I was amazed to see that overall, the VMWare virtual machine ran 2.9 times faster than the Virtual PC machine. Even more amazing was the performance improvement of the 2D and disk tests, 3.3 and 6.4 times faster respectively. I am now completely sold on the value of the VMWare Workstation license. The best price I found after a quick search was $161. For all the saved frustration in working with a slow virtual machine development image for MOSS, the product is well worth the price. But don't take my word for it, run your own tests if you don't believe me. Of course, if you aren't running a multicore machine, and what self respecting developer isn't, you probably won't see any improvement. On the other hand, if you have at least two cores, choosing save a few bucks seems to penny wise but pound foolish!

Props, kudos, and thanks a million to my good friend Aaron Zupancic, one of Microsoft's most valuable MVPs. Last week I pinged him to ask his opinion about a site I'd found adversting an VS 2008 Pro MSDN Pro 2 year sub for $999. It was a decent price but the site seemed a bit sketchy. He seemed to agree with my assessment and then asked if I'd like one of the complimentary VSTS 2008 MSDN Premium subscriptions that Microsoft had sent him with his MVP package. Wow!

I want to thank Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman and the whole ASP.NET MVC team for making web development fun again. The simplicity of Rails, the power of .NET, and so much more. I've been reading the posts and watching some of the screencasts but had not yet tried it for real. That all changed over the weekend while working my latest pet project which I hope to reveal sometime soon. I decided to put MVC Preview 4 to the test. I was not disappointed. ASP.NET never looked better!

I get a lot of forward email from friends and relatives. I've never felt compelled to do anything with any of them until, bored this evening, I read this one from my father-in-law. I don't know if any of these stories are true or not, but whether they are or aren't, they are. In a time when America seems to be taking much criticism from within and without, it's good to have reminders like these.

One of my very best friends, Phil Burns, whom I love like a brother, called me Friday afternoon. But it wasn't him. It was his phone but I did not recognize the voice on the phone. The voice belonged to a woman whom I assume was a hospital emergency room employee. She informed me that Phil's wife Adria was boarding an ambulance with their 22 month old daughter Serenity to be transported from the American Fork Hospital to the Primary Childrens Hospital in Salt Lake City. I asked what was wrong and she told me that Serenity was very sick and may have leukemia. Serenity is the very definition of purity and beauty. Here large brown eyes, which you can see here on a site that a friend has put together, can melt your heart and make you want to do anything you can to alleviate her suffering.

I am fascinated with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) but the configuration files can be cumbersome. Until now I haven't had the time to investigate programmatic configuration of WCF, but I may be involved in a project soon in which WCF would be useful but where configuration files would present an unnecessary complication to the end user. So I've spent some time researching and experimenting. To my happy surprise, WCF is easily configured programmatically. A little research has resulted in a simple Windows Forms application talking to a Windows Service via WCF while both client and server use a common class library that defines the service contract and data transfer objects. I'll give you a brief overview and then you can download the solution here.

I was playing around with some old code in which I had a custom ConfigurationSection. I had an attribute in the configuration section that I wanted to change from an Int32 to a Double. Seems a simple change. Just a little refactoring of the ConfigurationElement class changing the "int" declaration to "double" and it compiles. But kablam! It does not run but throws a nasty System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException with this explanation: "The default value for the property 'size' has different type than the one of the property itself." Huh? Turns out the type inference on the DefaultValue property in the ConfigurationProperty attribute is rather picky.

When something works well on its own with a high level of reliability, we tend to take it for granted and forget about the mechanics of how it works. We turn the key of our car and expect the engine to fire up. No thought is given to the inner workings of the internal combustion engine. We write .NET code and expect the CLR and its garbage collector to manage memory for us without having to think much about value types, reference types, the stack and the heap. We just write code that works and thank our lucky stars that we've seen the last of malloc. Sure we have to dispose of some objects that reference system or outside resources manually but that's simple work. But sometimes it's fun to look under the hood. And who knows, it might show up on a test. So what is the heap and the stack and what is the difference between a reference type and a value type and what do they have to do with the stack and the heap and garbage collection? You're right. I'm about to tell you.