The last 6 months have been a lot of fun. On the downside I've attended exactly zero conferences - ok my wife doesn't think that's a downside. On the upside I've been working in areas I haven't had the opportunity to over the past 5 years. Specifically I've been thinking about hardware virtualization and application virtualization. Some of that thinking is becoming real :).

For example, today we announced that Virtual PC 2004 SP1 is a free product. Go ahead and use it for any scenario you want. The download is available already from www.microsoft.com/virtualpc

We also announced the first of our licensing changes to internalize virtualization into Windows Vista. Specifically customers who buy first software assurance and then deploy either Vista Enterprise or Ultimate can install 4 copies of the OS in a VM in addition to the copy on the physical machine for the cost of one license. This is similar to an existing right we have on Windows Server Enterprise. This right is for one user on one device and is good for application compatibility scenarios. Download VPC, create up to 4 VMs for various previously incompatible applications and get going.

• A bit more info is available on Virtual PC Guy's WebLog