As I previously mentioned, I’ve had some chance of working on the application dubbed as the Virtual Machine Configuration Assistant in the last few days. One of the most noticeable changes are the GUI. This is the old GUI of the app:
This is the revamped, improved version:
The application has undergone major revisions under the hood. I have tried to separate tasks into different classes in order to gain modularity. So far I have a VMManager, a VHDManager, a VMRCManager and so on. Reading the code now makes a lot more sense than before.
This is the part in which most of the work has been lately done, the Disks tab:
From here, you can pretty much do anything related with VHDs. After modifying some ISOs, I have also managed to completely automate the defragmentation-precompaction-compaction phase required to reduce the size of VHDs. Now I just leave the process running and when I arrive the next day, my VHDs are like 50% smaller.
I had not touched C# in a while, and all I can say is “Wow”. C# rocks, it is very intuitive and creating efficient GUIs is a bliss. One can only wish that there was a 2.0 framework to run under OS X.
I have also fixed the problem with OCX stats at runtime – actually it was a workaround, not a fix. Here is a video I made of some of the features of the application, which include:
csaborio says:
Hi Mark,
This was a project I was engaged on in my free time back in the day. Ever since the release of Windows Hyper-V, I have not used Virtual Server and abandoned the project.
I still have the source code around if you would like to mess around with it – it’s not pretty in any way, but is yours to have if you’d like.
Cheers!
Mark Mazurik says:
Hello, Christian,
WHere can I find the tool “Virtual Machine Configuration Assistant” that you mention in your blog? I have searched for it aound the Web and have been unable to locate it.
Thanks.
~ Mark