Virtual Machine Configuration Assistant

13. April 2007 06:07 by Csaborio in General  //  Tags: ,   //   Comments (0)

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:

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This is the revamped, improved version:

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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:

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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:

  • VHD Attachment
  • VHD Creation
  • VM Creation
  • VMRC in tabs for each of the machines
*sigh*...It has been impossible to embed the video here, here is the youtube link.

In case the resolution of the movie above is too small, the avi can also be downloaded.

For all things related to software migration, be sure to visit Artinsoft's website. For training in Visual Basic to C# migrations, Visual Basic to VB.Net, Virtualization, and 64-bit training check our training web page.