Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview side-by-side existing Windows 7

Okay, so my last article was huge hit (by my standards). I was trying to setup Windows 8 Developer Preview on my Mac and thought of sharing the experience. Turns out lots of people were trying the same .

After a day of playing around, I was beginning to feel the pinch of VM so wanted to setup Win8 on some hardware. I have an existing laptop running Windows 7 and oodles of free disk-space. So decided to give it a shot.

Before you start here is the configuration I start with

1. Core i5 Dell Latitude with 8 Gigs of RAM and 250 Gig HDD with about 200+ Gig free and Windows 7 Professional OEM installed

2. The same Developer Preview ISO I used for my previous post

3. An ISO mounting tool like SlySoft’s Virtual Clone Drive

4. After a long twitter exchange with one fellow enthusiast, I need to put in this extra warning. You CANNOT setup Win8 on a Dynamic partition using the method outlined here. This will work only if you have ‘Basic’ partitioning. How to know what type of partition you have, in the Disk Manager select the hard disk and the first column on the left will show DiskN, Basic or Dynamic. If you see in the images for the Disk Manager below it shows ‘Disk0 Basic’. So proceed only if you have a Basic parition.

Standard Disclaimer: The below worked for me, the Windows ecosystem comes with so many permutations and combinations that it’s impossible to predict if it will work for you.

If Shrinking partitions/Installing Drivers doesn’t sound like things you can do, DO NOT ATTEMPT IT. Hopefully nothing is affected but if your system is hosed in the process I cannot be held responsible.

Use the below steps at your own risk, no warranties here.

All set? Here we go

1. Creating a new Partition.

You need to do this ONLY if you don’t have a partition that can be formatted. If you already have a partition that you can format, format it and jump to step 2.

• Navigate to My Computer->Manage
• Select Storage->Disk Management
• Select the drive that has atleast 20GB free.
• Right click on the drive and select ‘Shrink Volume’. It will take a couple of minutes for the disk-manager to respond but at the end it will show the following dialog
• 
• First Line is maximum capacity of the drive. I am writing this blog on the Win8 server so it’s showing ~20GB.
• Second line is the size up to which you can shrink it down (not sure how Windows came up with that number but I am sure it can’t shrink it down to that size because there isn’t so much space left on the drive currently).
• Third line is size of new drive.
• Fourth line shows the future size of current partition (size after shrinking).
• Click Shrink. Windows will shrink the partition and you’ll have a Unallocated block as follows

• Right Click on it and select New Simple Volume.

• Follow the wizard and create a new partition ready for setup
• 
• Allocate maximum (that is selected by default)
• 
• Give a Volume name identifying it as a Win8 Drive.
• Click Finish.

2. Start Installation

• Load the Win 8 DP iso by right clicking and Open With->Virtual Clone Drive
• If the AutoRun comes up don’t start the setup from the AutoRun dialog. Instead select Explore File using Windows Explorer.
• If you have AutoRun disabled just start Explorer and navigate to the virtual Drive.
• Here is the kicker. Navigate to G:\Sources\ folder (Replace G: with your Virtual Drive letter), and run the Setup.exe from there. If you don’t do this Window 8 installation doesn’t allow side-by-side install, it will insist on deleting you existing partition and overwriting on it.
• Once setup starts, point it to the newly created empty Drive as the destination drive. Sit back and get some coffee. All the reboot options default to required settings so pretty much no other intervention is required till you boot up. I again forget exact number of reboots, I think it rebooted thrice for me.

3. Notes and potential Gotchas

• Since side by side install required writing to the MBR (master boot record) any antivirus worth it’s salt will try to prevent you from doing it. So unfortunately you have to disable the Antivirus for the period of installation.
• Funnily enough the VM installation found ALL required drivers (except for the generic display). But it connected to Internet etc perfectly. It’s not so rosy on hardware. If you have drivers from your laptop for Windows 7 keep them handy. The initial setup did not recognize among other things – Wireless Adapter, TrackPoint, Chipset etc.
  • Luckily enough I just went to Computer->Properties->Device Manager and for each device that had an exclamation mark select “Update Driver” and pointed it to the folder where all my drivers were. Win 8 picked up the required drivers automatically and applied them. All except the multitouch trackpad which I had to run the Setup for it that came with the laptop.
  • That’s it. You are done. Must say running Win8 (‘on the Metal’) with 8 GB RAM is a much improved experience than running it on a VM with 2GB memory.

With that I end my ‘Setup’ series for Win 8. I promise the next one will be ‘Code to Metal’. Planning to explore WinRT and made a ‘real’ Social App.

Cheers.

Setup Windows 8 Developer Preview as a VM on VirtualBox running on OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Microsoft launched the Windows 8 Developer Preview today at the Build conference. If you like living on the bleeding edge of technology and want to play around with the release, you need a computer to do a clean install of Windows 8 DP. Fortunately if you don’t have a spare computer to mess with, Virtualization solutions are there to the rescue.

I usually use VMWare on OSX to run all my Windows VMs. However VMWare failed to install the Win8 DP. So I decided to install Oracle (formerly Sun) VirtualBox solution. It supports Windows, OSX and Linux as host OSes.

I am of course assuming you have already downloaded the Win 8 DP iso from Microsoft.

Once you have VirtualBox and Win 8 DP iso, lets get started.

Step 1

Fire up Virtual Box. It will look as follows:

Step 2

Click on ‘New’

Step 3

Click Continue

Step 4: Give the VM a Name.

• I have given ‘Win8 Dev Preview 1’.
• Select OS as Microsoft Windows. Version as Window 7 (64 Bit).
• I am assuming you have downloaded the 64 Bit ISO from MS.

Step 5: Selecting memory for the VM.

This is a very critical step. If you over-allocate memory the VM setup will fail.

• I selected the maximum available at the time on my machine (3584 MB) and failed to setup the VM first time. I had to reduce it down to 2048 MB (2 GB). Mind you I have a system with 8GB of memory installed.
• A good indication of free memory can be had by running Activity Monitor on OSX or Task Manager if you are doing it on Windows host system. Rebooting the system before starting might give you some more memory. But remember if you don’t have that much memory later when you try to start the VM, Virtual Box will simply Pause the VM load unless it has the allocated memory (+some more) to play with.
• Below screenshots show how to check free memory in your system currently

Above image of Task Manager shows 932Mb free on this Win7 System.

Above image from the Activity Monitor in OSX shows free memory available = 516 MB

The example values are very less because I am running two VMs at the moment, but point to note is you need to make a guess of Memory to allocate to the VM based on the above Free Memory available values. So if you see 2.0 GB free then assign about 1.5 GB. Hope this update helps people who are facing setup issues.

Step 6. Create a New Hard Disk

Step 7.  Select type of Image

I selected VDI.

Step 8. Selecting Storage Type

Keep it Dynamically Allocated unless you want to block off a
portion of your HDD to start off with.

Step 9. Specify the VM file location and Size.

20GB is default and it worked for me. My installation left
about 6 GB of the 20 GB left

Step 10. Finish VM Setup

Click Create.

Step 11. Win 8 Installations

Now Click on Start

Step 12. Select source ISO file

Here point it to the iso file you downloaded

Step 13. Fun times begin

Notes:

• Windows installation will start with the usual wizard interface that you can easily step through.
• One thing to remember, when it reboots the first time around the ISO will be loaded and you will get a prompt to ‘Press Any Key to Boot from CD/DVD”. DO NOT press any key. Wait for it to boot from the
  virtual HDD. If you press any key by mistake, the installation process will start again. Just cancel out and agree to rebooting the system.
• I counted 3 reboots. May/may not vary for you.
• I was able to log in to system using my Hotmail account.
• Give it a couple of minutes to connect and get all details and also do initial tile setup.
• 2 GB of memory doesn’t make it a spiffy system.

UPDATE: Some folks have had a hard time in-spite of the tutorial, so that got me thinking and I realized that between the setup failing for me the first time around (that I attributed to lack of memory above) and me getting it working, I also did some configuration changes to the VM that are different from the default shown in Step 10: So here are the final settings that work for me (click to expand). Notice I have enabled Acceleration, given it both the CPU cores to play with (default is 1 only) and given it a healthy dose of Graphics memory. For your system, keep an eye for the Green Line for each setting, don’t stretch beyond the green line in any of the settings. Again, virtualization is tough job simply because of the sheer number of h/w software combinations possible. So if it’s not working for you, sorry to hear that.

UPDATE 2: I just noted on twitter today this site had a very pointed solution to Virtual Box issues on Win 7 http://www.kombitz.com/2011/09/16/status-0xc000025-error-when-installing-windows-8-developer-preview-on-virtualbox/

You can try the above if you are facing the same issue.

Why are .NET Devs in knots after Windows 8 demo?

Okay, I had to throw my hat in the ring/shit storm/tornado that’s hit the .NET world after Microsoft demoed Windows 8. At the eye of the storm is the remark made during the demo implying HTML5 and Javascript tooling would be made available to developers to develop for Windows 8.

Now, if you take a bird’s eye view of this statement, you can look at it in all sorts of positive ways like

1. Javascript was finally becoming mainstream in MS world
2. We would have another ‘language’ in our repertoire to develop windows applications on.
3. IE engine was replacing the static desktop with dynamic desktop (fact that it’s been around since IE4 can be set aside for a moment) for Windows and heck they managed to put both (IE and classic desktop) side by.

Beyond this everything else is conjecture. However you put it, except for people working for MS in Windows and .NET team, no one knows any better. Then why this shit-storm and name calling and juvenile behavior from so many .NET devs?

Let’s delve a little deeper but continue with the positive stream of thought. Microsoft has been giving mixed signals about Silverlight and I would consider ONLY Bob Muglia’s comment to Mary Jo Foley (here) regarding what MS thinks of SL’s placement as a development platform – LoB and Mobile. Anything outside this, like posts, by Scott Barnes (@Mossyblog) or Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) proclaiming death of SL or WPF is still conjecture. They may have ‘inside sources’ but unless MS officially declares ‘End of life’ for any of the products/tools in debate, it’s nothing but hot air.

However, it’s not hard to imagine in a huge bureaucratic company like MS (again that’s my assumption, I don’t know anyone personally in MS who could tell me so) there will be power struggles and duplication of work and more power struggle. So let’s for a minute assume Windows 8 team didn’t like the existing client development tools and decided to roll a new platform, I would say SO WHAT! They are still Microsoft, if one team gets an upperhand in a power-struggle then the other team will have to fall in line sooner or later. What does that mean? Well that means if HTML5 and Javascript is the new mantra, the developer tools will follow.

That brings us to the arguments – ‘what happens to my investment in SL/WPF/.NET’? I find this question silly, and here are the reasons why:

1. If you made an investment in SL/WPF/.NET stick with it, MS didn’t say they are pulling plug on SL or WPF or .NET in Windows 8 or anytime soon. Now let’s see what type of investment you made:

• You built an enterprise app on SL that works great, it will work for the next 10 years probably but I doubt your business will need the same app for 10 years.
• You built 5 Windows Phone apps, great, keep them in SL till a mature HTML 5/JS platform appears that can do more that what your SL app can do.
• You built a LoB app, great, keep it around till Business doesn’t need it anymore.
• I really don’t see where your investment is going! Much less going down the drain!

2. Software Development has always ‘evolved’ and software developers have evolved with it. Crying about why SL/WPF is not a ‘first class’ platform in a future OS falls in the ‘spoilt-brat’ or ‘lazy-ass’ category. GROW UP and improve your skills as and when required!

3. What makes you think Microsoft’s development products division won’t come up with creative ways to continue to use all your existing front end/UI and .NET knowledge to serve up native Windows 8 apps (that are actually HTML and JS)?  In fact today there is a mono compiler that converts IL to JS (https://github.com/kevingadd/JSIL).

4. Are we cribbing just because it’s HTML and javascript? That’s snobbish behavior best left to ‘others’. OMG JavaScript! is just not an argument and one who is making it doesn’t know javascript, period!

A lot of us (so called loyal MS fans) have often cribbed how MS always rolls it’s own, never follows standards and acts like a bully! If that’s true, then hey, this time they got it bang on target right? Then why this hullaboo?

Personally, I started my career as a VB6 developer (mind you all VB6 and rich client and no ASP). Three years down I moved on to C#, since then I’ve tried Java and VB.NET for ‘non UI’ development. But sometime around 5 years ago I realized Rich Client platform wasn’t going to ‘cut-it’ and started on ASP.NET skills, rolled my own MVC framework using ASP.NET Webforms and didn’t feel a bit dis-concerting when MS came out with MVC framework themselves. In fact I couldn’t be happier. Did I throw out my work overnight? No, the app still works on the custom framework I built for it, but when I need it to do something that’s much easier or already handled in the new framework I’ll move to the new one. I have done very little work on WPF (only a couple of prototypes, one of which is available for download on this site) and minimal work with SL (built a multiple file upload and preview control in the above web app). I have been leaning towards learning/using Javascript better and using some of the existing javascript libraries, because just like I felt ‘Rich-client’ wasn’t cutting it, I can now see the ‘server-side’ event model and post-backs on web apps aren’t cutting it. Partial postback and async is the name of the game. Doing it without plugins is an added bonus. If MS just upped the ante on that front, by enabling windows applications using HTML/javascript, I would go for it… Just don’t forget to ‘show me the dev-tools baby’ because I don’t want to work with any other dev tools…

To conclude, the .NET devs should just quit being juvenile or just quit. They are making a mockery out of not just themselves but the entire .NET community. I was initially confused at @Pete_Brown’s comments on twitter till he pointed us to the silverlight forum where I found a long list of comments that he had to moderate. Feel sorry for you Pete, indeed your employers have put you between a rock and a hard place. Don’t worry there are plenty of us, eagerly waiting to see what comes out of //Build/

Finally to MS, keep your in-fighting to yourselves just show us a happy face everytime and we’ll continue put faith in your OS and Dev tools. Last but not least, super awesome demo of Windows8. Let’s kick some competitors’ butts with it.