Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for March, 2006
Microsoft Expression Interactive and Graphic Design Free Betas
Mar 12th
Microsoft has recently released updated CTPs of their Expression Interactive Design and Graphics Design applications (personally I can't wait to see the Web Design application when it's released or atleast made available via beta). You can get details on what the Expression product line are at: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx The Expression Dev Team has a blog online at: http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/default.aspx (one thing is for sure, Blogs are definately handy in finding new dev details and especially Dev Team Blogs like this one that link together all kinds of presentations, notes and tutorials) Links for the March Betas are found on the Blogs website. There's also something called Orcas, which I'm downloading currently and want to play with it. It appears to be a WinFX design extensions for Visual Studio 2005. I don't know but it sounds pretty damn cool: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD0CE56E-D7B6-44BC-910D-E91F3E370477&displaylang=en Enjoy.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 & iSCSI
Mar 2nd
Microsoft has an article available regarding Virtual Server 2005 R2 and iSCSI. I've been digging around on the forums and it seems the only way to really get the performance out of this is by having the iSCSI storage on the actual host machine. I haven't played with it, don't know enough about it but I do know iSCSI is way cool and I'm dying to play with it. Here's the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d112aa63-a51e-4722-a41b-98b3ab3700a3&displaylang=en
Clustrmaps.com — This seems pretty cool.
Mar 2nd
If it worked there should be a little map up above that displays the geographic locations my visitors come from (so I guess it will just have a big red dot over where my office is since I'm probably the only person that comes here).
Virtual Server SCSI or IDE drives and why is SCSI so damn slow?
Mar 2nd
So in the Virtual Server how to on setting up a 2 node cluster there was mention that you should select the SCSI drive emulatored because the IDE emulator was slower than the SCSI one and that this was true even if you were running on IDE disks. Strange, right? Virtual PC Guy recently wrote a new blog entry that really sums up the two versions of disks and why one over the other: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/02/06/525487.aspx So now you're going to run off, create a SCSI disk and install the OS and wait and wait and wait and start cursing me because my god is that install taking a day and night. By the time it's done though you'll install the emulator and lo and behold it's a ton faster now. What gives? Why was the install so damn slow? It turns out that the SCSI drive isn't actually faster until you load the driver from the VM additions. So how do you get around this? Well, during install press F6 to load a 3rd party driver. If you go back to the Floppy disk in the machines configuration and and tell it to mount a known Floppy disk image you'll see there's one on there called something like "VM Additions SHUNT SCSI drivers" mount that bad boy and then go back to your install and have it read the drivers off of this disk. It will now use the VM additions SCSI drivers during the install and you won't have to wait 3 hours for the install to finish… This is a huge time saver… Oh and make sure you read that blog entry on the differences about the two and why SCSI versus IDE, it's a huge question that seems to get pounded time and time again.
LightBox Module
Mar 2nd
There's 20 or so new community server modules that were released recently you can find details about them here: http://developer.communityserver.org/default.aspx/CS.FirstCSModuleContent One of hte modules uses a little piece of javascript called LightBox that just outright rocks. I'm in the process (when I can find the time) of writing a photo gallery based on it in C#. It's pretty easy actually. It seems this module may have a bug in it that keeps the image reloading time and time again but it's pretty cool. Below is an image of hasselhoff (no I'm not a huge knightrider fan or anything like that) but this is a pretty funny picture and well it's great for demoing apps like this so click on it and enjoy the magic that is lightbox. — Jess
