Peter blogged on my laptop dev config. I used to have two machines, my “production” machine for email and other office productivity and the my “development” machine that I wouldn’t mind paving at a moments notice, if needed. Now, I only have one machine so I can’t afford to be able to pave with extreme prejudice. Since I have a honkin’ laptop (2.4 GHz P4, 1GB RAM, 85GB HD) I decided to go the VPC approach. All I have installed in my host is Office 2003, SharpReader and VPC 2004 (it went gold today, so I upgraded). However, I have six VPC’s I’m managing. I can’t run them all at the same time of course, but it does give me a lot of flexibility. I run two primary VPC’s – one for WinXP and one for WS03. I’m actually running the WinXP VPC in the background as I blog – I’m installing the VSIP SDK (with the VSIP Extras Beta on deck). Then I have three dogfood VPCs – Longhorn, Whidbey and Indigo. Finally, I have a WS03 VPC running WSS. I need to upgrade my SharePoint Syndication project to support WSS RTM, but I just haven’t had the time.

Internally, we have a group that produces demo images and VPC’s for the technical field. So if I’m going to demo BTS 2004, I don’t have to go thru all the install process – I can either run a VPC or image my machine. Typically, I just use their base image VPC’s and install what I need.

Only downside to this approach – chews battery life like there is no tomorrow. I have two spare batteries and was completely drained of power going coast-to-coast a few weeks ago.

Authenticated feed support is all the rage. First RSS Bandit, now SharpReader. Now I’ve just got to update the SharePoint Syndication project to support the RTM version of WSS (in my copious spare time).

So my SAF coverage stinks. I missed all of Day #3 sick at home. Which means I missed BillG’s keynote. 😦

I did moderate an awesome session on Architecting for Manageability today. The session was awesome because of the speaker Praerit Garg (not because of my awesome if under-utilized moderator skills). He talked about the Dynamic System Initiative and the System Definition Model. DSI and SDM are very important for the Whitehorse analysis and design tools. However, you don’t need to wait for Whidbey to start designing for operations. Check out this whitepaper on how you can start adding support for management models in your applications today.

I don’t want to turn this blog into “What weird books did .NEAT use to as window dressing @ the SAF” but I can’t resist this one: “Los Negocios en la Era Digital” by Bill Gates. It’s a Spanish translation of “Business @ the Speed of Thought” though the literal translation of the Spanish title is “Businesses in the Digital Era”.

Speaking of Portuguese (I know, I wasn’t speaking of Portuguese, but it’s closely related to Spanish), check out Jose Silva’s blog (if you don’t speak Portuguese, check out the AltaVista Babelfish translation). Jose is an architect evangelist for Microsoft from Portugal. His most recent entry was on Keith Short’s PDC Architecture Symposium Session. RSS-Subscribed.

Day one of SAF was great, if short. It didn’t get started until 2PM so people could fly in that morning. The event is held @ the MS Conference Center on campus. The MSCC is pretty sterile, like most conference centers, so we bring in comfy furniture, rugs, zen gardens, fountains, plants so the rooms have a much friendlier feel to them. The only technology trappings are that the main meeting room is ringed with shared PCs and we have a ton of power strips strategically placed though mostly out of site under furniture. We also have bookshelves – the content of which is pretty funny. Mostly knick-knacks and very few books. The one closest to me has two books: Hunting Dinosaurs and Great Taste-Low Fat Holiday Cooking. Interesting choices for an architect event. Of course, we’re not expecting anyone to sit and read.

We had two keynotes yesterday: Pat Helland and David Campbell. For those following along at home, yes they presented the first two sessions @ the PDC Architecture Symposium. While the content was similar (baring changes Pat made @ 10pm Sunday night to adjust to the new PPT template), the big new addition was the launch of our new “Metropolis” metaphor. I hope to get this deck posted to the architecture center soon, but the basic idea is to draw an analogy between the way cities evolved in the late 1800′s with the advent of the railroad and the ways IT shops will evolve with the advent of the Internet. It’s a very interesting metaphor that I think we can learn a lot about where we are headed in this industry. More when we get the deck posted.

Today, we are having mostly breakout discussions. Instead of big breakout sessions, a la the PDC, we limit our discussion breakouts to around fifteen customers plus the MSFT speaker, moderator and note taker. Today, I’m moderating discussions on Envisioning the Service Oriented Enterprise and Microsoft’s Internal Approach to Enterprise Architecture. I’ll blog on those later. We also have a keynote by John Shewchuk, architect from the Indigo team. Should be quite a day.