VMware Converter 3.0 Now Available

VMware Converter is the next-generation enterprise-class migration tool that lets you convert physical machines, virtual machines and other disk image formats to VMware virtual machines.

With VMware Converter you can:

• Quickly and reliably convert local and remote physical machines to virtual machines while they are still running with zero disruption or downtime.
• Use a centralized management console to manage multiple simultaneous conversions
• Convert other virtual machine formats or image backups of physical machines to VMware virtual machines.
• Create a clone of a physical machine and back it up as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Download the free VMware Converter today!!

Visual Studio Developers: Welcome to Linux!

Mainsoft is preparing a solution to quickly develop ASP.NET applications that run on Linux and other Java-enabled platforms, without having to learn a new development language.

Mainsoft's answer is quite simple: they developed a cross compiler between Microsoft IL and Java bytecode. You obviously have some limitations (for instance, no OS native calls allowed), but you can even use Visual Studio's debugger to attach to and debug the application remotely.

Check it out here.

Best practices for testing with Visual Studio (REF)

This is where we put our latest thoughts and discoveries in software security. Members from this team previously brought you Improving .NET Application Performance. We are constantly talking to customers, industry experts, and performance experts to bring you the latest and greatest. Come here to see the new, the raw, and the unfiltered; see MSDN for the most mature and fully reviewed material.

-- J.D. Meier, Security/Performance PM, patterns & practices team

REF: Using LINQ with ASP.NET in VS "Orcas" (Part 1)

Scott Guthrie as just posted the first video about LINQ and "Orcas".

Mac OS X - The Return of the evil brother

So, it's true, I return once again to Windows evil brother: Mac OS X. But with a twist: this time I didn't have to pay for Apple hardware, I've just used an ordinary desktop with XP, and VMWare as hardware :)

Why did I do it? To make a point: if Apple hardware can run Windows with bootcamp, Parallels or VMWare, why can't the opposite be true? If possible, I would gladly pay for Mac OS X operation system.

Apple has to understand: the world we're living is a global one, and in a global world there's no place for closed solutions. Why should we pay for hardware that is nowadays basically the same , just to use the operation system? When I had System 6 back on an LC/30, the hardware difference was huge, but those days are over. Ok, an iMac is a cool piece of hardware, but it is very closed to extensions. On the other hand, Mac OS X is a great OS. And that annoys me so much that I'm considering buying an iMac. Not fair...

For respect for Apple's wish, I will now uninstall the VMWare version of Mac OS. And I finish this article with a challenge: Mr. Steve Jobs, if you really believe in the quality of your operating system, let if run out off the cocoon it lives in let it battle side by side with is evil brother. And let the best win!

PS: when I say "let the best win", I sincerely hope that both win. More, I believe more OSs should join this group - on a perfect world, we should have a bunch of OSs we could run on the hardware we chose. Maybe on day...

REF: ''The Paradigms of Programming'' online

''The Paradigms of Programming'' online

R.W. Floyd's Turing Award Lecture “The Paradigms of Programming” is freely available in an online journal here. It is almost 30 years old, and still very much relevant. A quotation: To the designer of programming languages, I say: unless you can support the paradigms I use when I program, or at least support my extending your language into one that does support my programming methods, I don’t need your shiny new languages [...]

in: Lambda the Ultimate

Natural Language Search in Windows Vista

Did you know you could set Vista search for answering to:

• "pictures taken last week"
• "Email to Jay Fluegel about Sony Vaio"
• "Email from Bill Gates sent yesterday "
• "Music by Eminem rated *****"

Read all about it here.

OASIS WS-Transaction (almost) a standard

InfoQ is covering this (almost) great achievement:

The OASIS WS-TX technical committee held a face-to-face meeting last week at IBM Hursely. This is likely the last such meeting prior to final standardisation of WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity. It has been a long struggle to get here, dating back to extended transaction work at the OMG, a first attempt at Web Services standardisation via BTP and OASIS WS-CAF (where there is a lot of overlap due to history). This meeting was primarily just making sure that all of the i's were dotted and t's crossed and getting agreement to progress to OASIS standard; all of the heavy work had been done over the past 12 months.

This is an important step for enterprise Web Services deployments for a number of reasons:

• WS-AtomicTransaction defines a traditional ACID transactions model, based on two-phase commit (2PC). Many people believe that 2PC is not right for the loosely coupled nature of Web Services and they'd be right. However, this overlooks the other important aspect of Web Services: interoperability. Interoperability between existing vendor implementations is key for many transaction processing deployments, particularly those that have grown via acquisitions of heterogeneous technologies. This has been a transaction processing holy grail for many years.
  
• WS-BusinessActivity provides a forward compensation model, much more appropriate for loosely coupled, long duration interactions. This latter model will probably have slower take-up than WS-AtomicTransaction, but it should become more important over time.

Once we finalise WS-Security and WS-Reliable Exchange we'll finally be able to do secure, reliable and transacted Web Services in a standard manner.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Released

Ok, I'm not a great fan of this "Yet Another Thing That Was Invented Years Ago And Is Being Re marketed Now", but what the hell, let adopt it!

PS: ok, it's a great implementation, and it's highly integrated with Visual Studio.

Mr. Steve Jobs: please open up your DRM!

Dear Mr. Jobs.

Everyone who owns a digital music player of any sort is painfully aware that buying music from a particular online store locks them into that platform. Your company has been particularly stubborn about allowing your protected AAC files to be played on anything but iPods. That doesn't seem fair.

So I urge you to open your propriety DRM technology, and I ask for the support of countries all over the world. France, Denmark, Norway and Germany seem to be in the right track now. Hope Portugal will join soon, if not the Europe as a whole.

Sincerely,

Mário Romano



Inspired in: arstecnica.

REF: Visual Studio "Orcas" Web Designer Integrated into Main

in: ScottGu's Blog

This weekend was a really exciting one for the VS Web Tools team. On Saturday they checked in their new HTML and ASP.NET WYSIWYG designer into Visual Studio. This designer is a major, major improvement over previous HTML designers within Visual Studio, and will be a shared component used by both Visual Studio and Expression Web Designer going forward.

Among other things, the new HTML designer provides:

• Split View Support (the ability to have both HTML Source and WYSIWYG design open simultaneously)
• Extremely rich CSS support (CSS property window, CSS inheritance viewer, CSS preview, and CSS manager)
• Dramatically improved view switching performance (moving from source->html design mode is now nearly instantaneous)
• Support for control designers within source view (property builders, event wire-up and wizards now work in source view)
• Richer ruler and layout support (better yet, values can be automatically stored in external CSS files)
• Designer support for nested master pages

Welcome the to VMware Converter 3.0 Beta Program!

Here's some old news that I've just came uppon:

VMware has unveiled VMware Converter 3.0 starter edition for public download. if you thinking create virtual machines on your current computer. Try VMware converter 3.0. An application is highly robust and scalable enterprise-class migration tool that reduces time converting physical machines to VMware virtual machines. The converter itself using snapshot based cloning mechanism which is extremely fast and reliable. Furthermore, VMware Converter enables remote conversions without disrupting the source server during the conversion process.

Beside that, VMware Converter have other features like converting virtual machines to a newer version of VMware and converting images from other software like Microsoft Virtual PC.

In related news, you can check out LiveCD Player Virtual Machine from vmwarez.com, which lets you create a virtual machine for VMware from any LiveCD ISO with just one click.

VMware Converter 3.0 starter edition highlight:
Single, central management console to easily deploy, manage and schedule conversions without the need for a Helper VM.

New local hot cloning functionality provides live migrations with zero
server downtime for the source machine.

Broad hardware support for physical machines as compared to the previous generation P2V Assistant product.

Supports cloning a wide variety of Windows OS platforms including Windows
XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4 (SP4 +) and 64-bit Windows Support (Windows XP and Windows Server 2003).

Supports conversion of standalone VMware virtual machine disk formats (VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware GSX Server and VMware Server) across all VMware virtual machine platforms (including ESX 3.0 server and VC 2.0 managed servers as target host).

Supports conversion of 3rd party disk image formats such as Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.

Faster conversion speeds by means of sector-based snapshot cloning.
Remote hot cloning functionality for deployment to hosted
(VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware Server) environments.
More information on Resize a Virtual Disk with VMware Converter

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