Archive for October, 2005

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October 20, 2005

Play With VMWare For Free

If you’ve wondered what VMWare was like, what it did, and how you could use it, wonder no more. You’ll need two free downloads:

1) VMWare Player 1.0: Open any VMWare virtual machine–for free.
2) Any one of the free VM’s for download at VMWare’s Virtual Machine Center. I tried the Browser Appliance, a customized install of Ubuntu that “enables you to safely browse the Internet from within a VMware virtual machine — protecting your host PC from spyware and malware.” Comes with Firefox and a couple of other utilities–at just under 1GB when uncompressed (~200MB zipped).

Yes, that’s a Terminal Server Client window. A very interesting demonstration of VMWare, a safe way to play with it for a bit, and a pretty convincing exercise in the usefulness of VM’s. This one joins the list of tools on my USB key…

Don’t forget to take a look at the other VM available for free download on that same page. An interesting way to serve up demos.

Posted in Tools | Leave a Comment »

October 17, 2005

VMWare Bridged Networking Suddenly Stops Working

After a couple of Windows Update-induced host reboots, VMWare Bridged Networking suddenly stopped working–this was evidenced by being unable to ipconfig /renew my way to network happiness in the guest, while having no issues on any physical machines. I tried going back a couple of snapshots, until I was convinced it wasn’t the guest OS. Went to Edit | Virtual Network Settings, and on the Automatic Bridging tab, I decided to have a look at what adapters VMWare was trying to automatically bridge. I have two adapters built into the motherboard, and I wondered if it happened to be going after the one that wasn’t plugged in. I found two adapters after clicking “Add?” in the Excluded adapters section:

 

Intel PRO/1000 MT Dual Port Server Adapter – Packet Scheduler Miniport

Windows Mobile-based Device – Packet Scheduler Miniport

 

First one looked fine. Second one looked very odd indeed: present I believe because of my plugged-in pocket pc phone. When plugging it in for ActiveSync, it adds itself as an available network. I added that last row to the “Excluded” list, and ipconfig /renew was back up and running.

 

So a warning–if you’ve got a plugged in mobile device that supports networking, it may affect your VMWare installation.

Posted in VMWare | 9 Comments »

October 17, 2005

Macromedia Flex 2 Alpha Released

Microsoft developer, it’s time to take a look at Flex (short 15 minute video demonstration). The 2.0 alpha was released, you can read about it and download it here.  I can do nothing better than pointing you at the demos available on the Macromedia Labs site (worth browsing for a bit).  Make sure before checking out the 4 demos (including some useful code to give you an idea of what it takes), to install the Flash 8.5 player (alpha), also available from the same site.

Takeaways:
* Fast UI development with a really polished look-and-feel–bar none, the best looking UI you can slap on your .NET application, WinForm OR Web
* No longer requires the Flex server–simply compile, drop the SWF file in an IIS site, serve it up.
* Nice webservice integration to leave your business/service logic in C#

When you consider it, Flash players are everywhere.  The download is smaller than the .NET Framework, probably smaller than WPF/E (I’m just guessing). Sure, WPF will be cleaner and sharper when its done, but that’s the thing–Flex is here now if you don’t mind 1.5.  And when WPF/E arrives, perhaps a Flex/MXML to XAML converter (why not?) would take you some of the way.

If you do one thing this week, click on those links, download, give it a try.

Posted in Flex | Leave a Comment »

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