1dent1ty cHa0s

So which is it folks?

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Sometimes I just have to do things "the hard way", I'll admin it.  I have a fair amount time (weeks of man hours at least) invested in Virtual PC 2007 images but now that more and more x64 based support is required for things like testing ILM "2" beta 2 I needed to have VMWare Workstation 6 provide hosting of the 64-bit guest OS.  Virtual PC still doesn't support it and I don't have the hardware lying around to dedicate to Hypervisor (much less anything beefy enough at home) so I find myself attempting to run both VPC and VMWare images at the same time.  My first attempts invoked the blue screen of fiendishness.

I have AD Domain Controllers, Database and Web/SharePoint servers already setup in my domain and I didn't want to have to convert all of the VPC's to VMWare images so...after a few attempts the fiend revealed itself that allowed these two guys to coexist.

Hardware Virtualization

As it turns out, disabling Hardware Virtualization support on the VPC images allowed them to coexist with running VM's.  Go figure...I thought VT was supposed to allow for better separation and not be the source of these issues?

Yes, my VMWare hosted ILM "2" Beta 2 image is now part of an AD Domain hosted in a VPC .

I do have to stop and give some quick kudos to Windows Live OneCare 2.0 team with regards to the fast moving instant messenger virus that has been going around.  OneCare flags this one as Win32/DelfInject.gen!AG and it saved me from a rather unpleasant encounter (yes I clicked the link).  I know several people who were using products from other vendors that shall remain nameless and they were not so lucky.

I use OneCare 2.0 on my HP Pavillion dv9500t loaded with Vista Ultimate x64 (yes, this is my "work PC" - 4GB, dual hard drives and 17" of Visual Studio, 'nuf said) and I've been very happy with the very low footprint and obvious effectiveness of OneCare running on Vista.  The 2.0 release added support for Vista x64 and all version include licenses for up to 3 computers.

My only issue with Vista x64 has been lack of support for Flash in the 64-bit browser; however the 32-bit browser works fine.  On the other hand, Jerry Camel really hates that he can't do Print to OneNote in Vista x64.

In Using Extension Methods in VS2008, I talked about how cool it might be to use Extension Methods as a way to add some handy functions directly to the string class. Here is the code for adding "ToUTCCodedTime" as an extended method to the string class using Extensions Methods which are now possible in .NET 3.5.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ClassLibrary1
{
 public static class SharedCode
 {
 public static string ToUTCCodedTime(this string t)
 {
 // Method Extension Class
 // Adds a new method to the string class
 DateTime dt = System.DateTime.Parse(t).ToUniversalTime();
 return dt.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss.0Z");
 }
 }
}

For the uninitiated, you start by creating a new Class Library and then pasting this code into it. I should also note here that the class must be a static class in order to contain Extension Methods. If you already have a class library that you're using to store common shared functions then you can just paste the body of the class in (the public static string block...). To use the class, make sure each of your projects has a reference to the new class and that you have a valid using directive for it. Once you do, you'll be able to take any string value and do this:

string strValue = strTime.ToUTCCodedTime;

IntelliSense will display this method using the extension method icon as shown below.

So that's it, you can create your own extension methods for practically any class (not just string) by changing the reference 'this string t' to refer to the proper class type. So, 'this int t' should work for integers.