I often get to work with brilliant people. That’s one of the real benefits of being a consultant, I would argue. Last week I got to know Thomas Gyllencreutz, who came onboard my project. He didn’t waste any time in getting the performance in our virtual development environments to new heights. This post is a condensation of his findings that really got our Virtual PC images flying.

A general performance tip is to put your virtual hard drive (.vhd-file) on a separate hard drive, as suggested by Mr. Hanselman.

OK, to get the multi-core support you’ll need to find out how many cores your system has. The easiest way to do that is to open Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+Esc) and check the number of CPU boxes under the performance tab:

This guide expects you to have an existing .VHD-file—the one with the...

The last month I’ve read The Goal by Elijah M. Goldratt. Apart from being a great book, it was also written in a really interesting way. It’s a novel in which we follow Alex Rogo and how he learns about the Theory of Constraints. I thought that I might try to mimic that style a bit in this post.

The subject I’m getting back to again and again nowadays is agile for the whole project. In my opinion, agile thoughts often come from development and never get a good foothold in the analysis/requirements or testing departments. “Yes, by all means… Do this agile you like so much, but please let us write the specs and test cases as we always have done.” – is a common reasoning where I’ve been.

OK – on to the story. It comes in two flavors, set in two different companies; Water-falling...

It’s been a while since I blogged. Twitter is taking over. I compensate that with a major blog post.

Background

I written about the project I’m in right now a couple of times before and to make a long story short; we don’t have any requirements! We only have the existing application which we are to “convert” from VB6 to VB.NET. 1:1 is the mantra – which is to be understood as: functional the same.

I have suggested for the team that we work with BDD (or ATDD if you like) to create the requirements as we go. They liked it. A lot!

To not let this post grow totally out of control, I leave the description for that process to another post.

To put my money where my mouth is and show them how it should be accomplished. This blog post is that description.

OK – this might not be one of my ordinary subjects but this was soo annoying. Sometimes when I closed the lid of my MacBook Pro there were something still running. This caused the battery to drain in about 20 minutes and the computer to go very, very hot. For the first time ever I actually burned myself on a computer.

I have checked around the net for a solution, and even went into a MacStore but as the error comes and goes there’s not much security in the tips.

As suspected one process doesn’t have time to close down and just keeps running. But which one?

In my case it was something called Safe Sleep (that prevents unsaved data from being lost if the power goes out). This is disabled by the following commands in a Terminal window:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0...