Better late than Never

I'm finally setting up my lab to do my SQL2005 investigations. I'm blogging from my glass cube running the Vista Beta, remote desktopping into the virtual server and creating some virtual machines. I think all the layers of remoting are making the mouse not work correctly on the DOS install for windows 2003 R2 where I'll be installing SQL 2005. Let's see Vista->Remote Desktop->Virtual Server->ActiveX Remote Control->DOS… ya. No problem.

This time, when I'm setting up my Virtual Machines I'm going to take a tip from my buddy John and create a root folder for all my images. D:\vmroot will be where all the ISOs and VHDs live. This will save me digging into the c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Shared Virtual Machines tree. I can also save myself some cutting and pasting by adding d:\vmroot to the "Search Paths" on Virtual Server. Good thing it took me 6 months of using Virtual Server to figure that out. From the virtual server admin web site select "Server Properties" from the navigation panel and then "Search Paths". This make whatever is in that path show up on all the ISO and VHD selection dropdowns. Very nice.

BTW, I'm using the new Word2007 Blog Posting feature to auth-publish to a Blogger site. It's pretty slick one you figure it out. I think the trick is you have to have an outlook account configured to send email from. I got some cryptic error messages about not being able to set up a blogging provider, then everything magically started working when I added an email account to outlook. No way to verify, but if your having trouble posting to your blog from Word 2007, try that. Including pictures has always been an issue with blogger, and this wordblog stuff does not make that any easier. If I get inspired, I'll try and make the picture thing work, but until then it's just text. Now if I can Blog from OneNote….Now we are talking.

Anyway, back to SQL and the CLR: I'm running thru "A developer's guide to SQL Server 2005" chapter by chapter and blogging all the way. I'm starting off with a fresh install of SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition running in a Virtual Machine of Windows 2003 R2. I'll be using Vista and 2003R2 for my client tools.