for those who drive cars.  Many times cars will stay behind us for a while.  I realize sometimes its hard to find a good time to pass, but in all honesty I would rather have you get past me sooner than stay behind me so you can ‘see me’.  The problem being that once you are past me  you are no longer a threat to me and I can be out of your thoughts… with you behind me how I react to a sudden road hazard changes – because with a choice between hitting the ground or risking getting hit by a car – well the ground looks mighty inviting.

At any rate I again corrected toward the edge of the road knowing that there was a large open dirt space on my right – but forgetting about that annoying curb.  This took me from bad to worse – because the edge of my front tire contacted this rounded ‘curb’ made from blacktop.  Which brought my next thought – TURN LEFT go into the road, followed as you might guess by the thought “NO!”.  Which was entirely appropriate since this was just about the point that my tire finally caught hard enough to trigger the chain reaction that resulted in me separating from the bike and getting the first hand experience of just how ‘inviting’ that dirt patch on the side of the road really was.

After  jumping back up from being on my back with my head toward the road, and my bike remaining (not sure how I managed it) sitting on the side of the road, I faced the cards which had now stopped.  Make no mistake it must have been an awesome crash to watch because no less than the first 3 cars in back of me asked me if I was OK… to which I answered yes – even though I wasn’t quite sure yet at that point.    Note I ALWAYS keep my cell phone with me when I ride alone so I had been less than OK or had my bike been inoperable, I would have called home/help as required.

So as with any wreck the first minute or so is just collecting the name of the ‘bus’ which just hit you and really deciding if you are OK.  Then you begin the real processing of how is my bike?  When I wrecked I was 11 miles into a planned 45 mile ride, and could have either turned back and headed home goal unfulfilled or pushed on to get in my climb and long ride. So I did a quick look over of my bike and sure enough within about 5 minutes I was pretty sure I was actually OK. I was amazed in some ways – my bike appeared pretty much undamaged. I did a more thorough check as I remounted and made a quick spin as I was deciding what to do.

Now aside from the obvious damage  - most of my impact had been on my back.  One of the tricks I learned mountain biking is that when landing “Use the camel pack.”  By which I mean, even on my road bike I show my slavery to ‘style’ by wearing a big ugly mountain bike camel pack to carry my water and stuff instead of a water bottle and the pockets in my jersey.  The advantage appeared again, because unlike my leg which has some significant scratches the only scratches above the waist are a few minor ones on my right arm.  Which is impressive because at first I wondered if I had broken my collar bone and over time it’s my right shoulder and my neck which have hurt the worst.  (Another note my helmet didn’t hit the ground – another untouched item)   The camel pack took most of the impact, that and I vaguely remember trying to get my right leg onto that curb – a memory driven in part my the pain in my right heel.

At any rate given my experience mountain biking as I got started and things appeared to be good I decided to press onward.  So I started up Sleeping Indian road.  As I was climbing Sleeping Indian I noticed that my front tire seemed a bit deformed.  I had tested with my brakes and didn’t seem to have a problem with the wheel at slow speeds… but on I pedaled noticing as my front wheel spun in front of me that it just didn’t look right.  It kept seeming like there was an odd little bump on the left hand side of my tire – which was odd since the curb was on the right when I wrecked, below is a still picture looking down on my front wheel (taken after the ride… notice the deformation). 

While the wheel was spinning of course there was the question of what is that ‘blip’ that keeps spinning past… but the good news was I passed my test for the ride. I made it up Sleeping Indian without stopping on the climb.  This is my test because back in 2003 when I bought my bike and started getting ready for my first Tour de Cure I set out on a ride that included this hill without knowing what I was getting into.  I stopped about 1/3 of the way up the hill and again at about 2/3’s and of course at the top.  Today like every year since I’ve climbed the hill – non-stop and as in Sunday kept on going without stopping after reaching the stop.  This is a good sign for me being read for the Tour de Cure on the 18th.

My next warning came on the resulting down hill.  Now at speed when I pressed the front brakes to slow down I got a clicking… both a sound a a feeling.  That clicking is something I’d felt before.  I had it when I managed to bend a rim on my road bike.  Not a subtle bend like you correct by adjusting spoke tension but a dent in the side of your wheel that is causing the brakes to hit an uneven surface.  Cursing mentally because I’m picturing a need to purchase a new wheel, not a cheap fix.  It also meant I had to be careful using the front brakes since they could in theory catch and send me flying (again). 

Once I got to the end of Sleeping Indian I pulled off for a quick break and to figure out just how bad the damage was and that deformation well it was caused by what would be some significant sidewall damage to my tire,

You’ll also note there is a small amount of what I later determined to be negligible damage to the wheel itself, but as you can see from the next photo the tire damage wasn’t in just one spot it was pretty much the entire right side of the tire.

So at this point, you’re probably thinking – hmm failing side wall, bleeding, shoulders and neck starting to hurt – Bill headed back.  However, you just aren’t considering just how stubborn I can be.  I was still only around 15 miles into the ride, so I continued on.  I made some checks at 20 miles and was careful to avoid my front brakes – after all – the clicking I head wasn’t the rim, it was the deformed sidewall hitting the front brakes.  Thus each time I heard that I was risking a sidewall failure as the sidewall collided with the braking mechanism.

Things went well till about mile 40 when I pretty much bonked. The fact that I couldn’t really breathe deeply combined with the general soreness of my right shoulder and neck made the last 5 miles – painful.  However, I survived and yesterday I put a new tire on my bike.  It rained this morning so I’m waiting until Thursday to head out for another ride.

I’ve been a tea drinker since back in my days in the Navy (which is a lifetime ago for some of you.)  Literally I still have a couple tins of loose tea from my time in the far east (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc).

However, according to this Wired magazine report apparently the rest of the technology world is starting to catch up… http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/tech-millionair.html

Proving what a trendy, stylish guy I am…

(The preceding line is a joke; for those who don’t really know me.)

In fact I'm sitting hear with a plastic cup full of a lemon infused green tea brewed from loose tea leaves in my iced tea pot... guess I'm not quite in the same class as those rich snobs talking about having a $40-$150 thimble 'full' of tea.  I don't see me ever getting into the +$10 per swallow tea drinking club... similar to my wine tastes (or lack thereof)

I am riding in this years San Diego Tour de Cure to help in the fight against diabetes.  This years tour is on April 18th 2009 and includes a 100 mile (century) ride which I’m hoping to complete.   If  you have a road bike and are interested or are just plain interested in the ride you can get more information from the official site at: http://tour.diabetes.org/site/TR/TourdeCure/TDC551018030?pg=entry&fr_id=5632

Since this is a ride to benefit charity you can also help out by sponsoring me.  You can send an offline donation for those uncomfortable using the online methods using the address in the link above:

Offline donations can be sent to:
American Diabetes Association
Attention: Tour de Cure
225 Broadway, Ste. 1530
San Diego, CA 92101
*Please include a note that states which rider the funds should be credited to.

or you can make an online donation through my personal event page is at: http://main.diabetes.org/site/TR/TourdeCure/TDC551018030?px=1001265&pg=personal&fr_id=5632

Diabetes is a nasty disease and when you consider it’s linked the leading cause of blindness and amputation in the United States, is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's, associated with increased risk of Stroke not to mention that just having diabetes is not only an increased risk of heart attack, but means you are treated as if you’ve already had your first heart attack, you hopefully can see why I support this cause.