Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
[Twitter] simonbrown: Eating cream cakes in the sun at jersey zoo ... chillin'
[Coding the Architecture] Just a short note to plug a handful of sessions that Kevin and I are presenting at the upcoming Software Architect 2008 conference, 3rd-5th June, London. 1. Coding the Architecture : From Developer to Architect The first is a re-run of our ...
Windows on my Mac
I've been wanting to upgrade my Office X for Mac installation to the new Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and instead of going for the standard edition, I opted for the professional edition that also includes a copy of Virtual PC for Mac. I did this because (a) I thought that Virtual PC would be useful sometimes and (b) Amazon UK have some great prices at the moment on this stuff. Office X is okay, but feels out of date compared with even Office XP on Windows. For example, it's good to be able to see inline reviewer comments. Office 2004 for Mac is great.
Anyway, after freeing up some space on my harddisk, I installed Virtual PC. This is a two step process - first you install Virtual PC, then you install a virtual machine. All in all this whole process took around 20 minutes, mainly because I didn't have to manually configure a virtual machine. The CDs include a pre-configured virtual machine with Windows XP Professional so all I had to do, after installation, was set my timezone and assign an administrator password. Here's a screenshot of Windows in action.
This is some pretty cool technology and there's a certain wow factor about seeing Windows startup on your Mac. However, there's an even bigger wow factor seeing Windows startup on your Mac in full screen mode! You could easily fool somebody into thinking it's a Windows box, albeit a slow one. To be honest, Virtual PC runs faster than I imagined, although it's not exactly quick. I'm only envisaging light usage, although I have installed JDK 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5 just to get a grasp on how much slower Virtual PC really is. Tomcat reports that it starts in around 20 seconds on my PowerBook and around 30 seconds on VPC. However, the time taken from typing startup.bat to Tomcat actually starting is around 45 seconds, so I think there's some additional slowness around starting up the JVM.
I think for light work, VPC is going to be a really useful addition to my Mac. There have been times in the past where I could have done with a copy of Project/Visio/etc and besides, I can't get Apple Mail or Entourage to hook up to the Exchange 2003 server at work. Being able to restart Windows and keep working in OS X is kind of fun but by far the most reassuring aspect is knowing that all of the usual Appley goodness is just a single press of the Apple key away, even when running VPC in full screen mode.