I have just applied to join the recently created INETA Regional Speaker program.  It’s unclear whether or not there is an approval process.  This program is meant for people who “are not ready for the national program”; read: I’m no Scott Hanselman.  This is the “farm team” for the national program.  I have asked them to add Parallel Programming as a topic and I hope to take my Silverlight and PFX show on the road.

I am proud to be able to announce today that I have been award the Microsoft MVP award in the proficiency of Smart Client technologies. 

I’m extremely appreciative of my nomination and of my new MVP Lead Suzanna Moran.  I’m already excited about the summit next year!  There’s a lot of exciting things coming from MSFT, and I’ve got a lot of community involvement planned for the coming year.

Personal updates: there is no code in this post!

The next stage in my career starts soon, as I have accepted a new full time position as a senior engineer with Big Hammer.

http://www.bighammer.com

I will say only that I’m very excited about this role.  The interview process showed me that there are some fantastic people there, and I expect to have to work very hard to catch up to them.  Let’s be honest, you can’t top that company name either!  I will be taking care of loose ends next week and spending some time with my family.

I also bought something today.

Something big.

Quite possibly the most irresponsible expenditure I have ever made.

You will have to wait some time to learn of it…

My wonderful workstation has not been super stable over the course of the past year; no, it wasn’t Vista.  Most of my issues were related to my network card, on-board my P5N-T.  Things like rebooting (vs. starting cold) would usually lose my Blu-ray drive, some apps would not run due to the network issues, occasionally on cold boot Vista would report that my BIOS was not ACPI compatible.  My circle of hardware buddies agree the motherboard had to go.  I will never buy an nForce chipset again.

I’ve been dealing with a couple of reasonably sized databases and a lot of image processing, so I was about out of disk space on my Raptor.  I decided to dip my toe into the realm of solid state storage.  The best drives seem to be made by Intel however they also carry the largest price premiums, $700 for 64GB is a bit steep.  I did some research and decided on the OCZ Vertex series, $375 for 120GB.  Still not cheap, but with excelled claimed specs I thought I could at least experiment.  I got a 2.5” –> 3.5” converter and rebuilt my main workstation with Win7, the new Gigabyte mobo, and the SSD.

SSD Performance

Windows 7 installed very fast but I didn’t have the foresight to time it.  Windows 7 can shut down in 2 seconds.  Visual Studio 2008 installed in 9 minutes ( I think it was 45 last time).  Office 2007 installed in 5 minutes.  Write speed was looking very good.  Visual Studio 2008 could be launched literally as fast as I could hit the button.  Later, once I had VS add-ins, startup was less stellar. 

Much of the boot time is in the BIOS and can’t be helped except by better BIOS.  Still, once I get to the point where Windows is loading it takes about 10 seconds.  Read speeds are looking very good.  When playing Left 4 Dead, I’m the first one into the map – the speedups here weren’t quite what I expected due to the amount of the work being network related.

All in all, I’m still very happy.  It’s very easy to get used to, I feel like it must not be that fast anymore until I boot up my laptop (no slouch!) and realize this workstation is in fact insanely fast.  I don’t see quite the crazy performance you can read about here but then again I cheaped out, relatively speaking.

All in all, I can’t wait for this technology to go mainstream.

Windows 7

When Vista was getting bad press, I was scratching my head.  I’ve had no Vista related issues.  Now that I’m running the Win7 RC on a critical machine, I’m scratching my head again.  Win7 is getting fantastic press and it seems so incredibly similar to Vista that I have to attribute both cases to the hype machine.  I like jump lists and the new task bar, I can’t comment on how responsive it is since I’ve made major hardware changes.

My Win7 issues have been extremely small, which I would expect since I’m really looking at a slightly prettier version of the Vista kernel.  I have had some warnings like “Install SP1 before running SQL Server 2008” and once in a while when I recover from sleep mode one of my monitors won’t come back to life without flipping the switch on and off.  I wasn’t up to speed with what was in and out of Win7, so I was disappointed that WMP didn’t automagically play my blu-ray discs but I’ll survive.

It’s nice to see Microsoft getting some positive press.  I just hope I can transition to a “real” version of Win7 without rebuilding my machine.

As promised, I am releasing my Parallel xUnit solution built on top of the Task Parallel Library. Last year I released partial code for a solution built on top of my own thread pool. I updated the solution for xUnit 1.1 and used the previous CTP of the Parallel Extensions for .NET; the code should also work with the recently released .NET 4/VS 2010 beta.

As shown in my Parallel Extensions talk at the FVNUG Day of .NET, the unit of parallelism here is the class. Enjoy, and please send me any comments.

Download xunit 1.1 with parallel test runner

For me, the Mix it Up! Tour is over.  Chicago (qua spectator), Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, Appleton (also doing a Parallel Extensions talk at the Fox Valley Day of .NET) , and Eau Claire.  I wish the other folks who are still finishing up some tour dates good luck and I hope they make the necessary bad jokes during my TastingProject.com demo code.

I can now return to my regularly scheduled tech blogging.  I’ve got a lot of incubating things that need to be blogged about as well as posting some code related to the Mix it Up! Tour.

Time to rock out some .NET 4 and blog about it.

The next two stops on the Mix it Up! tour are quickly approaching.  My talk to the Wisconsin .NET Users Group (metro Milwaukee area) has been moved up to this coming Tuesday, May 5th. You can find details on how to register and where to go here.

The following night, Wednesday, May 6th, I will be in Madison.  You can find details on this talk here.

I hope to see you there!

This post is coming to you from my new Mobile Workstation.  Having seen The Vanderboom’s Alienware M17 I knew something similar would be my next laptop but I wasn’t ready to purchase.  My wife’s venerable Tablet PC dying initiated a chain of hand-me-downs ending in me getting a maxed-out M17.  This thing is definitely the nicest laptop I’ve ever owned, and is barely any larger than the Dell Vostro it replaces.

• Vista Ultimate x64
• 17” 1900x1200 screen
• Core 2 Extreme Quad 2.53ghz
• 4GB RAM
• 7200RPM drive
• Blu-ray drive

About the only thing I didn’t upgrade is to get the solid state drive.  When prices come down I’ll upgrade that.

I went for a quad core rather than the fastest dual core in order to help keep forcing myself to think in terms of parallelism when I need a speed increase.  I also have a long-incubating Parallel Programming in .NET talk that I’ve held off on giving publicly because, well, the examples are just plain not that inspiring without at least four cores in my opinion. 

I’m giving the keynote at the Fox Valley Day of .NET next month, but they had some extra session slots.  It looks like my talk on the Parallel Extensions to .NET has been accepted for this conference, so me and my new Alienware pal will be there in style crunching data and graphics.

Also, the keyboard glows.

Last night I did my first stop on the Mix it Up! tour: the Indy NDA group in Indianapolis, IN.  These guys have got it made.  They have an absolutely fantastic group of people, a great location, and a TON of swag at every meeting.  I was pleased to be bringing some t-shirts and copies of Expression Studio only to show up abd find 20 books, a webcam, and various other nice prices already on the swag table.

These guys are hard-core too:  Their attendance is 120 people and up for every event, and they hold various SIG groups right after the main user group meeting.  After I did the Mix it up content they invited me into their Architecture SIG meeting to discuss the MVC pattern and we ended up talking about map reduce and the Parallel Extensions for the .net framework.  Thanks, guys, for having me, and maybe I’ll be back again.