Today my curiosity got the better of me. It's been a while since Microsoft announced the CTP form of Visual Studio 2010 and seeing as I had a bit of spare time today, I started downloading the VS 10 VPC machine (7 GB total download size split in 11 parts) from the Microsoft Download Center.

I finished downloading very fast (for that download size and considering the numerous requests that MS is serving at the moment), total time was 1 hour and 7 minutes and started the virtual PC machine with ease.

As a note, Microsoft recommends that you assign a minimum of 1 GB RAM memory to the virtual machine, but I would recommend around 2 GB if you can spare them while testing. If you run it on 1 GB with a Vista edition operating system, things run slow and the enthusiasm for VS 2010 has to suffer.

As there are only a few features available (understandable seeing as this is a CTP), you don't need much time to be amazed with the new VS. Actually I consider it a breath of fresh air compared to the over populated UI of previous editions. Microsoft has done it's best to ensure a "comfortable" development environment for developers.

Will continue with screen shots and some comments. I'm too eager to get back to testing now.

Today I had 10 minutes of free time to do a much delayed upgrade to the Joomla core of my site. On 9 January 2009, the Joomla! development team released a new security patch for the Joomla! core which promises an increased security level and multiple bug fixing. Of course, keeping your site core updated is very important, since Joomla!, as most frameworks, has bugs and security risks which are often enough reported and fixed by the community.

Upgrading Joomla! is simple enough (takes about 2 minutes).
Visit the following page for more information: http://docs.joomla.org/Upgrading_1.5_from_an_existing_1.5x_version

I'll repeat the Joomla! dev team's advise, backup your site before upgrading! This is very important, because even if the upgrade process is very simple, errors can occur and they nearly always very hard to fix (trust me!) and sometimes data loss can occur as well.

I'll also advise you to visit http://www.joomla.org/download.html and enter your e-mail to get upgrade notifications.

The change log for this new version can be found here: http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5226-joomla-159-security-release-now-available.html