Eric Cosky

I've been using the Visual Studio 2008 beta for a while now, and recently I discovered the built in support for unit testing. It's pretty slick, well integrated, and soon I found myself using it to answer some performance questions that had been lingering for some time related to how to best pass large value types around in C#. In my case, I'm interested in Matrix3D, a struct with a 4x4 matrix for a total of 16 doubles in it weighing in at 128 bytes. That's quite a chunk of data to pass in as a parameter to a function or to copy from the stack as a return value. Because I have so much code that depends on passing matrices and other large value types around, I decided to use the new unit testing features to try to measure which approach would produce the best performance. This is what I found out.

As I was doing some experiments with my Virtual PC setup, I realized my base disk image was just too small. I was trying to install the Windows Driver Development Kit, and the installation failed because the disk simply had no room for it. When I first created my disk image, which is a basic Windows XP installation on a single NTFS partition that filled the VHD with a variety of utilities added to it to make my work easier, I created the VHD using the disk wizard with the disk size to 4 GB. I thought that because I had set it to be a dynamically expanding disk that it would allow the disk to grow to any size I needed later. Unfortunately, I was wrong; the disk is limited to 4GB but it will only be as large as is needed to store the used sectors. This makes sense now that I know more about it, but I was left with a decision to either reinstall XP from scratch or find some way to extend the partition.

File Report Generator Screenshot

This is a very simple utility for creating reports about files. You can drag & drop files into it or use it as a Send To target to build a list of files which are then listed out in a format similar to what you would get by using a command line directory command and redirecting the output to a file. It's a bit nicer though, in that you can gather all the files you want reported on and it will sort by folder and various other options.

It's been just over a year now since I switched this website over to Drupal. It was a bit rough at first, not because it was bad but because it comes with a very lean set of modules and to make your site even moderately nice it can take more effort than other websites seem to require. At least, at first.