I was looking around for a computer that would be good to install Vista on and get into some WinFX programming, specifically the WPF part of it. My current desktop system is pretty nice to work with, but I’ve also had a higher priority for large desktop real estate and so I never got into those really fast graphics cards that are needed to do Aero Glass. My desktop system is no slouch, but it’s one of these systems that have been extended manually over years, and it really doesn’t work all that fast compared to machines I see other people use – anyway, Vista will of course have a number of new versions released over the next months, so I couldn’t install it on my main working machine for now anyway.

So, up to this point I had the impression that the only way to currently get into that kind of stuff would be to get a pretty fast desktop machine with a modern GPU. I found I was wrong – apparently there’s pretty good support from ATI and NVIDIA, and this also covers a number of the notebook graphics adapters, like the Mobility Radeon series from ATI and the GeForce Go series from NVIDIA. I had pushed the topic of a notebook away for the time being because I found the Vista thing more important, and I thought buying a notebook now would be a waste of money or at least the notebook would leave a lot to be desired when Vista actually comes along.

My idea is now to use a notebook to install Vista pre-releases on it, also Office stuff of course, do a number of presentations with it, all these things that one normally does with a notebook. And when Vista releases finalize, I can migrate the work I’m currently doing on my oldish desktop system over to the notebook. Good plan, I hope. Now, I was looking around for a notebook I’d like and I found the Lenovo (was IBM) ThinkPad T60. That looks like a great machine to me, it’s got the fantastic keyboard that ThinkPads are famous for, it can take 3GB of RAM and it has a GPU that’ll be compatible with Vista right now.

The drawback seems to be: it’s apparently impossible to get one in the UK! I wasn’t even able to get a quote so far – Lenovo links to a number of resellers, but none of these seems to have a T60 to sell. Hm… wait and see, I guess.  Anyone have convincing suggestions for alternatives?

DDD day 3 is on June 3rd, 2006, and last time there I promised I would submit a session proposal myself this time. Here are the two proposals I just put in – I hope they’re not so specific that nobody likes them :-)

Refactoring made easy with Refactor!
Refactoring is the process of changing implementation details of methods, classes or other code entities, to promote readability, efficiency and/or performance, without changing the external interface of the code entity. Refactor! is a product that allows developers to perform Refactoring right there in the Visual Studio code editor. The aim of the session is to give an overview of the features in Refactor! and their use in C# as well as VB.NET projects, and to provide an introduction to the extensibility model in the product.

Designing a model based application architecture
 Basing an application on a model is a good idea because it makes it very easy to modify those parts of the application behaviour that depend on model data. But creating a useful model and the framework architecture to make it easily reusable is not a simple task. This session aims to describe some of the basic decisions that had to be made during the ongoing development of the eXpressApp Framework, a reusable application framework being developed by Developer Express.

And by the way – they’re still looking for speakers, so make sure you submit your own ideas as well!