Tools...

Today I'm doing a long-overdue overhaul of my operating environment. I've been running Visual C# Express Edition until now, which barely has more coding-specific features in its text editor than Notepad. Additionally, after the end of a 30-day free period, the program refuses to run until registration. Registration is free, but Microsoft either declined to support multiple registration or the idea of reinstalling, or neglected to think of it: I registered the copy on my desktop, and can't get another registration code for my laptop.

Additionally, my laptop has been running a pre-release evaluation copy of Win7. That expired at the start of March, and is in feature degradation mode; in addition to rebooting every 2 hours without warning, random things are starting to not work.

So, today's "good things" that I am doing have so far included installing the proper version of Visual Studio 2008 on my desktop (yay Dreamspark!) and Windows 7 and VS2008 on my laptop.

One more little thing as a bonus: I had my laptop set up to dual boot with Ubuntu, since CS357 this semester and 442/491 last semester required (or strongly recommended) a Linux environment for programming. I had 100 gb for Windows, 100 gb for Linux, and 100 gb for shared space. I quickly decided this sucks, partly Linux is clumsy when it comes to handling NTFS volumes, but mostly because Linux just kind of sucks on my laptop and I never use it for anything but those classes. So this time around, Ubuntu is getting installed in a VM in Windows. If this offends any diehard Linux zealots, then quite honestly I will just find it a little bit more amusing.