Good and Bad Software

Currently on my bad software list is the MSDN search engine. It seems it has been many months since the search engine worked well. Last night a search produced results where the same article appeared about 100 times in the result list. Search results never seem to find MSDN Magazine articles, unless you go to the home page and search just magazine content. It used to find them. It seems very broke.

On the good software list is Virtual PC.

I currently have the following Virtual PCs setup:

• Whidbey - Windows 2000 Server with the Whidbey beta installed
• RSBETA - Windows 2000 with the Reporting Services beta and SQL 2000 installed
• Mandrake - Mandrake 9 distro of linux. Complete with a functional Mono .NET environment.
• Longhorn - The PDC build of Longhorn, with Whidbey and the SDK installed.
• Experiment 2000 - My Win 2000 plaground for trial software, etc.
• Exchange - Where I installed Exchange Server 2003 to play around.
• CSK2000 - Where I play with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit on Windows 2000
• CSK2003 - Where I play with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit on Windows 2003 WebEdition

Virtual PC is a great way to experiment with software, test, use different browser versions - there are so many possibilities. It has an undo feature to reset any changes you've made - so even the worst software install can be undone. I keep a Virtual PC image of a Windows 2000 SP4 install around, and whenever I need a new virtual PC I make a copy of the file, attach it to a Virtual PC, and I'm off.

Best of all it keeps my primary OS (2003 Enterprise Server) nice and tidy.