This makes me sad: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/10/rip_mr_burgermaster.html My own personal connection to Burgermaster is manyfold. My first article for Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ) was about the Burgermaster segment in Windows 3.X. When it came time to publish the article, they couldn’t find a suitable graphic image from the article, so they went with the picture of the…
Visual Studio 2010 Linker performance improvements
A long, long time ago I wrote quite a bit about PE files, OBJ files, compilers, linkers, etc… Thus, it warms my heart to see the VC++ linker adding a dedicated thread for writing PDBs, and achieving a nice performance boost as a result. http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/09/10/linker-throughput.aspx
Adventures in creating a Windows 7 HTPC – Part 2
In my previous post, I described the requirements and purchasing decisions around a new Windows Media Center based PC, running Windows 7, and acting as a no-touch appliance. When I left off, I had purchased an HP s5100z PC and added an HD 4350 Video board. The box happily booted Vista Home Basic. At this…
Adventures in creating a Windows 7 HTPC – Part 1
Recently I decided it was time to jump back whole hog into the Windows Media Center experience now that Win7 is baked. In these next few posts, I’ll explain the choices I made and the process I went through to get a first class experience. I had last used the full blown Media Center experience…
Native VHD support in Windows 7 and WS08 R2
This is truly cool stuff. VHDs are no longer “just” a virtualization file format. They’re baked into the OS. Yes, you can boot an entire OS from a single file. You can create a VHD from the Disk Management Console without having Hyper-V installed. Devs will love it because it vastly simplifies testing on different…
64 Logical Processor support in latest Hyper-V
I’ve been waiting for quite a long to post this information. Hyper-V now supports systems with up to 64 cores (we call them LPs). This is 4x the number supported in the original release just 9 months ago. The devs on my team write the code and did the tuning to make this possible. It was our biggest…
New Hyper-V Release Candidate available
If you’re still using the original Hyper-V that runs as part of Windows Server 2008, this is a big deal. While Windows 7 is getting all the attention, the equivalent server version (Windows Server 2008 R2) is also available as a release candidate. This is how you’ll get the latest and greatest Hyper-V. As the…
Analyze Wait Chain – Why is my program stuck?
My new favorite “Nerd” feature in Win7 involves the Resource Monitor (not surprisingly.) It’s mesmerizing at times… Ever had a program get “stuck”, where it seems to be quite obviously waiting for something, but you don’t know what? Install programs that invoke child processes are notorious for this. In the Win7 Resource Monitor app, in…
My favorite Windows 7 feature so far – Resource Monitor
While the Windows 7 UI is currently getting most of the “What’s new?” attention, I’m a system guy at heart. I gravitate towards the tools and features that let me understand what’s going on. Why does program ‘X’ take so long to load? Which of my dozens of services are sucking up the CPU? Which…
Hyper-V gets even better
While there’s much press coverage about Windows 7 hitting beta, the availability of the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta is also big news for me personally. In particular this beta brings the first public look at the next iteration of Hyper-V. There’s several very cool new features. Putting aside any marketing spin, two big features…