Tech ED SEA 2007 is over, and thankfully so, for it now means we can get back to work. The week basically revolved around different people from Microsoft with varying degrees of competence tried their damn best to convince the 2,000 people in the huge auditoriums that their products were the best on the planet and that even though they were extremely confusing that the real truth of the matter was that they were simple, which is why it took them a week to explain it…

For example, in order to develop SilverLight applications, you not only need to spend a month trying to get Visual Studio installed properly, but you also have to run most of the scripts off ASP, which means that Windows Servers are a must, and that anyone in their right mind would want to host their sites on Linux are bang out of luck. Nonetheless, the end products coming from this new technology are impressive, but to call them the Flash Killer may be a considerably early call to be making…

Our time is going to be much better spent building desktop applications in Adobe AIR, but then, that also means we need to make the big jump and upgrade our Adobe suite to CS3, which to be honest, costs more money than it does to buy a second hand car, not that NI-Limits needs a second hand car, but it will probably be just as useful to us as an upgrade would before we bring in some heavy sales to justify the leap…

To be fair, the conference (Tech ED) did confirm a few things…

Flash CS3 Kicks Royal Arse and Microsoft’s Next Generation of Virtualisation is Just as Impressive!

Curiously (perhaps he or she was actually there), 4sysops reported on much the same as we were planning to the day after the conference’s opening ceremonies (for which Geetha took some video footage of from her new handphone but have not yet prepared for the blog):

Chris Sirrat from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog announced the release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Microsoft’s new centralized management tool for Virtual Server. As I write this, there only is a complete installation as a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) available for download.

Windows IT Pro has (subscribers only) a good feature list of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Server Virtualization (WSV):

  • X64 and virtualization-enabled hardware
  • Support for live backups using VSS
  • MMC-based management console
  • Hypervisor-based architecture
  • 8-way virtual SMP per VM
  • 32GB RAM per VM
  • Guest clustering
  • Host clustering
  • VHD Format
  • Snapshots

However, the focal point of any conversations being had around the Gate’s Mansion these days simple has to be about Gatineau.

Strangely enough, as of this morning, Gatineau still does not have a landing page and the domain is registered to Revlon (Yes The Make-Up Company) Consumer Products Corporation.

The Dot Net equivalent is a landing page that has suddenly struck gold and the ORG TLD is in French so do not really understand what it means or why Microsoft once again chose to brand before registering.

Nonetheless, the Google Analytics competitor certainly looks the part…

It was the Download Squad who first drew our attention to the story:

It looks like Microsoft is preparing to launch a new web-based tool that will be at least as powerful. Microsoft’s Ian Thomas introduced the new project, code-named Gatineau, at Web Analytics Day. A private beta is expected to launch next week. At first, Gatineau will be available only in English and only in countries supported by Microsoft’s adCenter.

Any official information about this project is extremely hard to find at the moment, but you can sign-up to try and join the beta list, but you are warned that in order to use the free services of Gatineau, you must have an adCenter account, which costs US$ 5 to set-up.

Getting back to the wonder of Tech Ed and that if virtualisation was not confusing enough, they have an even more confusing tool call the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) that manages this confusion for you. 4sysops has a write-up available:

The Virtual Machine Manager Administration Console made a good impression to me. It is a bit like the one from ISA Server.

You can use it to do many things where you would otherwise have to work with the ugly Web-based interface of Virtual Server. For example, you can start virtual machines, access them through VMRC, save the state, clone VMs, and so on…

Even though VMRCplus was already step in the right direction, the VMM Administration Console gets to be the first user interface that earns this name.

The hardware requirements are quite huge:

  • Hard disk (if using the default local SQL Server 2005: 7 GB
  • Hard disk (remote SQL Server database instance): 1 GB
  • Hard disk (using VMM as a library server): 80 GB
  • Processor: Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
  • RAM: 2 GB

Notice that these are the hardware requirements from the SCVMM help file. Usually, one has to double Microsoft’s recommendations.

These are the software requirements:

Two very useful in-depth articles regarding user rights this month:

There can be no denying that Windows Server 2008 is going to make a huge difference to the world, and for those wanting to test applications on the server to see if they will work, 4sysops reports that Microsoft have just released Works With Tool (WWT) for Windows Server 2008:

WWT has an easy-to-use wizard that guides you through the software evaluation process. It works a little like a software packager. WWT compares the system before and after the installation of the application. It will then give you information about the files installed such as their location, their version number, if they were signed, etc.

Next you have to check the functionality of your application. WWT will display a form where you have to answer several questions about the results of the test. For example, you have to tell WWT if the system and the application remained stable, if you experienced data loss and so on.