So, after having a few meltdowns w/ Parallels, I decided to give VMWare Fusion a go.

The Parallels problems seem to have gone away (fingers crossed) with the latest Mac OS X upgrade.

But, I’m still working with VMWare. A couple of pluses:

• I could be wrong, but qualitatively, I think XP under VMWare is faster. I do a lot of compilations over shared volumes – they seem to go faster under VMWare.
• The images are smaller w/ VMWare. In the case of my XP VM, it went down from 38gb to 33gb. That’s significant.

On the down side:

• Trying to get Yahoo Messenger to work in the XP VM was a nightmare – big hangs and I had to power down the system and reboot several times.
• Bluetooth audio doesn’t appear to be working in VMWare.

Both of those features in the last work quite well in Parallels.

But, the only thing I want this capability for is VOIPing over YM. The good news on that front is that Yahoo has just release a Mac version of Messenger (and that’s a big honkin’ YAHOO!). Thus far, it seems to work pretty well.

Which eliminates the need for the VOIP solution under the XP VM (one of the critical reasons for keeping Windows around…)

Users of Skype can be happy, too – they’ve had Mac version out for some time, now.

rickb

Ran into a window controlling problem with C#/.NET – a couple of things in the API aren’t exposed. The first is (are, really), the messages WM_NC* (used to detect non-client mouse hits, etc.) The second is the ability to set window settings via the SystemParametersInfo call. In this case, I want to use SPI_{SET/GET}DRAGFULLWINDOWS. C#/.NET exposes the GET functionality, but not the SET.

The first case is handled relatively painlessly – simply a matter of putting a message filter on the app and then watching for the hwnd and WM_ message of interest. You don’t want to get too carried away with message filters – every message that goes through the message pump is forwarded to the filter, first, once installed. So, you install it only when you need it, and remove it when you don’t. And just do minimal processing, while you’re in there.

The second problem requires an interop call to the user32 dll and getting that all set up properly. Not terrifically taxing, but not perfectly straightforward, either. It’s unfortunate the named constants for the SPI_, WM_, etc values aren’t available in the toolkit. You have to redeclare them in your code, somewhere (don’t want to use raw numbers, for sure.)

On one hand it points out the shortcomings of a kit like C#/.NET – on the other, it’s always nice to know I can get under the cover/lift the hood when I need to.

rickb