Yes, it's been a while since my last post . I've been completely buried under a number of projects, including kicking off this year's BDPA-Charlotte High School Computer Competition (HSCC) training program. The good news is I learned a few things, which I may write about in future blogs.

I also got to revisit the use of virtualization in a way I hadn't used it since the 90's. Back then developers used VMware to create test environments on their desktops. We'd configure the Virtual Machine (VM) to write disk IO to a temporary scratch file, so every time we restarted the VM we'd have a pristine environment. Normally, the HSCC students receive a USB drive with a VirtualBox image of Windows XP configured with all the software needed for the program. This year we moved to a computer lab with PCs that weren't really powerful enough to run our VirtualBox image. However, our hosts were generous enough to allow installing the development software directly onto their lab PCs.

Creating an Install script

My first attempt to install the development software involved giving directions to a couple of volunteers. That was a catastrophe! Let's face it; if you really want something done right several times you gotta automate it. Unlike OS/2 (yes, I'm that old!) apps, which nearly always support unattended installation, Windows apps generally resist attempts to automate their installation.  I learned more than I expected about Windows Scripting Host (WSH) and Microsoft HTML Applications (HTA). For example, did you know that there's no sleep function in HTAs? The only real workaround is to dynamically create a VBScript file with the desired wait and execute that file with a background call to cscript.exe. I did the poor-man's workaround of calling "ping -n <number of seconds to sleep> localhost."  In any event, creating a script to install Java, Tomcat, MySQL, Eclipse and various other packages took a fair amount of trial and error.

Luckily, virtualization software still allows developers to repeatedly return their VMs to a known state. In VirtualBox it's as easy as pushing the Snapshot button on a VM. When I close a VM without shutting down the guest operating system VirtualBox even asks if I'd like to go back to the last snapshot.

What could be easier? Seriously, I never could have gotten the installation script tested on Windows XP and Vista without virtualization. Getting the Vista VM is a whole story unto itself. For now, I will spare you my tirade over how OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) give us these bogus "Recovery Disks" instead of a real Windows install DVD. The hassle of.....

No, I said I was going to spare you that tirade! There will plenty of time for that next week after I tell you have to P2V a Windows Vista laptop to VirtualBox.