MobilePipes grows up!

The MobilePipes team works hard on our product suite making sure that our customers are buying software that is top notch, bright and shiny, reliable, easy to use, stands the test of time, and, well you get the point!  We could assure all day long that our products meet this criteria but we took the extra steps to prove it. 

MobilePipes was officially certified by Microsoft this month as a certified product.  This means a lot for our marketing and sales material because we get to include the logo all over the place, but more importantly, it assures our customers that they are buying a quality product. 

For those familiar with the process we ensured that our code meets the Microsoft standard for .NET based Web Services, Managed Code, and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. 

I was recently listening to a TWIT podcast that was discussing changes in technology over the past 10 years or so.  One area of innovation struck especially close to home for me ... Virtualization.  Virtualized environments have completely changed how I think about hosting development environments. Virtualization allows you to host multiple different environments on the same physical machines.  Depending on your hosting hardware you are going to use either VMWARE or Microsoft's Virtual PC / Virtual Server.

My role in Syndicated Methods requires lots of time researching new technologies.  Additionally, we have many developers that need to work on our solutions.  Virtualization has answered two major problems that have proved challenging to support these needs:

1) Minimizing hardware to support iPhone, ASP.NET, WAMP, and LAMP environments.  We can now have one or two machines that host all of these different development machines.

2) More importantly we don't waste time setting new developers up.  With a local running configuration of VMWARE, developers only need to copy a file over and they have everything they need to start coding. 

We run windows based servers in our local network.  With virtualization one of the things that has always troubled me is that CPU and RAM have gobbled up by a baseline Windows Server install.  The Windows Shell takes up a lot of resources to run services.  These are precious resources that essentially sit idle for a machine that is intended entirely for hosting virtualized environments.  Obviously other customers felt this way because Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 Core.  This special operating system is a Windows 2008 Server without the Windows Shell.  With the lightest foot print possible to host Windows, you can now install your Virtualization engine on top of 2008 Core and have more access to raw resources.  The Tech Republic Blogs have an excellent tutorial that walks you through the installed with Windows Virtual Server 2008.