I have the bad habit of starting a dozen complex blog posts and never getting them done. Here’s a simple start.

I am frustrated. It is way, way to hard to program and manage a programming environment today. I want to play with DSL. For heaven’s sake, I live and breath code generation and I’m not familiar with Microsoft’s DSL tool yet. Aaargh!

So, time to go back into beta land after a year in heads down consulting with 2005 tools. So, much as I hate VPC on my beloved but underpowered little sub five pound baby, I dive into VPC. It did not help that I could not find the disks. A friend of mine said managing a Universal subscription was maybe just not intended for people raised in Alabama. Harrumph! So, I finally get it installed after searching my mountain of old disks (I want to do a ceiling in MSDN disks), and find it. Then I find it in my active disks. Moving on…

So, I install VPC, and while tedious it is surprisingly easy to get the operating system installed. Then I try to find .NET. Eventually I download it again. Comcast has slowed to a crawl here, so that takes all night. Now, the .NET disks are 3.6Gb and my VPC choked on anything over 2.2Gb. It took several hours for me to get all the ducks lined up in a row (and I already know how to mount an ISO image). Here’s the plan I used. I’ll be happy for someone to blog about a better way.

Note in reading this that my son and I call the running VPC a parasite, which I think makes it clear what’s what

1. Copied the ISO image on the host where I had access to it
2. Mounted the ISO image in my host with a utility as a hard drive facsimile (Z:)
   • I used the one from the MSDN FAQ Virtual CD ROM Control Panel for Windows XP. Search the page for ISO. Be sure to read the ReadMe.txt
   • The Daemon tools may have a better interface on the same process
3. Started the VPC parasite and installed the VPC Additions from the VPC parasite Action menu
4. Restarted the VPC parasite
5. On the CD menu I now see the mounted ISO as drive letter Z:. Selected this.
6. Ran the autorun and got the VS Studio install  

You'd think this would be the end of the story. But after hearing about the July CTP of DSL, I can't find it, only an unavailable link to the August CTP. It's really a darn shame, because I'd like to jump into a big Vista/Orcas/WPF VPC, but I thougth I better walk before I run.

Tip if you aren't a VPC guru: Run you're VPC on a differnet hard disk than you're host, even if that means running over USB 2.0 to improve performance (Thanks to Scot Swigart and others).

I am no longer buried in a trench coding project. I’m very interested in the work Rocky Lhotka's (www.Lhotka.net) released in his books recently and am hoping to release a couple of things in response to that, including some templates and generic refactorings. I’m also interested in WWF which I’ll be talking about in Wisconsin in September and DSL. Hopefully I’ll post here more regularly now.