A new virtualization player is on the horizont...

I develop in the meantime virtual, meaning I have on my workstation (an Intellistation with Dual-XEON 3,2 GHz and 4 GB RAM) for the XP-Prof-System with RAD Studio 2007 a SCSI-Ultra-320 solution with two 15k-harddrives and for the Windows 2003-Server a Firewire-800-system; it works under VMWare Server 1.0.4. The backup is on a USB2-HDD and I think this is a highly performance solution. I tested the MS-solution but the VMWare is in my IMO faster..
And today I received the info hat there is till tomorrow another player in the virtual-world (not the 2nd-life ): Oracle ....
Oracle VM is "is three times more efficient than other server virtualization products", wooow this is a big promise.... and:
"Oracle VM software is available for free download."

There are some interestings things of Oracle VM in the doc's:
"System Requirements
Oracle VM installs directly on server hardware and does not require a host operating system."
this means no guest-os-layer....

from the FAQ:
Who can use Oracle VM?
Any user can get Oracle VM and associated support from Oracle whether they use Oracle products or third party applications.

I wonder about the first impressions of this virtual-solution in the next days on my workstation....
Oracle VM can be freely downloaded starting Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at oracle.com

Namespaces and Types of the .net framework 3.5

I've done in the past few weeks some small projects with win32 (I know, it's death but it really works, believe me) and if I need things from the .net-world I've written the assemblies and application in BDS2006 and RAD2007 and it works fine, e.g. I noticed that the log-file from the Microsoft Fax solution in WinXP is Unicode and to read information I made an .net-application. The main application use this "translated" information in non-Unicode.

Today I noticed that there is a new poster from Microsoft.com about the namespaces and types in .net 3.5 (actually 2.x ) here available:
.net-Namespace-pdf-file

-> I think we must be on the top of any changes in the .net-world but it can co-exists with Win32-development and with Delphi we have both worlds, the old, stable and the new (not un-stable!) for our daily work.

F# in the next VisualStudio release ??

In the Blog from Soma Somasegar, Corporate Vice President der Developer Division of Microsoft he thought about including the language F# in one of the next Visual Studio release....

F# is a functional programming language, objectoriented and high performanced for a scripting language....