My New Development Machine + Windows 7

Just a note to let you all know that I had done a write up of my new dev machine on my web site at http://www.naughter.com/computers.html. Here’s the details:

An Intel Core i7 Quad Extreme Processor. This is the top of the range Core i7-965 processor running at 3.2GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads. I also used a Zalman CNP9900 LED CPU Cooler. The whole blue glow from the various fans inside the case is very cool looking thro the clear side window in the case.

An Asus P6T6 WS Revolution Workstation Motherboard

6 sticks of 2GB Corsair XMS3 DDR 1600Mhz 2PC3200 memory. This provides a total of 12GB of main memory and can take advantage of the triple channel memory support of the X58 motherboard.

2 Western Digital VelociRaptor 10000RPM 300GB SATA drives in a RAID0 array giving, this gives a really fast setup for my boot partition.

1 Western Digital Caviar 2TB SATA2 drive as a “data” drive

A factory Overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Graphics card

Gigabyte 3D Mars Silver Big Tower Case

Corsair 1000 Watt Powersupply

The OS installed is Windows 7 x64 Release Candidate. I will be updating it to the gold version when it is released (hopefully without having to do a fresh reinstall)

LG DVD_RW Blue-Ray & HD-DVD Drive.

2 DELL 30″ 3008WFP LCD monitors. This provides a lovely multi monitor solution with each display running at its native resolution of 2560 * 1600!

This machine is a pretty high end rig and should serve my very well for development purposes going forward. With the amount of memory onboard it should be easily able to handle a number of simultaneous virtual machines which is always handy for testing purposes. Since installing Windows 7 on it, I must admit that MS really has got it right after the whole Vista debacle. Everything just fits together nicely and performance is very good. The only thing I still pine for is the XP style Classic Start menu which has been completely removed from Windows 7. With the new Pin to TaskBar functionality and such large monitors I rarely ever use the start menu anyway now, instead preferring to use the taskbar shortcuts directly for my most used programs. The other thing I miss is not having the Start-> Run command easily available. I’m sure if I Googled that I could find a command line shortcut to make it available via a pinned shortcut on the taskbar. UAC on 7 seems to be much more toned down than Vista which helps to make you day to day experience a whole lot more pleasant. The Virtual Windows XP in Windows 7 is a really great feature and has already helped me to keep my old Desktop printer going as well as being able to use the Cisco VPN client which is only available for x86 versions of Windows. I’ve also run a few games on the new PC to give it a good try out. I’ve tried Crysis, Racedriver Grid and Far Cry 2 and the visuals in these games are absolutely stunning. PC gaming technology has really progressed in the last few years. I would also like to thank my accounts manager at Komplett, namely Rafal Cyranski for their great service. They’re truly a great company to do business with.

W3Mfc v1.91 / CWSocket/CSSLSocket v1.28 /CThreadPoolServer v1.33 / SocClient v1.03 / SocServer v1.03

Just to let everyone know that v1.91 of W3MFC, v1.28 of CWSocket/CSSLSocket, v1.33 of CThreadPoolServer, v1.03 of SocClient & v1.03 of SocServer has been released. Updates for this version include:

• Updated copyright details
• Updated the sample app’s project settings to more modern default values.
• Removed some outstanding VC 6 style code from the codebase
• Removed the operator= and copy constructor support from the CSSLContext and CSSL classes. This avoids de-allocation problems in the respective destructor classes when one of these contexts is shared between two C++ class instances. Thanks to Dmitriy Maksimov for reporting this bug.
• Removed use of CT2A throughout the code.
• Reworked all token parsing code to use CString::Tokenize.
• Updated W3MFC binary to now link to OpenSSL 0.9.8k.

Splasher v1.50

Just to let everyone know that v1.50 of Splasher has been released. Updates for this version include:

• Updated copyright details
• Removed VC 6 style classwizard comments from the code.
• Updated code to compile correctly using _ATL_CSTRING_EXPLICIT_CONSTRUCTORS define
• Updated CSplashWnd::SetTransparent to allow the alpha transparency level as well as the flags passed to SetLayeredWindowAttributes to be completed specified
• Updated code to clean compile on VC 2008.
• Code now compiles cleanly using Code Analysis (/analyze)
• The code now only supports VC 2005 or later.

CPJNPOP3Connection v1.46

Just to let everyone know that v1.46 of CPJNPOP3Connection has been released. Updates for this version include:

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the sample app’s project settings to more modern default values.
• Removed the parsing methods from the CPJNPOP3Message class. For comprehensive support for message parsing please take a look at CDO for Windows 2000.
• Extensively reworked the parsing code to use CByteArray derived classes to hold parsed responses instead of CStringA instances. This handles the unusual but legal situation where a message contains embedded nulls. Thanks to Sergey Lysenko for reporting this issue.
• Fixed a bug in ReadUIDLResponse when parsing the message ID
• The code in Connect now correctly validates that a timestamp has been provided if doing APOP authentication