Another DDD and another major success. Saturday saw the eighth in the ever popular DDD event at TVP in Reading. This one broke new records that must be getting increasingly difficult to break. DDD 7 in November 2009 'sold' out in 4 hours. DDD 8 'sold' out in 12 minutes and 47 seconds (that's 320 places). The wait list of 200 filled up later that day. It is difficult to tell whether this actually means an increased demand (although I suspect it does) because for DDD 7 the organisers upheld the tradition of not telling anyone what day and what time registration would open but for DDD 8 the date and time was well known in advance. The Twitter tag #ddd8 was also the third most used tag on Twitter on Saturday 30th January 2010. And even better we got to say goodbye to Barry Dorrans (off to Redmond to work on WPL etc.).

I played my small part with another showing of "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" (slides, source code) which I thoroughly enjoyed as usual and went well despite Windows Updates.

As promised here are the slides and source code for yesterday's "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" presentation at the MVP Open Day. The sister presentation to this one is "Automating Testing Using Virtual Server 2005" and you can download the slides and source code for this one. If you are using Virtual Server 2005 you might like to download both as the Windows Virtual PC presentation is more recent and contains slightly more code that is still applicable to Virtual Server 2005.

I've been bitten a few times by a 'feature' in Windows Virtual PC where all of my virtual machines disappear so I thought I'd write about the problem and how to solve it to save anyone else the grief of rebuilding their virtual machine list.

My current Windows Virtual PC list looks like this:-

As you can see from Primary Disk column on the right I keep all of my virtual machines (except Windows XP Mode) on a separate USB drive. The consequence is that the drive is not always plugged in. The Windows Virtual PC 'feature' is that if I accidentally start a virtual machine and forget to have my USB drive plugged in then it fails to run the virtual machine (fair enough, no problem here) and then removes all references to all virtual machines on that drive (not fair enough and a truly stupid idea):-

The solution lies in understanding that the Windows Virtual PC console is just a view on a folder. On this Windows 7 machine this is C:\Users\Guy Smith-Ferrier\Virtual Machines. Here's what the folder looks like in a command window before Windows Virtual PC has 'fixed' it:-

And here's what it looks like again after Windows Virtual PC has removed all of my references:-

Clearly Windows Virtual PC has simply deleted all of the VMCX files that refer to virtual machines on the USB drive. There are a number of solutions to the problem. The first and simplest is to use the Recycle Bin to undelete the VMCX files from the Virtual Machines folder. This is the best option although I have to say that I am not always convinced they are always present in the Recycle Bin. Alternatively you could have the foresight to have saved a copy of your VMCX files so that you can just copy them back to the Virtual Machines folder. If neither of these options are available to you then the fallback solution is to start each and every virtual machine that used to be in the list by double clicking on the virtual machine's VMC file and then the VMCX file will be automatically recreated.