I recently had a hard drive failure on my development machine and now I’m faced with reinstalling everything. No big deal I guess, all of my code is in TFS so it isn’t like I’ve lost anything. I got to thinking and I wonder what a better way to do this is? Have any of you started using the boot from VHD option? I work as a consultant and have lot of different customers. I don’t see the benefit to VHD over just doing an image with something like Acronis? What are your methods of being able to quickly get back up and running after a failure?

I would argue Microsoft left the hardware open so people could get affordable phones. Most of the phones out there are under powered or at the minimum requirements which are far lower than the IPhone’s hardware. I might also add that my Touch Pro is as responsive as my friends IPhone and I have half the processor running touchflo from HTC...

So this really has nothing to do with why the IPhone is successful I just wanted to point out MS has created an app store for windows mobile. It works great you buy you apps and press install that’s it... You can do it from an app on your phone or on your computer. To be fair I suppose Apple came up with that first but either way it’s a nice tool...

I've been using Windows mobile since version 5, it was rough... At the same time if you look at some of the work companies like SPB mobile and Resco have done I think it shows the flexibility of windows mobile as a powerful and customizable os... Microsoft didn’t give it a great UI out of the box but left the possibilities open to basically whatever you want the UI to be. I think it’s good and bad on one had it lets manufactures like HTC customize the UI to their brand, TouchFlo...On the other hand it leaves Microsoft vulnerable to bad PR when a manufacturer does a bad job of customizing the OS… Recently I have been running windows mobile 6.5.3 on my phone and Microsoft has made great strides in providing a freindly out of the box UI but in the end it comes down to people’s perceptions of MS products,marketing and the simple fact that Apple had the advantage over Windows mobile, and palm to learn from. I saw an ad from apple about how the IPhone now has copy and paste... Windows mobile (touch version) has been able to copy and paste for many years now. Let’s hope for WPF development on windows mobile 7…

I’ve used Silverlight 2 and 3 in a couple of major web applications. Development is generally faster than AJAX development, and in my opinion the UI is much richer. Deployment is as simple as any other website; the Silverlight app is just a file on the server... If you are deploying on IIS 6 you will need to add a mime type for Silverlight, there are lots of posts about it out there so just search for Silverlight mime type. I have run into a couple of companies who wanted Silverlight applications but their IT staff refused to allow Silverlight installs. This is obviously a barrier.