I’ve been using Windows 7 now (Build 7000) for about 2 weeks and am very happy with it. I still get some strange behavior now and again, but overall, it’s been very stable. I much prefer it to either XP or Vista. I do find some software I can’t easily get to work (which is no surprise), but if I really need it (like I do GoToMeeting), I usually figure out a way to make it work.
So, for GoToMeeting, if you launch it from their web site (http://www.gotomeeting.com) and simply say “Create Meeting”, you will get an error saying IE8 is not supported. I found that if I actually downloaded the GoToMeeting application from their web site, then move the application to my start bar and set the properties to be “Run As Vista” and “Run As Administrator”, I had success.
Hopefully, this will work for you.
I’m sure many of you know Lynn Langit. Her role at Microsoft has been a Developer Evangelist of many of the business software offerings from Microsoft including Sharepoint and SqlServer and it’s many offerings. She’s always been a wealth of great information about those products and it’s great to see she’s got a book out about one of her favorite topics, Business Intelligence.
So far, I’ve read the first four chapters and have skimmed the rest. I am so far very impressed with both how well it’s written and the depth of topics the book covers. As I read more, I’ll come back and update this post. I have no doubts I will get a lot out of this book, as I’m sure practically anyone else who buys it will also.
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(Windows 7 Beta, Build 7000 put through the paces)
Background
I don’t seem to have a pile of computers laying around anymore so testing new operating systems can be a bit time consuming. In general, I don’t like testing OS’s in VM’s because performance on the actual hardware is what I’m trying to measure. So, luckily, I do seem to have an infinite number of SATA hard drives for my Lenovo Thinkpad W500 ( Lenovo 4062-27U ThinkPad W500 15.4" Notebook
) so I figure the best thing to do is install the OS on one of those. Microsoft recently sent me two DVD’s (a 32bit and a 64bit). Since I have a 64bit machine with 4gig of RAM, I figure I should test the 64bit. So, here we go.
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William Bartholomew just published a new book on MSBuild and TFS. There is a great forward by Richard Hundhausen (Famous TFS Author and top MS consultant). I personally don’t use TFS yet, but I do use MSBuild and plan on using it more extensively for web deployments going forward. I have not yet read the book, but am anxiously looking forward to. It is a topic that IMHO has been very under documented. This should be a big help!
Some Background
I recently notice on Amazon a discussion thread of about 15 people saying how absolutely wonderful SSDs are and how the brought new life to their notebook computers. Every one of them raved about the magic this brought into their lives.
Well, after checking out the prices and performance, it seems that right now there are two classes of these drives. It seems there is a first generation drive that performs in the area of 15/40Mbs/sec and ones that perform in the 100/170Mbs/sec. To put this in perspective, when people refer to SATA/150 or SATA/300, the 150 and 300 are the Mbs/sec. With Vista resource manager, you can actually see for yourself how man Mbs/sec you are actually getting. Below is a screen shot showing that.
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Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (PRO-Developer): Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi, William Bartholomew: Books
