Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

It’s been nearly two weeks since my MacBook Air arrived and I have used it almost exclusively. I bought and setup Parallels 6. I created several Windows 7 Ultimate templates with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Office 2010 Business, and used all my remaining licenses in the process. The VM template was given 60GB of hard disk, 2GB ram, and two cores.

I took it to work and setup a cloned VM as my client development machine. Everything worked better than expected. The MacBook Air built the massive client solution in two minutes and 38 seconds. The previous HP i3 machine with 4GB ram built the solution in just over four minutes. A true testament to the power of the solid state disk if I ever do say so.

Then problems started. First the machine started to freeze. From freezing it went to displaying the power sign of death. Within the first week it crashed five times. It varied from power screens of death, freezing, and even one blue screen within my Windows VM with a “Memory Management” problem. Started to suspect bad RAM at this point, but being new to both the OSX and Parallels I couldn’t tell whether it was hardware or fake hardware causing the problem.

This past Sunday an upgrade was released to Parallels 6, and I’d hoped if it was Parallels maybe it’d be resolved by the update. Unfortunately the upgrade didn’t help resolve the crashing. The crashes were random without being reproducible unless you count when I was in the programming groove it seemed to pick those moments to die. Luckily the MacBook Air boots in no time flat, and I can get my VM to boot relatively fast for a Windows machine.

I ended up contacting Apple support’s fast lane to schedule a service call. Last night I spoke to Cody, the Apple support rep, and booted the Mac to the hardware test utility running off the reinstall thumb drive. The quick hardware test proved to have no known problems. The extended hardware test was run three times in a row. Unfortunately it showed no signs of problems either.

At this point it seems there is no hardware problem, which leads me to believe Parallels 6 is the protagonist in this hardware play. Several other developers at the client site are using MacBook Pro’s with Parallels 6 without any incident. As far as I can tell it seems Parallels 6 does not play well with the MacBook Air. I’ve been researching any known problems (Apple rumors I should say,) and came across several kernel panic threads. The threads were related to first generation Nvidia 320M drivers on the Air. Considering that the Air doesn’t have discrete graphics memory it’s possible the combination of no discrete graphics memory, first gen drivers, and the strain of running Parallels causes a triangle of disaster.

For now I just have to live with the looming crashes, interrupted workflows, and the lost trust in my $1,800 development machine.

A few weeks ago I started the search for a new replacement laptop for the Sony I sold a few months ago. I started by going to the nearby Microcenter and testing the usability of each laptop in the store. I had several make or break criteria I would not budge on. The criteria is below for reference:

• Trackpad centered horizontally
• Trackpad doesn’t move cursor while I type when brushed
• Laptop shell not blindingly glossy (looking at you Toshiba)
• Vent ports on the bottom of the laptop don’t get blocked by resting on legs
• Touching the bottom of the laptop doesn’t burn my hand
• Power cable plug doesn’t wiggle inside the socket
• Power cable must be longer than four feet (Sony power cables SUCK)
• Must have a low profile case easily used on the couch

Shockingly enough only three machines passed this criteria. Asus, Acer, and Apple. Of the three A’s the Asus was by far my favorite. The G series Asus machine with the flat black case, and back vent ports with luke warm bottom set it apart from the rest. The Acer unfortunately had too small of a trackpad where the mouse buttons seemed half the size of the touch area. The only problem with the Asus was the backlit keyboard from an angle shined light from the sides of the keys, and it weighed roughly 12lbs. It was 17” and wasn’t available in the store in a size I felt I could use comfortably on the couch.

The MacBook Pro laptops were nice, but the edges around the laptop were sharp. It felt like it would be painful to use while resting on my lap. The MacBook Air ended up being the all-star of all the laptops I tested out. The trackpad was perfectly centered on the case, it didn’t move my cursor while typing even though it was nearly twice the size of any other trackpads, and the laptop was incredibly cool to the touch. The slim profile of the device made it seem perfect for couch based use, and it weighed 2lbs compared to the 11lb Asus.

I wasn’t totally sold on the specs of the MacBook Air. The low powered Core 2 Duo and lack of discrete graphics memory wasn’t exactly a strong point in my opinion. Still it was the ONLY laptop that matched the majority of my requirements. I ended up checking around StackOverflow for anyone else using the MacBook Air for development, just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and found a few posts about people doing just that. It seemed for the most part to be a decent machine given it’s limited resources.

I ended up ordering a MacBook Air last week. I ordered the 13” with the 2.1ghz core 2 duo, 4GB Ram, and with it came the larger 256GB flash drive. I installed Parallels and setup a development template with Windows 7 running both cores and 2gb Ram. It rated a 4.4 in the Windows Experience Index. Not too shabby considering the HP I use at work is an i3 2.4ghz with 4GB Ram and 512MB discrete graphics memory only rated 4.9.

After running Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010, and an assortment of other development tools within the Windows VPC while listening to podcasts via iTunes running on the Mac I can safely say the system holds up. Compile times on the VM were even faster than the HP running the same large solution natively. I believe the SSD had a lot to do with that fact as the hard drive rated 7.6 out of 7.9 on the experience index on the MacBook Air.

There is one thing to note though. I had a Mac screen of death earlier today after leaving the Mac for 30 minutes to attend a meeting. On returning I went to send the alt-ctrl-del command to unlock the Windows VPC, and received a giant power dialog instructing me to shut down the system. It was a bit odd, and a little disconcerting.

As I type this post from the couch on a Windows VM I have to admit this laptop is quickly growing on me. I literally have the best of both worlds, and don’t seem to be sacrificing anything more than the arm and leg it took to purchase it. I’m definitely glad I had the sense to upgrade the laptop with the faster processor, maximum Ram, and larger hard drive space. I have already used more than 100gb of space after setting up XCode, iPhone/Mac SDKs, and three basic .Net development systems.

Last week I ended up getting up at about 3:30am and couldn’t sleep. So I did what any self respecting nerd would do. I went upstairs, opened up Visual Studio, and started making my first Windows Phone 7 program. I really wanted to create a program to be able to read the Mac address and display it easily from the phone. I quickly realized that the Silverlight functionality available on the phone is incredibly limited. By incredibly it’s really very pathetic. I would say it’s the most closed ecosystem of any mobile phone on the market, with exception to BlackBerry, but even then I haven’t dived into BlackBerry programming since the 8000 series.

It was fine enough to be able to use the emulator for phone development, but since I have a real phone I wanted to dive right into using things I create directly on my device. That’s when I discovered the App Hub. It’s basically like Apple’s development program where you have to pay $99 plus tax to join their little programming community/marketplace. With that cost you you are entitled to exactly one year of membership, and access to using a development device. This is where Apple and Microsoft take a sharp turn away from each other. With Apple it’s a one time yearly fee for complete access to the marketplace, documentation, code development environments (Xcode), SDK’s, and ability use development profiles on your physical devices. Microsoft on the other hand requires a background check to even get started. Microsoft didn't mention this until AFTER I paid them.

I failed the immediate background check. This is the second time I've failed to prove that I am me. It was asking questions related to my mortgage bank, my student loan bank, and what my monthly mortgage rate is. Well, first the mortgage bank list didn’t display my bank, my student loans were paid off/bank not listed, and none of the listed monthly mortgage rate range were even close to mine. Instead of a quick check it’s turned into a week long wait, having to fax a copy of my drivers license, and just today was granted access to start using my device for programming.

Talk about a buzz kill. Nothing like waiting a week with NO status updates to kill my enthusiasm. First the device is incredibly limited in access to physical functionality, and then jumping through hoops even to use the device I paid hard-cash to own really just puts it over the top from being sad to pathetic. Still, I am happy to see they finally agreed I am me, and now from this day forward I actually feel the $100+ dollars I paid to get denied was at least worth _something_. I’m hoping to push out a few project ideas and at least get a bullet point on the resume that I’ve made Phone 7 applications.

As I mentioned previously I embarked on a one certification a month mission. For October I took the 70-528 Web 2.0 certification, and last weekend I took the 70-536 .Net Framework Application Development Foundation exam. I passed and now officially have the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for Web 2.0 Framework certification. I bought a few new study books from Amazon so I’m hoping to keep the ball rolling. December is shaping up to be very difficult to schedule time for an exam with the holidays, but I may make this a new years resolution to continue my goal of one certification a month.