AngryPets Blog

You know what would be REALLY cool? Some type of tool that would show me where my RAM was REALLY being used up.

Task Manager is kind enough to show me that I'm currently using 1.79 GB of RAM, but if I do a quick sum of the memory/virtual memory being used by listing the processes, I'd be lucky to come up with 500MB of RAM.

No.. I don't have spyware, a rootkit, malware, etc. I'm running Virtual PC - and that's a beast (and appears to lie to the kernel about where memory is)... but still.

I'm open to suggestions..

So, I get the big-bad email today from MSDN telling me that VS2005 will be coming along, and that I'll need to transition my MSDN Universal Account to one of the Role-Based Team Edition/Premium Subscriptions.

If you've been under a rock, that means that the MSDN Universal Subscription is no longer your ticket to 'just about everything MS has under the sun for one big gob of money' (because Team Suite more or less takes that spot, and will cost considerably more to buy - but I think it's going to be worth it for enterprise customers, once TFS matures enough). Of course, I'm still a bit grumpy, that as a one-man-shop that I can't somehow get all 3 of the role-based editions of VS 2005 without spending a small fortune. It's my ONLY gripe with the changes they're making.

Well. *wait for it... * There is one other thing that bugs. And it's just a question of execution. My MSDN subscription cost over $2k, so making the transition to a new 'role based version' isn't something that I'll want to SCREW up on. i.e. I'm going to want to make sure that I select the best version for me (as a one-man-shop) - meaning that I'll want to compare features, etc. The link that MS sends me to in the email sends me here.

If you go look at that, you'll see that it doesn't mention bupkiss about what each version contains, just that the Software Developers Subscription comes with Visual Studio for DEVELOPERS, the Architectural Subscriptions comes with ... VS 2005 for Architects, and you can guess the details on the Software Testers' subscription.

I guess the problem stems from the fact that the Visual Studio Team BUILDS VS, and the MSDN people sell it, etc. Meaning that there's a disconnect. The bigger problem? Hunt and peck on the MSDN site, and you won't find an overview of the differences. I had to go back and pull an image out of a slide deck that showed the differences (graphically, and without much explanation other than the obvious).

I've included that image here for both of my readers.

Though I don't know if either of them will be worried about picking the right MSDN Subscription. (I wonder what is the bigger waste of time, writing blog posts that nobody reads, or scanning blog posts that you encounter to see if you'll read it or not... )