A few months ago, we started the CLR Team Blog. There are quite a number of posts there and we're getting quite a lot of traffic to the site. It has been a long time overdue, but I'm really excited that our team has a single face now. Please do pop by and take a look.

In addition, the team just completed a ton (a dozen or so) of Channel 9 videos. I've only watched the one with Vance so far, but I expect that they are all very good. If you are a propeller-head, like the rest of us, you'll likely get a kick out of these.

Now that we've shipped Beta 1 of the .NET 4, we should see quite a number of posts on .NET 4. Please do provide us with feedback on what we've built. We're very interesting in what you think.

Having installed Windows 7 RC, I decided to try Windows Virtual PC. I had heard a number of months ago that we were building a new version for Windows 7 that took advantage, actually required, hardware virtualization, but had never tried it. Anyway, I'm quite happy with the experience. I had to do some Vista --> Win7 upgrade testing over the weekend, and did a bunch of it in the new virtual PC. It was quite easy and pretty performant. It also didn't 0wn my machine (the host OS), in terms of performance. I actually kept a virtual machine of Win7 up (that I was testing) for a number of days, even through a number of sleeps (close laptop). It didn't seem to bother my laptop having the VPC up, even though I had a ton of other apps open, and I did fiddle with the Win7 VPC along the way. There just wasn't much of a motivation to close the session. Cool!

I first ran a tool to ensure that my chip (AMD or Intel) supported hardware virtualization. It takes just a few mins to run. It is a good thing to verify that you will have virtualization supported when you make your next PC/chip purchase. I certainly will. Fortunately, two of my work machines support it, and just one doesn't.

I briefly tried the XP mode. Seems to work! I can see using this for the one XP app that I have that doesn't (yet) work on Win7. Scott has a great post on how to use XP mode.

I also like how the management of the virtual machines is implemented via shell extentions (to the Windows Shell). It feels like (and is) a really light-weight experience. I've never really gotten into virtual machines before, and I think that this version will finally hook me!