Microsoft DreamSpark – FREE is GOOD!

"Free is good!" is one of my favorite sayings, and now it looks like Microsoft is adding another notch in their freedom and goodness belt with the announcement of Microsoft Dreamspark.  This program is intended to get professional-level programming products into the hands of (verified) students. 

The software listed on the DreamSpark site are "Visual Studio 2008 Professional", "Expression Studio", "Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition" and "XNA Game Studio 2.0".  Also included is a (free) 12-month trial subscription to the XNA Creators Club – which normally runs $100…and did I mention that it was all FREE?

Computing Labs

I’m stoked that students will be able to get their hands on VS 2008 Pro.  The Express editions are great…don’t get me wrong…but it’s quite a pain to have to download and install Visual Studio Web Developer Express Edition AND Visual Basic Express AND Visual C# Expess…you get the picture.  Being able to install Visual Studio 2008 Pro and have all of that goodness in one spot is sweet!  Being able to install it on your own box and to be able to install 3rd party tools and have them remain available to boot…even sweeter.

Conventional wisdom was that there was probably a computing site on campus where you could do your computer development work and research on – right?  Probably not.  Sure, there MAY be one site on campus, maybe tucked inside a computer science department or the like – that has programming tools, compilers, developer resources and the like.  The reality of it is that if such a site exists, they’re teaching JAVA and C++ and other conceptual type stuff.  In the unlikely event that it does have Microsoft programming tools on it, it’s probably still got Visual Studio 2003 installed, perhaps with plans to upgrade them to Visual Studio 2005 sometime in the future when the Student and Instructor textbooks come out for VS 2005 and somebody has changed the curriculum to coincide with the "new" technology.  Even then, the lab computers are probably locked down tighter than a drum, and even if you could install any 3rd party tools or add-ins on them, the evening re-imaging batch job will wipe any changes you’ve made (for obvious security and reliability reasons).  The even harsher reality is that the computer sites probably don’t have Visual ANYTHING on their lab systems (well, maybe Visual Notepad).  There are probably thousands of students on campus and what percentage of them have even HEARD of Visual Studio?  Statistically insignificant in terms of the maintenance and upkeep requirements for almost 4+ Gigs of extra stuff to have to store and restore.

Windows Server 2003?

I’m happy that they’re ALMOST making their flagship products available for students to install and run on their own systems.  One quick question though…what’s up with providing Windows Server 2003 Std edition?  Why not Windows Server 2008 Std edition?  Or perhaps a Windows Server 2008 Student Edition or a Virtual PC version of Server 2008?  Server 2008 is faster, more secure, more reliable, more {insert marketing words here}…right?  We gotta get us some off that!

Face it, if I’m interviewing candidates for a position, or interns for an internship, I’d be much more impressed with a candidate with experience with Visual Studio 2008 and how to develop and deploy applications on Server 2008 than I would one who’s familiar with 2003.  I’ve probably already got a heap of over-worked and under-paid employees with Server 2003 experience (I’m included in that mix).  I’m looking for some smarty-pants young’un fresh out of college who can come in and show the rest of us the ropes on the new-and-improved server technologies.

Verified Students

This one is a bit of a sticky-wicket.  I’m not quite sure how Microsoft is going to be able to verify that students are actually students.  The DreamSpark write-up refers to signing onto a Live account (all roads Microsoft start with a Live account ;?) and then having the student key in their campus username/password to verify that they’re actually enrolled as students.  In a College or University that’s firmly in the Microsoft camp, I can see where they can broker a deal with the campus IT department to work out such an authentication scheme.  In the vast majority of institutions, I can forsee a huge kick-back due to the security implications of such a proposal.

Perhaps a "Plan B" solution would be to identify an employee at the academic institution who can verify the credentials of a student?

Thanks

As a .NET users group leader and a member of the academic community, I appreciate this outreach effort by Microsoft to help make these tools and technologies available to those who otherwise couldn’t/wouldn’t afford them.  Many thanks!

Say Goodbye to all those CDs and DVDs

I used to schlep a couple of CD-holders around in my laptop bag all the time.  Back in the good old days you never knew when you were going to be prompted for the original CD/DVD when you were applying a patch (like good old Office used to do).  I quickly learned my lesson and did a custom install with "Run All from my Computer" as the default install choice.  Another gotcha was when you needed to add another service to IIS (like FTP or SMTP) on a Windows Server VM and, of course, you needed the CD.

And, of course it never failed that if I was at work, I left the CD I needed at home.  And if I was at home, well, you know the story.  To get around that problem, I started copying all of my CDs and DVDs to ISO images and carrying around an external USB drive (a teeny little Western Digital Passport) with my arsenal of image files.  Problem solved, I had the required media with me anywhere I went.  The added benefit of things being in an ISO format is that when I create a Virtual PC project, I could just mount the ISO as a virtual CD and things always seemed to install much quicker over slapping a disc in the drive.

I used to do the same thing when I installed apps on my desktop.  I used a program from Slysoft called Virtual Clone Drive to mount the ISO file as a virtual drive and again, lickety split installs.

With my recent choice to bite the bullet and go 64-bit with my new laptop I ran into a little snag.  Virtual Clone Drive no likey 64-bit Vista.  A little searching and I was able to come up with a similar app – enter MagicISO.  It installed fine under Vista x64 and works fine.  No muss, no fuss and no greasy aftertaste.  And now with my second 200Gig HD in the laptop, I can store them all internally and don’t need the external drive.

I still carry around the USB passport drive for backup purposes and "just in case" situations.  Slick little drive that doesn’t require an AC adapter.  It’s completely USB powered, and with only ONE USB port (lots of similar drives need two USB ports, one for the data and the other for extra power).  One caution on these though…they come with a six-inch USB to mini-USB cable and on some systems, you mysteriously can’t get them to be recognized by some computers if you try to use another longer cable.  Must be some voltage drop along the cable with the longer run or something.  This can be a pain if you’re trying to hook the drive up to a tower with the USB ports up high as you might have to set the drive on a book or something for the short cable to reach.  Strange but as long as you stick with the short cable that comes with the drive all seems to work fine.

Configuring the Dell XPS M1730 Laptop

So far so good with the new laptop.  I broke the RAID mirroring between the two 200Gig hard drives and installed Vista x64 Ultimate.  Since this blows away all of the drivers and other Dell-installed software, I had to hit the Dell site and pull down the 64-bit Vista drivers. 

Graphics Card Woes:

Pretty much all of the drivers, including software for the built-in webcam, were covered on the Dell site except for the graphics card – an nVidia GeForce 8700M card – no 64-bit drivers to be found.  Tinkering with the "preview" capability inside my Pictures folders resulted in a black display instead of the expected preview.  I also ran into problems with connecting an external monitor or connecting to an LCD projector.  They just weren’t being picked up using the stock nVidia driver.  Some searching on the nVidia site revealed a Beta driver for the card that, once installed, seems to have fixed both issues.  Hopefully they’ll follow through and get a final release version of the driver out the door.

I installed Visual Studio 2008 and promptly installed the Web Development hotfix that ScottGu blogged about.  So far so good on that front as well.

I pulled down Virtual PC 2007 (64-bit version of course) and installed that and I’m pretty impressed with the performance I’m getting from my old XP Pro VM that I copied onto the second hard drive.  I used to run that particular VM on an external USB drive and it is downright fast on the second internal HD in comparison.

Now it’s time to start making a list of what other software goodies I’ll need to load up to get productive on this machine.  I’ll share the list next time I blog.

Ultimate Developer Laptop

Like any developer/IT pro, my schedule is nowhere close to the mythical 9-5.  I have to put out the fires, keep up with the never-ending onslaught of email, research current and upcoming technologies, keep the servers patched and happy and…oh yeah…code some content.  I can’t seem to fit it all into the daytime hours, so it’s home I go with laptop in tow… 

Okay, it’s late at night, the kids are all in bed and it’s time to squeeze in some non-interrupted coding time.  Out comes the old laptop and – hmmm – we got a bit of a problem Lucy.  I’ve got a 2-3 year old 15" Centrino-based laptop with a max resolution of 1280×768 and a single 80Gig hard drive.  By the time I load the OS, Visual Studio, the MSDN documentation, Virtual PC and a server virtual machine or two – I’m out of space and waaaay under powered.  Not to mention that the latest version of my app and/or the images I needed and/or {insert file here} is still on my desktop machine back at work.  And did I mention that cool developer tool that I loaded on the desktop machine but never got around to installing on the laptop?  So much for my productivity.

In the past, I’ve tried to remote desktop into the machine at work and take it over to get things done.  That way I’m working in the same environment that I had during the day.  When I’m on the road, however, that hotel wi-fi never seems to have enough bandwidth.  Not to mention that trying to develop on a 1280×768 screen is pretty painful.  Just not enough screen real-estate.  Time to look into a notebook that will also serve as a desktop replacement.

The requirements:

• At least 1080 (if not 1200) lines of resolution on a widescreen display to allow me to pin my VS panes open
• Plenty of CPU horsepower while still being able to hold the laptop on your lap without 3rd degree burns
• Support for 4Gigs of RAM
• Dual 7200RPM drives – 1 for the OS and apps, the 2nd spindle for the server Virtual Machines – the bigger the better
• What the heck – let’s go ahead and do Vista x64 while we’re at it
• Let’s make it heavy too.  That way I’ll get a good workout while I’m hoofing it from work to home and back.

The solution:

After much deliberation and searching, I decided on the Dell XPS M1730 gaming laptop. 

I spec’d it out with the 2nd fastest Core 2 Duo proc (never seems to be enough money to go with the fastest proc), 4Gigs of RAM, dual 7200 RPM 200Gig drives and the 1900×1200 display (sweet).  I talked them into leaving off the Aegia Physx board to shave some bucks off the price.  Even with all this hardware goodness, the Dell was STILL about $1,000 cheaper than a loaded MacBook Pro with only one hard drive!  (I so wanted to get a MacBook Pro…just so I could put the "Windows Vista" sticker in the middle of the Apple on the cover.  Oh well.)

Now I’ve got my cake and I can eat it too.  I’ve got my developer environment with me at work, home and on the road, and I’ve got plenty of storage and the 2nd spindle to run my VM’s on.  Now I can wipe my desktop PC and use it to play with Hyper-V when I get my hands on it…

Doug