Every 2 to 3 years I end up purchasing a new powerful laptop in order to get the latest and greatest of what is happening in the Laptop hardware market and run my applications and development tools very fast and furious :)

Well, I just received my AlienWare M17x this weekend and wow! that is one good looking laptop. Very nice indeed!

I purchased the laptop with Quad Core2 Extreme CPUs at 2.53MHZ, 8 Gig RAM DDR3 1333, Two Solid State Drives of 512 Gig (These things are awesome, HIGHLY recommended) and a lot of other top of the line ...

If you are following along in the excellent Walk Through, there is one gotcha.

In the section where you add a custom method to the service, in the current code base you need to add the [Custom] attribute for it to compile:

[Custom] 
public  void ApproveSabbatical(Employee current)

Be sure to tune in to Falafel TV to watch a series of videos on Parallel Computing with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. First out, the 101 video shows you how Parallel.For will drastically improve your performance with virtually no new code…

I was so excited to see MonoTouch released two days ago.  congratulation to Miguel and the team at Novell! I picked up my MacBook Pro where I have been building IPhone apps using XCode (Objective C :( Ah! Karamba!), and installed Mono, MonoDevelop and MonoTouch as soon as I received it from Miguel (Thanks Miguel!).

Well, MonoDevelop started jumping up and down on my dock for few minutes but never started.  Looked at the log files and it seemed like a permission issue with the ~/.WAPI directory.  I am not really a MAC person, so went to Google for ...

I am setting up an environment to test Visual Studio 2010, and will need to be installing a series of releases, each of which can not be uninstalled.

The plan is to install the product in a Virtual Machine, so I don’t have to reinstall my whole actual machine each time. Since the aspects of VS 2010 I want to test are the .NET Parallel Extensions, I need VMs that virtualize multiple cores, so I chose to boot Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper V to host my VMs.

My first task was to create my basic machine, so I ...

In case you wonder, as I did a few days ago, what Hyper V is, here is a simplified answer (the Wikipedia will tell you more):

Hyper V is kind of like Virtual PC for Servers on Steroids: it allows you to efficiently run and manage a whole bunch of different VMs on one machine. Hyper V is a role that is added to Windows 2008 Server (or Windows 2008 Server R2). Once you add the role, some strange things actually happen to your Windows Server installation: it actually becomes it’s own ‘parent partition’ on the server, so that ...

Today I had an interesting battle getting some Virtual Machines connected to the Internet from within their host operating system, Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper V.

Initially, the baffling thing was that I could not enable my Broadcom wireless network adapter on the host partition itself, i.e. from Windows 2008 Server. I dual boot my machine, the other boot option is Windows 7, and it has not problem at all using the card. So I knew there was nothing wrong with the card. Also, the Device Manager on Windows 2008 Server reported that the network adapter was working just fine. I would ...

We are proud to announce that Falafel is a platinum sponsor of this year’s Silicon Valley Code Camp, along with Microsoft, LinkedIn, Oracle and Foothill College, and has several speakers registered for the event.

Lino Tadros will cover the following topics:

• Dependency Properties in WPF & Silverlight
• Silverlight 3 ins & outs
• IPhone Development in C# with MonoTouch

John Waters will talk about:

• Partially Connected Silverlight Applications
• Parallel Programming with .NET

Steve Trefethen is speaking on:

• Extending CruiseControl.NET
• Tour of AutomatedQA's TestComplete 7

And Stephen Dempsey has a talk on:

• Befriending Lambda ...