Thursday, September 17, 2009

Virtual Machines and Sharepoint 2010

Publicly known now, SharePoint 2010 runs only on a 64-bit machine.  First thing came to my mind is what will the developer experience be like?

Running Windows 7 RTM with Virtual PC is really slick and fast.  I have a Windows Server 2003 / Sharepoint 2003 / Visual Studio 2008 machine and works great on a Dell XPS 1330.

Sadly, (PLEASE MICROSOFT FIX THIS), Virtual PC does not support a 64-Bit virtual OS. 

First i tried VM Ware.  Their free version offers a lot of really great feature, but a few things that i didn’t like.  First, it requires a Tomcat server to be installed to interface with the Virtual Machine.  Eck.  on my clean Windows 7, please dont!  Second, i kept getting failures (frozen) on in my Windows 2008 R2 during operations.

Uninstalled VM Ware and tried Virtual Box by Sun Microsystems.

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So far, its working really well and quite fast; Windows Server 2008 R2 / SharePoint 2010 / Visual Studio 2010.  It even has some slick features such as “Seamless Mode”.

My issue now is that since Virtual technology grabs hold of your Vt-x/AMD-y processor, only one Virtual software solution can run at any given time.

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I really like the native integration Virtual PC has with Windows 7 and don’t want to give it up.

Microsoft, Please support 64-bit virtual machines on a 64-bit host… please!

S.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Microsoft Office 2010

A microsoftie, Kristin Bockius, posted some screenshots and commentary (that I cannot do under NDA) about the new Office 2010 system.

Some really great examples of some of the cool changes coming for the Office 2010 client.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bright_side_of_government/default.aspx 

Some things to note in her screenshots is that there is no more “Office Orb” button on the top left and has been replaced by a “Office Tab” that opens a fantastic set of features standard and custom features to each product.

(Images below linked to her website…if they are broken, then they were pulled off her site).

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Can’t wait to share more with the community on our findings.

S.