VirtualBox memory limitation plays spoilsport in Sharepoint 2010 installation

As a believer of virtualized development environment, I've started building the development environment for SharePoint 2010 using Sun Virtualbox. I've shared initially 1 GB of Ram out of 4 GB from my 32 Bit Vista host which eventually fell short after installing the Pre-requisites of SharePoint 2010

After facing a lot of screen freezes and high memory consumption in my guest (Windows Server 2008 SP1) I've increased the shared memory to 1.50 GB. SharePoint 2010's psconfig proved that is too low after 8 of 10th step throwing a WCF timeout exception. No luck even after relaxing the timeout values ,not able to complete psconfig and not able to pull down the processor/memory consumption

Frozen VirtualBox

So SharePoint 2010 requires more memory to be shared in its virtualized environment, there comes the issue. There's no way to increase the shared memory beyond 1500 MB with my current hardware setup(32 bit Vista Home premium with 4 GB RAM)

This limitation is forcing me to evaluate using VMware, so for the time being good bye for the cross platform hypervisor Virtualbox

Top memory comparison with VMWare

Querystring limitation in Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer browser is having a nasty limitation on URL length in its address bar, it cannot contain more than 2083 characters, It will trim the string whatever comes after position 2083. This applies from IE 4.0 to IE 7.0.

This limitation is only for HTTP GET request not on HTTP POST request

On the other hand Firefox 3.0 allowed me to paste >2,40,000 chars. So developers beware of IE while passing lengthy query strings from your web application, your code has a chance of failing on browser compatibility testing.

Keep in mind that the number of characters will be significantly reduced if you have special characters (e.g. spaces) that need to be URLEncoded (e.g. converted to the sequence '%20'). For every space, you reduce the size allowed in the remainder of the URL by 2 characters - and this holds true for many other special characters that you may encode before sending the URL to the client.

MSFT KB Article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q208427/