Its been quiet on this page since April, in fact - since 2007 this is the longest period of time that has gone by without any posts on the blog. The reason behind my quiet period has been that I've basically been working way too much. I've had quite a few things on my plate and really haven't had the time to blog at all, hardly had time to tweet even.

This is about to change. I've started clearing up my schedule quite a bit in order to focus more on the things I love; blogging, open-source and being social on the usual suspected social medias. Time to go back to the roots and rediscover the fun.

That being said…
For those of you who have been following my work on Balder have seen the occasional commit, but not at the pace you might be used to from me. I'm very committed to bringing back to life Balder - there are a few things I need to be doing to the library before I'm comfortable, but I'll be posting about that later in a separate post.

Another project that is dear to heart is something called Bifrost, something that has been getting a lot of love the last year and will get even more love moving forward from now. Also a project I will be blogging more about and sharing some of the experience from building with you.

 

Concluding this post with; I'm back and I will be focusing more on the blogosphere and the open-source community moving forward.

First of all, this is not a religious post. Its not a PC vs Mac post, I'm just fed up with the quality of hardware the PC manufacturers are putting out there.

2.5 years ago I switched from being a "PC guy" to my first Mac, and I was really impressed with the quality of the hardware and how it felt. It just felt solid. At that point I was very frustrated with the quality of PC hardware and constant trouble with both desktops and laptops I had bought for home use, but also at work. And I figured it was time to try something else. I was very happy with my switch.

About 2 months ago I decided to go out and buy a PC. Basically I needed it for Windows Phone 7 development, as the emulator for WP7 doesn't work with my virtualization software on the Mac, and also being out in the field doing quite a bit of work for Microsoft, I grew tired of having to have my MacBook Pro taking so much attention.

I researched quite a bit, I wanted a PC that looked nice, had the right spec in terms of performance and memory and also I was looking for one with similar keyboard as on the MacBook Pro - separated keys, as I find that type keyboard to be very efficient to write on. After a long look, I settled in on the HP Envy 17".

Looks nice, felt nice all the way from the packaging. Specs was awesome at the price they are selling it for. Got it and was really psyched (I LOVE HARDWARE). Turned it on; it was realllllly slow and the fan was going completely mad. Figured it might be a software issue, reinstalled windows looked for firmware updates, but didn't work out at all. Sent it back and got a new one within days. The new one was silent and very snappy, I was happy.

Since the PC will not serve as my main computer, I didn't get to use it much and it took a few days before I discovered an issue with it. Turns out that the keyboard was not mounted properly, so it was sticking out on one side and looked really bad (at least after one discovers it). Since one of my criteria was esthetics when buying a new computer, this drove me insane. Discovering this, I really started to look at the rest of the computer and really compare it to my MacBook Pro and I found more annoying things with it, not flaws, just things that annoyed me. Firstly, why is it that the screen on my MBP is about 1cm (half an inch) thick and on the Envy it was about double of that. Why did it weigh more than my MBP. Why wasn't it a unibody design. Plastic feeling.. Arghhh.. I was really annoyed with it. Sent it back, and got my money back this time. Didn't want to try out a third HP.

Went back to my research and looked for a day or so, looked at Dell - they had a few nice ones, but not in stock and frankly I wanted the hardware NOW. Settled in on what I really wanted to buy before I bought the Envy; a Sony Vaio. It looked nice, fit the pricerange, had almost the specs I wanted.

What could go wrong. Well a lot, it turns out. The hardware seems quite OK, the build is not too shabby, very plastic, but I could learn to live it. But still, too thick monitor.
Turning it on, booting into Windows, doing all the necessary initial settings for Windows and a Vaio wizard. First thing I started noticing, the screen - its really not bright as I expect. The Envy was really bright and crystal clear, this was dimmed. Figured it must be a setting. Nope. Then I started getting really annoyed with all the stickers I have to remove from the computer. It looks like a christmas tree. Flashy intel sticker, nvidia, windows, big fat Sony Vaio F-Series sticker, bluetooth and what not. Then I started noticing the fan constantly working - even when completely idle. Don't know why, can't figure out why. Sometimes it turns off, but for the most part you can hear it. I'm not used to that.

Getting over the fact that the hardware does not feel solid, and clearly lacks the production quality that I've grown used to from Apple, there is one more thing that really bugs me with PC manufacturers. Why are you putting all that crappy software on the machines. They come preinstalled with something like 50 apps, and they are mostly crappy. I can see why Microsoft wants to get them to realize they're ruining the Windows experience, because they really are! And most users don't necessarily know how to get it off their computer.

One of the arguments I hear from people about Apple computers, are that they are so expensive. This is something I don't quite get. Going on my quest to find a PC I was aiming around the price range the MBP 15" is at. Sure, both the Envy and the Vaio have a few more features (a ton of connectors on both sides). But when the quality is so bad and their products aren't coming across as solid work - I really don't get it. For the most part I will not be needing all those added features (eSATA for one). I'm more than happy to add $100-$200 on the price if that means I get a computer that just works. You'd probably argue that Apple has their problems as well, sure they have. They've had bumps in the road for their hardware as well, but compared to PCs for my sake at least, I've not had anything but bumps in the road buying PC hardware. I've bought 5 Apple computers in 2.5 years and not had any problem with any of them. In the same timeframe I've bought 4 PCs, and had issues with all of them. So in my book thats pretty bad!

My comment to the PC manufacturers; GET A GRIP. Start delivering quality hardware, stop creating bad user experiences by putting a shitload of software on them. Focus on the end-user!!

I will be sticking with the Vaio, not because I want to - but I really don't see a good alternative, at least not for the type of design I want for my computer (I don't want a Lenovo, because I think they look like crap).

For probably more than a year now, submitting an email to me on my blog hasn't worked. I've looked at the settings a bunch of times but without figuring out the problem. No error messages to be found anywhere. Well, turns out, there was a small typo in the email adress and it has been sending to an inbox that doesn't exist.So, if anyone has been trying to contact me through the contact page, I'm sorry I haven't gotten back to you.

Its been the most hectic couple of months I've ever had since February. 

I've had a few Silverlight courses, been out in the field at all kinda customers, traveling across Norway, doing talks at user groups and at the same time doing some moonlighting for a U.S. based company - and during this time, working hard on Balder and getting more and more features in it, optimizing it and fixing bugs. It has come at a price though, me not being able to post any blogposts and pretty much be passive on Twitter, Facebook and Messenger. My family will be surprised to see me soon, I guess. :) 

Balder is coming a long nicely and I'll be posting a bit about the new features and changes when I get some more time. Soon there will be a new official release, and I'm working on getting together a continuous integration server that will also do nightly builds and push them automatically to Codeplex. Just have to decide which platform I want to run it on - Mac or Windows. 

So until then, have patience with my blog - I'll return and put out quite a few articles I have running around in my brain. 

I've been using CodePlex with both the TFS integration and SVN for quite a while and recently started using GitHub, especially for the Balder project, and must say that I'm very impressed with what they have over at GitHub. Not only is Git something I'm really falling in love with and the way GitHub handles this, but simple things as the Issue tracking is so nice. GitHub is ultrafast, anything one does, its instant. Adding and modifiying issues is like working locally, kudos for this. 

One of the things I discovered the other day was the ability to host your pages there as well. Plain HTML hosting, something I've been missing at CodePlex, the best part, the HTML being hosted is versioned by Git - of course.

 

I've been a Mac owner for about a year now - it takes some time getting used to coming from a hard-core Windows mindset. My goal, entering this new stage, was to suck in all the experience possible from the platform and use Windows as little as possible, but being a .net developer, Mono and MonoDevelop does not quite cut it - so Visual Studio is needed to do proper .net development. With my first Mac I had a Boot Camp partition with Windows installed and used Parallels to access the same installation as well. This opened up a can of trouble when going back and forth between Boot Camp and Parallels because of drivers and such, not to mention Parallels services installed. After a while I figured it was probably better to have a dedicated virtual machine existing in a virtual image. 

Several months later, I'm finally content with the speed of my installation. Here are my findings so far.

 

Stripped down Windows
If you're like me, not using Windows for much - in my case I have basically 3 things installed; Visual Studio, SQL Server and SQL Server Management studio, you are probably better off having a stripped down Windows. This can be achieved in many ways. One way is to take a standard Windows installation and start disabling services and removing Windows features. Another way is to get something called TinyXP. TinyXP is a distribution, not from Microsoft, that has most features removed. There is a boot meny were you can chose what you want installed, and the bare minimum does not include internet explorer, mediaplayer or outlook express. Most "nice to have" services are disabled as well. You can also chose to install it without any driverpacks, to keep the size down. For a virtual machine were the hardware is constant, this is probably the best option. TinyXP as mentioned, does not come from Microsoft, so using it is most likely a violation of the license. Instead of using TinyXP, one can use a tool called nLite or vLite if you prefer Vista. The tool allows you to take your existing XP or Vista install CD/DVD and select what features you want to include. When you're done, the tool will create a new installation CD/DVD for you.

I prefer running Windows XP, as it has the basic featureset I need and Visual Studio and all versions of .net runs on it. 

 

SCSI vs IDE
As with all VM software, Parallels also comes with an option of running the harddrive on an emulated IDE or SCSI bus, the default being IDE as this is more compatible and Windows has default drivers for handling this. My experience so far, is that running on SCSI gives a lot better performance, especially using Visual Studio. It doesn't matter what kind of physical disk you're having, you can still use SCSI even if your physical drive is IDE. For Windows XP you can't simply switch to SCSI by default. Windows XP detects the SCSI adapter to be a BusLogic one, and this one will crash during boot. So, the trick would be for instance to set your CDROM to be SCSI and leave your primary harddrive as IDE and then boot into Windows and go to the device manager and install the SCSI driver which is most likely marked with a question mark stating an error with it. The drivers are located on a floppy image located in /Library/Parallels/Tools/drivers.fdd - mount this in Parallels and install the drivers from the mounted floppy inside Windows XP.

 

Parallels options - Optimization
In Parallels 4, there was great improvement to handling OSX caching. By default, OSX will enforce caching for any files used, meaning that your virtual harddrives could potentially eat up a lot of your memory when in use. On the optimization page, you should leave the "optimizate performance for" option on Virtual Machine, and I prefer to use the Adaptive Hypervisor. What this means, is that it will change focus between OSX and your Virtual Machine for utilizing the CPU and other resources. Also worth mentioning is to set the Better Perfomance option and untick the "Enable battery in virtual machine", that ensures full speed-ahead - allthough draining your battery.

Shared Resources
In Parallels there are several producitivity such as shared folders, shared user profile, shared applications, smart mount and such. My experience is that enabling Shared Profile and Shared Applications lags things a bit, so keeping these off will boost performance a bit.

 

CPU
Parallels has the option of virtualization your diffferent cores, you can select how many cores you want to use for your virtual machine. I go with the number of cores I have (which is 2 on my Macbook Pro), there is quite a performance boost by doing so.

 

3D Acceleration + viewmode
One of the neat features of Parallels introduced in Parallels 3 was the ability to support 3D acceleration. This is really nice if you're using any 3D software or playing games, but for doing software development this does not make any sense. In fact, it seems to slow down regular graphics a bit and if you're using software such as Blend or Visual Studio 2010 that relies on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), it seems to be even slower. My tip is to leave this off and just allocate enough memory to cope with your screen resolution, typically 16MB should be enough.

Another thing that Parallels comes with is the ability to run in what is called a coherence viewmode. This makes your Windows applications appear as if they are a part of the OSX desktop and they float around like any other OSX window. This is great if you're in a multi monitor environment and want to keep some of your Windows windows on seperate monitors. But, there is a downside, performance wize. I prefer running in fullscreen, even if I run on a multi-monitor setup.

 

Sound, USB
Since my Virtual Machines are primarily there to host Visual Studio, I have chosen to disable both sound and USB. Parallels supports virtualization of USB, meaning that the entire USB hub is available within the Virtual Machine and anything connected to any USB port can potentially be connected directly in the Virtual Machine. If you don't really need these, this is another performance boost.

 

Swap files
This tip is more of a best practice regardless if you're running in a virtual machine or not; have a seperate partition or drive for your swap file(s). In Parallels I've chosen to have a seperate harddisk. This boosts performance quite a bit.

 

Fixed size disks
By default Parallels creates growing disks, this is quite a bit slower than a fixed size disk. Since I have several virtual machines, I create my images with a fixed size and set them to the bare minimum, typically 8 or 10 GB and all my data is on a seperate virtual harddrive that all virtual machines share. 

 

Windows Services
Even if I run on a stripped down Windows, some services are still left on after installation. Manually turning these off will increase performance of the Windows installation and use less memory, some of the services you might find running and might not need are:

* Image acquisition - typically used for scanners and such
* Printing - I don't print from Windows, in fact I never print at all - environmental awareness
* Firewall - I don't need it, I have a firewall on the OSX side already and run in Shared Network mode, besides I never surf the web on my Windows installations

 

Why don't you just buy a Windows machine?
This is a question I get a lot. Well, there is no simple answer. At this point in time, I want to explore different things and don't get locked down. I must admit that the look and feel of Apple hardware is quite appealing as well. :)  Even though all of the above research has taken some time to figure out, it has been well worth spending the time. I now have the flexibility I want and can explore multiple operating systems, sure I could just install a "hackintosh" on a Virtual PC or something in Windows on a normal PC. I wanted the real deal and for now I'm content with the situation.

 

There is probably a lot more performance tips out there - I am still digging in my quest to optimize everything to perfection, if you have further tips please leave me a comment. 

I'm working on a WPF 4 project, targetting .net 4 and need to use Visual Studio 2010 beta1 for this. For now I've been handcoding all my Xaml (I know, the designer in VS2010 is quite good - but I kinda love doing Xaml), but I wanted to do some more advanced graphics and I am somewhat used to working with Blend for doing that. So I decided to download the Blend 3 Trial and get going. Only thing was that the installer kept saying "Another installation is in progress. You must complete that installation before continuing this one". I downloaded the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility , but it didn't solve anything. In fact, I couldn't install it even, since it was a Windows Installer, had to install it on another computer and copy the files.

The event viewer was referring to the 'VSTA_IDE_12590_x86_enu' component and a missing directory. This is a package installed by Visual Studio, called Microsoft Visual Studio for Applications 2.0. 

Turns out, the solution is really simple. Just create the directory and try installing again, in my case I had to reboot and then do the installation of Blend. 

And, by the way, if you want to open your project in Blend 3, you need to change the target framework to something that Blend recognize, 3.5 or less. Read more over at Charles Sterling's blog.For me, I must maintain a seperate .net 3.5 project for my frontend for working with Blend as I am targetting .net 4.

 

Im relaunching myself with a brand new design at a brand new location.

This blog will continue over at the following URL: http://www.ingebrigtsen.info

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Hope you´ll enjoy the new design and keep on reading my ramblings. :)

Please leave me a comment if you have any. Also if you feel like your missing something, or you find the design to be ugly or non functional. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

And now for some credits.

I´ve done the design partially myself. Believe me when I say I´m no graphics artist or designer, so I have to get inspiration and "borrow" ideas from here and there. The top header is ofcourse my own, but the content part is a modified version of the Gluttony Wordpress Theme that was adopted to BlogEngine by GravityCube. In addition to this, I´ve gotten the contact actions icons and BlogEngine.net code for using them from David Burke, thanks again for helping me out.

Where did time go??

It's been close to 2 years since my last post..   What happened?    I'll tell you what happened..   5th of March 2005 I became a dad to a beautiful little girl called Mia. We're now expecting another baby in May, so I have to hurry up with blogging till then, seeing that I tend to be totally thrown off for a couple of years when having a baby.. :)