Nicholas Clarke

While installing Visual Studio 2008 on my PC I started to get the not so friendly Windows low disk space pop-up. This was odd as I thought I had lot of spare space! So I opened up Windows Explorer to see what I could find only to find nothing. My PC has files all over the place put there by all kinds of programs.

Then I remembered WinDirStat, this program turned out to be my saviour.

After leaving it run for 10 minutes it came back with a very nice psychedelic version of my hard drive:

Not my real hard drive

On closer inspection I found that I had many unused Virtual PC instances and old ISO images.

WinDirStat is broken up into three sections each of which offers a different view of your data:

• TreeView

Shows the disk usage summary from a group of folders down to file level

• Type list

Colour coded with the psychedelic view so that types can been seen easily.

• Psychedelic colour view

This is by far the best view and with a quick glance you can see where all of your disk space has gone.

No matter what view you are in, selecting or hovering over any of the items will highlight the area in the psychedelic view and provide you with more information about the file. Its odd to see the same patterns repeated by user directories or the sheer size of virtual PC images.

Once you have found what you are looking for the application allows you to clean up the files directly by using the delete key or the clean up menu.

This is a great application and I have since seen some of my colleagues running it and playing with the psychedelic view.

It seems that you can wait ages for something to finally be released by Microsoft. For example I started .Net with Visual Studio 2005 beta only to wish for the RTM version and then SP1. SP1 came along only for me to wish that I had 2008. All of this due to bugs and missing/cut features.

It seems that Microsoft is coming to the end of a massive development cycle as there are lots of projects starting to stick their heads above water (Microsoft Firewall).

These are some that I have noticed including some links:

Silverlight 2.0 - Beta Q1 of 2008
ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions - Public release due
IIS 7.0 – Coming early 2008 with the new version of Windows Server
ASP.Net MVC – Preview any time now with the supported release in the first half of 2008

• ASP.Net MVC Framework Part 1 - Overview
• ASP.Net MVC Framework Part 2 - URL Routing
• ASP.Net MVC Framework Part 3 - Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views

Windows Vista SP1 – Just got RC so RTM will not be too far away
Parallel FX – Preview out now

• Programming in the Age of Concurrency - Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with PFX
• Daniel Moth Parallel Extensions
• Parallel FX Team Blog

Visual Studio 2008 – Out now for MSDN subscribers with the official release being February.
.Net 3.5 – Out now
.Net Source Code – Coming soon
LINQ – Out now

• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 1 - Architecture for LINQ to SQL
• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 2 - What is LINQ?
• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 3 - DAOs and Repositories
• Architecting LINQ to SQL applications, part 4 - Dynamic Queries

Volta - Technology preview
Expression Service Packs – Out now
XNA Game development platform – RTM Coming Soon

I’m sure I have missed some, but even so this is quite an impressive list to release at the same time especially when some of these are linked.

All of this makes me wonder what Microsoft is working on that we have not yet heard about. Oh how great it would be if I could to be a fly on their wall. As this is not possible I guess the next best thing is Channel9

So I guess the wait continues. I’m looking forward to the first half of next year.