Phil Scott's WebLog

I was curious to see how VMWare 4.0 works (in particular the Windows 2003 Server RC2 installs went), so I signed up and downloaded the beta.  Now, since this is a beta I naturally didn't want to hose my home machine, so I instinctively fired up VMWare to create a virtual machine to test VMware on.  I think I just went cross-eyed. 

A lot of interest amongst the DotNetBloggers about InfoPath, so perhaps some will find this helpful: http://microsoft.order-5.com/officeeval/

Finally got into the 70-300 exam after a week of teaching SQL.  Pretty interesting exam.  The case studies weren't your typical "you are developing an n-tier accounting system..." types stuff.  A little new app development, extending an app, and replacing AS/400.  Three case studies and I was out.  I felt pretty good about most of my answers.  Had one question about ORM that I had to reach into the cellars of my brain from the MSDN video on it.  Overall, I haven't the foggiest of ideas on how to tell someone to prepare for that exam besides "work with a lot of .NET."

Microsoft has announced pricing for their different flavors of Windows Server 2003.  Most interesting is that the web server edition is coming in at $399.  Here's a table showing how the different editions differ.

Ted Neward went gonzo-blogging some good info on EJB and the such. I especially liked the part about going against the Zen.  I think I'm going to just simply rip-off the zen approach and the kwan concepts for my .NET classes (giving credit where credit is due of course).  "Yeah, man, it means love, respect, community... and the dollars too.The package. The kwan."

Here's a sanitized version of Joel's Building Communities with Software article mentioned previously.  You can never go wrong with a StrongBad reference either.  They say smart people use StrongBad reference's on their blogs.  And choose green. 

On the Path to XML Hell [via Scripting.com].  Hey, I feel this guy's pain.  I'm teaching courses 1013 (Mastering VB6) and 1017 (Mastering Inder-freakin'-dev 6) in the next few months.  At which point I will be faced with chapters talking about how DHTML Scriptlets are the solution to everything, how COM will last forever and ADO is the most usefull technology for accessing databases. 

Not sure how many people subscribe to Joel on Software and got his "Building Communities with Software" e-mail, but it is an interesting read.  Drop me a line if you want a copy - Joel asks that nobody reprint the article on their site and has choosen not to make some of the info public.  Anyways, he mentions the fact that the "notify when somebody replies to me" is not implemented because it kills a site because people will post something, leave the site and never come back.  "The end."  This is somewhat I feel about RSS.  While having a news aggregator is nice and makes things easier to read more "stuff," you never get a feel of community and it's harder to get a feel for the poster.  For a long time I was reading blogs without an aggregator.  I got to know blogs not just on their content, but also on the links they provide, what it looked like, what software they were running and so on.