I’m installing Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 C#. Per usual this is taking a long time… close to an hour, and I haven’t even installed the SQL-Server that usually goes with it. So far the installation has required two restarts (remember those?). The Express editions are free versions of the full-blown Visual Studio programming tools. The 2010 has a revamped appearance; very attractive.

Bluetooth connections can look like a serial port to a running application; the BlueTooth device talks on one COM port. Of interest is that the device may receive on one port, but talk on another. From the application’s standpoint, it receives data on the port assigned to the BlueTooth dongle…but transmits on the port assigned to the external device. I hope.

After several days of Windows 7 on my iMac and Macbook….it seems to be working pretty well on the iMac, but it is slow as mud on the Macbook. (unlike….curiously…. Vista.) In both cases I did an in-place upgrade of Vista. The MacBook install is barely useable. This may be a memory issue; as the Macbook can have a maximum of 2 megs of RAM which has to be parceled out between Mac OSX host operating system and the Windows 7 virtual machine.