There are far too many things to do! The rate things are being created can be overwhelming sometimes.

After reading Hansleman’s post about Web Platform Installer now supports XP – And the Master Plan continues I downloaded it and was very impressed. I also notices something called Application Request Routing which is added to my things-to-learn list.

If it is what I think it is and works as well as I hope it does it should fill a huge gap in the Microsoft web server platform. Lots of features/scenarios which Apache and Nginx servers have baked in. As much as I enjoy ISA Server and have seen it used successfully as a Layer-7 router for development environments, it’s always been trapped between two things it’s not. It’s not a web server (though it runs Windows) and it isn’t a network appliance, so it’s doesn’t fit traditional network design that won’t expose the Windows operating system to the internet without a firewall and load balancing appliance.

What else… Oh yes, holidays coming up so I’m only able to work one day this week. Hmm… It’s odd when you realize you’ve just typed “only able to work one day this week” as a problem. :)

The other thing to do is install Windows 2008 R2 Server Core and experiment with it’s support for Asp.Net. I’m hoping to check out PowerShell 2.0 while I’m doing that.

Seems like every time you turn around you’re faced with a dozen new things leaving you with that feeling you barely know anything about what the latest tools can do.

I also haven’t had time to blog about is support for IronRuby added to Spark. It’ll be old news I’m sure by the time I get to it.

Update wasted a few hours trying to install 2008 R2 in a virtual guest. Under both VMWare and Virtual PC the Windows setup complained a 64-bit process could not be started. Internet wisdom states a bios settings must be changed to allow hardware assisted virtualization – no such setting exists – tried to update bios – Dell firmware flashing app won’t run on my host o/s which is 64-bit. Do I really need to make a cmd prompt boot disk here? What year is it?