Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Changing times in the big house

The now famous "windows shutdown button" post has caused quite a stir, see this post from Scott Bellware for a summary and comments. I must admit when I first read the post I was shocked by what I read. After a while it occured to me that what we see its prehaps a story from the old Microsoft and the new Microsoft will be better. Lots of calls for Microsoft to change but its easy to forget that Microsoft is a big company, one product team is different to the next in their approach and structure. Teams that spring to mind that show this are the Expression and ASP.NET teams. Microsoft is its leadership ranks has some amazing thought leaders, for example now Scott is heading up more teams like the .NET Framework he can help bring to those teams the style of thinking he brought to ASP.NET team. I also have faith that Ray Ozzie will in the next few years bring more change for the better across all the product teams at Microsoft. So rather than make demands for Microsoft to change prehaps its better to see that it already has hands that are making those changes and to show a little faith.

Phil Haacks new book

Mr SubText him self is writing a ASP.NET book along with Jon Galloway and Jeff Atwood, not saying much on details yet but I am hoping they write a cool SubText book.

Setting up for MbUnit database rollback

StatSVN

ASP Insider

Some big news this month, I have joined the ranks of the ASP Insiders. The insiders are a group of people that help provide feedback to the ASP.NET product team, the group has a lot of community leaders, MVPs and such who help voice the thoughts of community at large.

Apologies for the blog slow down this month, day job, mbunit, illness and a broken login all contributed, service will hopefully resume shortly.

Castle RC2

Update: reformated this post.

Ayende has series of posts on building web applications (with a dash of TDD) using the Castle RC2 release.

• Building a data layer and scaffolding using ActiveRail and MonoRail
• Building the presentation layer using MonoRail.

Some things stand right out here in that testability and patterns like MVC are baked right in (with the VS projects supporting this structure).