Sam Gentile's Blog

The last N&N was Feb 20, a month and 1/2 ago. I'm too busy being productive adding business value to our product to blog much considering I am still close to a intra-state move and dealing with the sale of one house and purchase of another. Meanwhile, the weekly plane flight commutes are just no fun especially after 6 months straight.

• David Cross, in the UAC group at Microsoft, has confirmed that the users accounts created on Windows Vista Beta2 will be standard users.  Yep, thats right...not an Admin, not a Protected Admin, but a standard user. Finally! I will still need an Administrator account from time to time though, which in the latest build I can't find, and this trick no longer works.
• SuperFetch is a new feature in Vista that learns which applications you use most and preloads them into memory, reducing paging and load times. This is similar to the prefetch used in XP however, Microsoft has come up with a very complex prioritization scheme that will differentiate which applications you use and when you use them. What SuperFetch also allows you to do is insert a USB thumbdrive and use it to cache, rather than paging to the hard drive. Hard drives are much slower than flash based memory, and by doing this, there is a noticable performance boost.
• My friends Beth, Frans, Jeffery, Raymond have all been renewed as MVPs! Great going and more excellence for Codebetter
• Nicholas Allen from the WCF team has started posting in Indigo Internals. Awesome!
• New versions of the MSF for Agile Software Development Process Guidance and MSF for CMMI Process Improvement have been posted to the Microsoft Download Center (VSTS MSF Agile 8.0)
• Wow! 32-Bit and 64-Bit versions of Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise are FREE now for download and will support running Linux
• The BCL Team Blog has been relaunched
• The MSBuild Community Tasks Project releases version v1.1.0.145. There are many new tasks in this release [via Mike]
• Rails 1.1 has been released with over 500 features, with some cool small "forgotten features."

• Mike Clark just announced a new course from the perpetually-sold-out Pragmatic Studio on Production Rails deployment.

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