Touch the surface
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

This Thursday (October 25, 2007) is the 2nd Annual Chicagoland Innovation Summit, presented by Innovate Now.  Microsoft is a sponsor and will have a large presence at the event.  I will be on hand with several of my colleagues and we will be demonstrating some very forward looking technology.  In addition to our team, there are several other teams that will be demonstrating technology.   This is the third article about some of the innovations that will be showcased, the first article was on Photosynth and is located here and the second article was on Seadragon and is located here.

What is Surface?

Surface is a fundamental paradigm shift in the way that we can interact with computing platforms (and from saving you to have to leave the comment - yes they made a computer out of a big a$$ table).  The software that powers this will be very familiar to Microsoft developers because the User Interface is written in .NET and WPF.  There is a lot of cool technology under the covers that allows the user's gestures to control the device.  If you want to know more about Surface, I would point you toward the write up that my colleague John Mullinax wrote up a few months ago (even though it was written in June, it still holds true today).

I actually got to see the surface in action today.  The feel of the device was quite different than I imagined, I quite frankly expected it to feel like the old table top arcade games from the 1980s.  It has a very cool feel to the top and it does not take long to get used to playing around with the device.  It will still be some time before you see the first devices appear with the customers they have announced as launch partners.  Hopefully the globe trotting surface team that I met today will have some more events where people can experience the surface first hand before the launch.

Innovation begets innovation

The coolest part about surface?  It has an SDK.  Microsoft and their customers have cooked up some pretty cool demos that show you the things they have thought of to do with the surface device.  But what will even be cooler is when the developer community gets a hold of the SDK and starts to create even more interesting applications for the platform.

This Thursday (October 25, 2007) is the 2nd Annual Chicagoland Innovation Summit, presented by Innovate Now.  Microsoft is a sponsor and will have a large presence at the event.  I will be on hand with several of my colleagues and we will be demonstrating some very forward looking technology that I feel is quite innovative.  I thought it would be interesting to give a "sneak peek" of some of the technologies that we will be showcasing at the event.   This is the second article, the first article was on Photosynth and is located here.

Disclaimer

This blog entry describes technology that is currently still in the labs environment.  Microsoft's intent with this type of technology is to build it into shipping products or services that are delivered to you.  There are no timelines or product plans available at this time and there is always a chance that you may never see this technology in a shipping product.

What is Seadragon?

Seadragon is a technology that greatly enhances the viewing of images at different resolutions and different bandwidth speeds regardless of the capabilities of the device that it is being viewed on.  I have talked with several people in the past couple of years about the quandary we are in with our devices: some of our devices are getting bigger and some are getting smaller and we want high quality on the device regardless of its size.  I use the example of seeing a 12 Megapixel photo on a large widescreen HD TV versus seeing the same photo on your iPod or Zune.  The Seadragon technologies will help to address this quandary.

Want to see it in action?

Currently there is not a public preview of Seadragon that you can interact with on the web.  If you checked out the Photosynth preview, you have seen some of the Seadragon technology in action (it is part of the overall demonstration).  There is a great video that shows a Seadragon preview from the most recent TED conference embedded below (if you are reading this from a feed reader, you may need to open it in a browser).  We will be demoing a Seadragon client application at the Chicagoland Innovation Summit.

This Thursday (October 25, 2007) is the 2nd Annual Chicagoland Innovation Summit, presented by Innovate Now.  Microsoft is a sponsor and will have a large presence at the event.  I will be on hand with several of my colleagues and we will be demonstrating some very forward looking technology, that I feel is quite innovative.  I thought it would be interesting to give a "sneak peek" of some of the technologies that we will be showcasing at the event.

Disclaimer

This blog entry describes technology that is currently still in the labs environment.  Microsoft's intent with this type of technology is to build it into shipping products or services that are delivered to you.  There are no timelines or product plans available at this time and there is always a chance that you may never see this technology in a shipping product.

What is Photosynth?

The concept with Photosynth is that you take lots of photographs (that are digital or have been converted into digital) of roughly the same area from different angles and you run them through a process that identifies objects that the photographs have in common.  The Photosynth is a representation (part 2d and part 3d) of the pictures that you have taken.  You are able to "browse" through the environment in a way the seems like a virtual world, but you see it with the actual photos that you took.

The implications are limitless

If you have followed this blog, then you will know that I am a photo-hobbyist (still well on the amateur side), and I love taking photos and sharing them with the world.  When I heard about photosynth I was obviously intrigued (truth be told I was at Wrigley Field a couple days after that and took like 300 photos in anticipation of someday being able to synth them).  This could really make a fundamental change in how we recreate our vacations, as an example.

But there is more to this than just being able to recreate a place in time.  I mentioned last year at the .NET User group when I was talking about the semantic web that we were getting pretty good at tagging things and describing them, but we really had not yet tackled the "time" aspect.  I gave a very moving example of pictures taken at the same location in NYC in 1992, September 11th, 2001, September 14th, 2007 and September 11th, 2003.  One of the potential uses of photsynth is to break that time barrier.  Imagine a scene that has not changed much in 80 years (such as a historic theatre that has been preserved), you could intermix images from across the decades.  Cool thought, eh?

Want to see it in action?

Currently you are not able to run the process to synthesize photos yourself, but you can see some stunning examples of photosynths that have been pre-rendered.  The collections require a Windows Platform (XP SP2 or Vista) and IE or Firefox.  Please note that this is pre-Beta technology, so there is a chance that it will not run on your machine.  My favorite collection is the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy.

Having fun with the new Beta of Popfly yet?  In my post the other day I did not get a chance to mention the contest that the Central Region DPE is running for the "Best Mashup" in Popfly.  Creating a mashup in Popfly is simple, but how to enter the contest is kind of complex (It might take you longer to enter than it does to create your entry).  Here are the steps that you follow:

1. Create your mashup in Popfly.  Make sure that you make it viewable to the public (put it on a web page in Popfly is the quickest way).
2. Create a blog entry that links to your mashup.  Feel free to include screenshots and brag about how great your mashup is.
3. Tag blog for Technorati with "PopflyHDC07" (http://www.technorati.com/tag/PopflyHDC07)
4. Go to Jeff Brand's entry on Popfly located here http://slickthought.net/post/Microsoft-Announces-Popfly-Beta-and-Mashup-and-Win-contest.aspx and leave a comment that links to your blog

What do you win and other contest rules

There are a couple of prizes up for grab including a Zune 2 (now with Podcast support!) and a Halo 3 edition XBOX 360.  You have to have your entry posted on Jeff's blog by October 31st.  Jeff is in the Central time zone, so take that into account when you post your comment.  The contest winner will be announced on or about November 9th.

Good luck for those who chose to enter the contest.  Feel free to contact me if you want to bounce around some ideas (I don't think they will let me enter the contest). 

A few weeks ago, at the SilverlightDevCamp in Chicago, George Durzi from The Revere Group said to me "This devcamp is a great event, we should have one of these for SharePoint".  George was instantly drafted into the "SharePoint DevCamp planning committee" along with Kevin Marshall from Clarity Consulting and Chris Kadel from Sogeti.  With just a couple of quick conference calls and a couple hundred "reply all" e-mails, MOSSCamp was born.  Since then we have added IMG to the sponsors and planning committee as well.

MOSSCamp is an unconference style event that is focused on development for the SharePoint platform (both WSS and MOSS 2007).  We will not be covering the deployment or collaboration features of the product (unless someone wants to lead a breakout session on those).  We will have an introduction to SharePoint (optional) for the first hour of the camp, for those who are new to the platform.

Details

Date: November 9th, 2007
Time: 11:00 - 5:30 (optional social afterwards)
Location: Clarity Consulting, One North Franklin, Suite 3400, Chicago, IL 60606

Let's have some fun with this

Devcamps are different from the traditional Microsoft Events that you have been to.  There is no firm agenda, although we do have a tentative schedule of some great speakers lined up.  The schedule will change and there will be lots of impromptu breakouts that will happen over the course of the day (or not depending on how everyone feels about it).  If you got some great stuff to share, you will be encouraged to lead a breakout.  Don't want to lead a break out?  Just participate in the conversation.

Pizza and Beer - all day long.  If you are of legal age and want to participate (no peer pressure here), we will have some great Chicago style pizza and adult beverages for lunch and throughout the day.

Airing of Grievances.  In the great tradition of Festivus, over lunch we are going to ask everyone to tell us about issues they have had with SharePoint.  Our goal is not the bash the product, but have an open discussion about things that need to be improved.  Chris Kadel is planning on bringing a pole.

Free T-shirts.  The sponsors have chipped in to give the first 100 people who register and show up to the camp a free T-shirt, custom designed by Kevin Marshall (and sorry, it only comes in Charlie Brown colors).

MOSS first, then Halo.  After a long day of talking and learning about MOSS, relax with a few games of Halo 3.  We will hang out and have fun for as long as everyone wants.

Lots of prizes.  Wrox has donated a stack of books to giveaway and IMG has donated a training class.  We will also have the usual Microsoft giveaways (software and XBOX games).

Links

Register on the Microsoft Events site (so we know how much pizza and beer to get)
MOSSCamp Wiki (hosted on WSS - of course)
Facebook Event Page 

As I was writing the last blog entry on Popfly going Beta, I realized that I had not yet posted an entry about my article on Enterprise Mashups that is in the current edition of The Architecture Journal.  Josh Holmes, my friend and fellow architect evangelist, co-wrote the article with me this summer.  We got the idea for the article at TechEd in Orlando and submitted the abstract.  In July we found out that we had been accepted and began the process of interviewing and writing and we sent the article to "press" in August.  I would like to thank Simon Guest (Editor in Chief) and the technical editors at the Journal for helping to create the article.  They are a great bunch of people to work with.

If you are interested in reading the article you can see it online here.  I would also encourage you to subscribe to the Architecture Journal by going to http://architecturejournal.net, it is a free subscription (and also it is free of ads as well).   You get the print copy of the article delivered to you on a quarterly basis.

Some thoughts on writing

I would really encourage everyone to try and do some writing.  Articles are a wonderful way to get started (a lot of people think that you have to write a book).  But if you are not up for tackling a full journal article, try an online publication or even your own blog.  Writing really challenges you to think of topic in a different fashion and the process of writing can change the way that you think about a topic.  Honestly the article that Josh and I ended up with was not the article that I had envisioned when we submitted the abstract, because we had to think about the audience of the article, we covered the topic in a lot different way than I though of when we started (for the better I hope).

Never finished

There is a quote that goes something like this:

Great poems are never finished, they are abandoned

What the quote means is that a truly great poem evolves over time.  The poet will continue to work on it and obsess over it, finally he/she has to just walk away from the work and declare it done.  I would rephrase it just slightly for journal articles:

Good articles are never finished, they are submitted seconds before the deadline

Since publication

Our article concludes with a prediction that more enterprises would investigate and adopt mashups in the future (we quoted a McKinsey study that said only 21 percent of the respondents were considering Mashups in their Enterprise).  About 2 days after our article was sent to press the Economist published a survey that 42% of the companies were considering Mashups (double the number).  It is really cool when a prediction comes true. 

I hope you enjoy the article, let me know your thoughts.

This morning Microsoft announced the next iteration of the Popfly application.  Popfly is an end user tool to create mashups is a visual fashion, there is no programming required to create the mashup (although "advanced" mashups will allow you to to inject some of your own code into the process).  Once you have created a mashup using the drag and drop building block features, you can create a web page to host the mashup in, or it has a variety of other options to host the mashup in (including putting it in Facebook).

Popfly was originally announced back in May and at the time it was a closed Alpha that you had to be invited to attend.  I ran out of invites in August when I gave a quick demonstration of Popfly at the Madison .NET User Group and had a line of people waiting for me at the end of the stage.  One of the best things about the move to Beta is that the invite only restriction has been removed.

I have built a couple of Mashups in Popfly and one I can tell you it is very easy because they have pre-built interfaces into some of the most popular Social networks on the Internet (Like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter).  At the Facebook Developer Garage I created some Mashups that pulled photos that were tagged with my name and put them into a spinning globe viewer (yes it looked tacky, but it took 10 minutes and required no code).  At the Silicon Prairie Social we built mashups based on Flickr photos that had a Chicago Theme and we altered back and forth about putting them on a map or a "page turner" type application.

Check out Popfly when you get a chance!

Ron Jacobs Interviewing Revere

I got to spend Monday with Ron Jacobs in Chicago.  For those of you who don't know, Ron is the host of the popular podcast on architecture arCast and its sister video show arCast TV.  Ron is on an 8 city in 12 days tour that is taking him from Boston Remix to Nashville Devlink to the Heartland Developers Conference.  He stopped over in Chicago to record some arCast shows with some local customers.  He recorded one on SOA and Agile development in the Enterprise and one on a Silverlight application that is under development (for those of you that were at SilverlightDevCampChicago, you saw a glimpse of the application during one of the discussions).  When the shows get mixed down and posted,I will be sure to point you to them.

In between shows we had some time to record "B" roll footage, which is the slang term for unrelated footage that is mixed in with the primary footage.  Ron wanted to give the audience the feel that he was in Chicago, so we walked down to the Tribune building and the Wrigley building, as well as shooting some stuff down by the Chicago River.  I would have liked to take Ron up to the Sears Tower, but we just ran out of time.

On Monday night we met up with some local architects for a conversation about architecture, in keeping with the "unique to Chicago" theme, we all met over at Harry Caray's.  My colleagues Robin Mestre and Beth Patton joined us and 8 other architects for some fascinating conversation.  I don't think we get architects together enough to have just casual conversations.

Ron Jacobs

On Podcasting

I am a "wanna be" podcaster.  I have started doing some recording and I have some ideas about the type of shows I want to do and the format of the shows.  Spending the day with Ron has simultaneously inspired me and intimidated me about the whole podcasting experience.  Ron seems like he is a natural at the art and science of podcasting, but he has been doing it for years.  He also is constantly studying.  A lot of our conversations as we walked around downtown Chicago were about things that he learned by studying how professional film makers shot movies (like how outdoor scenes have the audio recorded in the studio and mixed in with some ambient noise).

I got a lot of insight from Ron on how to record good quality podcasts (well at least how to technically record a good podcast - you can still record a bad podcast even with good quality sound).  Here is the best part, you don't have to spend a whole day with Ron to get this insight.  Ron is working on a special edition arCast where he is going to walk everyone through all of his tips and tricks for recording good podcasts.  I shot some video of Ron shooting some video of him recording a podcast for a podcast on how to podcast (it was very existential).

Speaker Badge
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

Yesterday (Saturday the 13th) was the IndyTechFest in Indianapolis, IN.  IndyTechFest is an all day technology conference that is centered around Microsoft Technologies (mainly .NET and SQL Server).  It is co-presented by the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association and the Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server.  It is very similar to the "Day of .NET" or "Deeper in .NET"  events that have been held in other cities.  They had close to 400 attendees and the entire event was free to participants, thanks to some great sponsors.

What does it take to put on a conference like this?

I was amazed at what a professional conference the organizers were able to put on using a volunteer work force, especially because this is the first time that they have held the event.  This event was on-par with smaller technical conferences that I have been to that cost in the neighborhood of $795 to attend.  Some interesting things to note:

• They ordered 100 dozen doughnuts, or roughly 3 for each person
• Each attendee got a "swag" bag that was a nice conference style messenger bag filled with goodies from some of the sponsors (including a T-shirt)
• They had an unreal number of giveaways including over 150 books, a Halo 3 branded XBOX (with controllers and a copy of Halo 3) and a Halo 3 legendary edition (the one with the master chief helmet)
• There were 25 sessions across 3 tracks with lots of great presenters from Indianapolis and from across the region.
  

The Keynote

Buck Foley Keynote
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

The day started off with a bang during the keynote.  They had the usual 10-15 minutes worth of logistical information (thanking the sponsors, describing the session format, talking about the user groups who put on the event).  Then Brad Jones came up to give an overview of the technology landscape in Indiana.  Hey talked about the number and type of jobs that were available in the area (a large number of open positions for people who know the Java platform).  Brad works in the online publishing business, so he also explained how the online publishers "judge" the popularity of technologies based on the number of articles read and keywords searched for.  There was some surprising data in there and I hope to spend some time with Brad to publish some of the findings that he talked about (quick preview: Java is still number one, C/C++ is number 2, Visual Basic is growing like gang busters).  When Brad tried to give give his views on technology trends, he was rudely interrupted...

Buck Foley, a motivational speaker who is "thrice divorced and lives in a van down by the river" busted in on the presentation.  Buck is a distant cousin to Matt Foley, who you may remember from the Saturday Night Live fame.  Buck spent about 15-20 minutes describing his views on technology and giving us a preview of the conference.  This included:

• Pointing out that today's conference was not just about technology you were also going to learn about music (C#)
• "You guys also also going to learn about a lot of Diseases (TFS, VSTS)" he added "You want to make sure that you don't catch any of those"
• Railing on both of my sessions - s+s and mashups
• Giving the most hilarious explanation of LINQ I have ever heard

Dave Bost got the whole thing on video tape, but it is almost unusable because they camera was shaking so much as he was laughing too hard while he was recording.  We are in talks with Buck Foley's agent to get him to appear at an MSDN Event or a Devcares.

Note:  Not only is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, but Buck Foley also donates a portion of his proceeds to the Chris Farley Foundation.

Code to Live roles into town

Code to Live DPE
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

Code To Live is a program that my colleagues Josh Holmes and Steve Loethen are putting on this year.  I will have a separate blog post describing the program and everything that it entails (and ask for your participation in the program).  Josh and Steve are currently on a kick off tour where they are touring around to various events on a Harley-Davidson Road King.  Josh spent Friday and Saturday morning at the Devlink Event in Nashville, TN, but drove up for the afternoon and gave an impromptu "closing remark" to the IndyTechfest crowd.  The crowd really liked the fact that we wheeled the motorcycle into the conference area (not sure if that was cleared with building management ahead of time or not). 

But wait there is more

I did 2 sessions at IndyTechFest.  One on software and services and one on Mashups.  I will give a quick recap of those sessions and post the slides that I used in a blog entry in the next couple of days.  I also recorded a couple of podcasts with some of the speakers at the event including Chad Campbell, Tim Landgrave, Robert Bogue and Brad Jones.  Each podcast was interesting in its own ways, but the one with Brad Jones was especially interesting because I asked him what it takes to put on an event like IndyTechFest.

If you would like to see more pictures from Indy TechFest, please click here.

I got to attend AdobeMAX last week in Chicago and I had an absolute blast and I will probably post a couple of blog entries over the next couple weeks about some of the things that I saw and did.  One of the neatest things I got to do was participate in a "Birds of a Feather" (BOF) session on Monday night.  I have to thank Brian Meloche, who ran the BOF Session, and Luke Kilpatrick who suggested me when Brian said that he was looking for a non-Coldfusion Developer to participate (how more non-CF can you get than a guy that works for Microsoft?).

Coldfusion on the ropes?

During Brian's kickoff to the session (ppt file) he spent some time talking about the reasons that they were looking to promote Coldfusion.  There is a general perception that Coldfusion is either dying or dead.  He cited some examples:

• ComputerWorld listed Coldfusion as number 5 on its list of Top 10 Dead (or dying) computer skills.  It is listed along with OS/2 and non-IP Networks.  It has the distinction of being the newest of the 3 "languages" that was declared dead (COBOL and Powerbuilder were the other 2)
• Software Developer listed it as one of the 12 languages that never took off.  Powerbuilder is also repeated in this list, but those were probably the only 2 languages that the typical IT developer would recognize from the list (I have heard of a couple of the others - but most of the list escapes me as well).
• Probably the biggest kick in the teeth was when sys-con announced they were relaunching the Coldfusion Developer's Journal as the Silverlight Developer's Journal.  This announcement makes no sense to me as the 2 technologies are completely different, but you can see that the Coldfusion guys could take it the wrong way.

The BOF structure

The BOF was run in a brainstorming format, rather than a discussion.  The format was good because it allowed us to rapidly through out ideas, but it was bad because we only had an hour to do the full exercise.  Brainstorming can be a multi-hour process and in some cases it can be days before the strategies are finalized and written up.  As a group we decided on the 3 audiences that we wanted to try and evangelize Coldfusion to: IT Management, non-CF Developers and education (students).  We then broke into teams and did the brainstorming exercise for each of the 3 audiences.  I was in the IT Management group and we had the most spirited discussion, but were also the ones that failed to complete the full exercise (the spirited nature of the discussions got in the way).  Here are the write-ups:

IT Management - http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcdhg6m6_10hp2tsg

Developers - http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcdhg6m6_11gvphp6

Education - http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcdhg6m6_12hgh7gm

Some thoughts

Coldfusion Developers are passionate - I only have to point out that we had nearly 30 people in the room discussing this topic starting at 9:30 at night (after the conference bar closed down) for you to know that they are passionate about their platform.

The Coldfusion platform is probably misunderstood by a lot of people - many people probably think of Coldfusion as a web technology (and it does web well).  I think this comes from the roots of the tool when it was strictly a web platform.  When the people in my group where describing the benefits of the platform, they described it as more of an integration engine that strictly a web platform.

Microsoft gets a lot of blame - The education audience specifically called out Microsoft for doing "too good" of a job at evangelizing to the education audience:

"One of the largest barriers to entry at schools is the fact that Microsoft has a very active education evangelism program for their technologies"

If you happen to be in the Twin Cities on October 27th or you want to take a road trip and see a lot of code, consider going to the Twin Cities Code Camp.  Code Camps are free events (thanks to the sponsors) where the focus is on code.  Unlike the devcamps that we have been having in the Chicago area, a code camp is not focused on just one technology, but you get small doses of a lot of different technologies - all with lots of code!  This is the third time they have had a code camp up there (they had one in Fall 2006 and one in Spring 2007) and the past ones have created a lot of excitement. Jason Bock of Magenic is the chief planner of the TCCC and he does a wonderful job of putting the event together (you have probably seen Jason speak if you attend .NET User Group Meetings).  If you check out the session list you will see it is packed with a lot of cool topics (AJAX, XNA, 3D Game Programming and Robotics Studio).  A couple of my colleagues, Jeff Brand and Mike Benkovich, will be doing presentations as part of the code camp as well.

I gave an overview of Silverlight to the Fox Valley .NET User Group last night in Appleton, WI, I had a lot of fun and they are a really good group of folks up there.  One of the best changes that I have made to my Silverlight overview since I first gave it out in Madison, WI at the Madison .NET Users Group in June is that I have started to work in Silverlight applications that have been created by people outside of Microsoft.  In June Silverlight was new enough that most of the samples were from Microsoft or companies that worked specifically to create samples for MIX.

One of the coolest samples out there now is the Farseer Physics Engine for Silverlight 1.1.  The Farseer engine was originally built for the XNA platform in order to create 2D games for the XBOX 360 platform.  Briefly put, physics are very important to game play.  How objects move and interact with each other pretty much is 50% of the game play, the story and some of the other effects (like Audio) are the rest of the game.  If you are interested in checking out the engine itself, the project is on codeplex.

Small World isn't it

I was ending my presentation by showing 3 or 4 real world samples of Silverlight.  When I pulled up the Silverlight version of Farseer, someone in the back of the room raise their hand and pointed to the person next to them and said "He wrote Farseer", sure enough Jeff Weber was in the room (note: Jeff is the genius behind the engine, Bill Reiss of Blue Rose Games did the Silverlight work).  I always say that every time that you present on a subject to a room full of people there is at least 1 person in the room who knows more about it than you, but this one takes the cake!  I was so freaked out by the coincidence, that I did not get a chance to tell Jeff how cool his engine was.

Microsoft takes its relationship with the design community very seriously.  As a technology company we are pretty good at talking with developers, but you can't have the same conversation with a designer that you have with a developer.  We are learning how to talk to this audience, because we think it is very important to us.  Over the past couple of years you may have noticed some of the following:

• Microsoft is developing tools that are designed for and geared towards designers.  The Expression Suite has 4 tools that are built for this audience.
• Microsoft has launched a site that has content for the design audience.  http://www.microsoft.com/design/ is the location for that site.
• Microsoft has hired people who are designers to be evangelist to the design community.  They are called User Experience Evangelist (UXEs) and our local one is Chris Bernard, who can be reached at his blog http://designtthinkingdigest.com.

These are all good resources, but they are very focused on Microsoft talking to the design community.  What was missing was a place where the design community could talk to each other about the Microsoft products and techniques (there are, of course, more general places where designers can build community).  So Microsoft has created a workspace for designers called PhizzPop.  It includes information on techniques to build experiences, A gallery where you can show off your work and networking features that allow you to hook up with designers of similar interests.  I encourage you to check it out and give feedback on ways to make it better.

I have 2 laptops that Microsoft supplies me to do my job.  I got one the day I started (which was absolutely wonderful that I did not have to sit around and wait for hardware) and then I got the second one a couple months later.  The problem that I have had is that I have been using both machines pretty much interchangeably.  I have a lot of the same stuff installed on both of the machines, the only key difference is that one of them is set up to use Visual Studio 2005 and the other with Visual Studio 2008.  The problem that I have is that it seems like I always have the wrong machine with me. 

Some Examples

I was at the SilverlightDevCamp last week and was going to show someone how easy it is to hook a JavaScript event in Silverlight 1.0 and I wanted to do that with Expression Web to show that you did not need to use any Visual Studio voodoo to make it work.  One problem: Expression Web was on the OTHER machine.

I put critical files in a Groove Share so that they are available to me on either machine (Groove is very cool if you have never checked it out).  But I don't put all files on Groove and about once a week I go to look for a file that is on the other machine.

I take a lot of photos when I am at events and I like to upload them live in many cases.  To do that I sync my camera to the laptop I have open and then use the Flickr uploader to send them to the cloud.  I don't send every photo to the cloud and as a result I have photos scattered across 3 machines (I also sync my wife's camera on her laptop).

Potential Solutions

Carry both laptops everywhere I go.  I have done this on many days and it is nice to be able to give any potential demo at any time.  But my shoulder suffers greatly and I have developed a rip in my backpack.

Specialize the laptops into roles.  Turn one of the laptops into my "productivity" machine where I have office, outlook, etc.  Use the other machine as a dedicated demo laptop.  Most of my co-workers do this, so the idea is not novel.

Turn one of the laptops into a media center / gaming PC and use it to record Nick at Night and play Halo 2 PC version.  This idea appealed to me greatly, but I figured that my boss would be none to happy with me not putting the hardware to good use. 

The rest of this blog post will describe how I am setting up the demo machine to drive everything off of Virtual Machines.  I have a few presentations this week, so I will not yet convert the other laptop to the productivity machine yet.  Expect anther boring blog post When I do that.

The Hardware

Dell Latitude D820

4GB of RAM

90 GB Primary Drive

80 GB Drive in the Expansion Module

I picked my Dell laptop as the demo machine for several reasons:  It has more RAM (and RAM is a big factor in performance for virtual machines), it has 2 hard drives that I can use at the same time without plugging in an external drive.  Other than RAM, the best thing you can do is to put the virtual hard drives on a separate spindle.

Items installed in the base operating system

Windows Vista Ultimate x64 edition (with all of the latest patches installed via Automatic update)

Windows Bitlocker for full drive encryption

Corporate supplied anti-virus software (with all of the latest patches and virus definition files installed)

Virtual PC 2007

VPN Client for access to corporate network

That is all I am planning on putting on the host OS.  I am being militant about not putting anything else on it.  I want the host to be very easy to recreate and locked down very tightly.  I will update this post if I go back and put anything else on the machine.

Virtual Machines I plan on creating (or adopting)

A VS 2008 / Silverlight Machine - Windows Vista, Expression Suite, Visual Studio 2008

A SharePoint Environment - Windows 2003 RS, WSS, MOSS 2007, Office 2007, Visual Studio 2005

A Linux Machine - I want a typical Linux Distro to test Moonlight on, suggestions are welcome.