Chris Szurgot's Blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/03/26/microsoft-acquires-teamplain.aspx

Saw this on a couple of MS blogs today. Downloaded it, installed it, and had my Web Access up in under 10 minutes (most of that because I had to install the client software on the server) Looks good, easy to use, clean interface, and better access to the things that matter most. (Process Guidance and project documentation are important, but knowing what's on my plate is even better)

If you use VSTS with TFS, download this today!

Last night, my wife and I were watching some trailers downloaded over Live on the 360, and one of them was for "Live Free or Die Hard" when I noticed that the actor who plays Mac (Juston Long) on the Mac vs PC commercials was trapped in a car with McClane during a car chase.

My first thought was that it's the most insidious product placement I've ever seen. The anthromorphism of the Mac in the movie will be like plastering the logo all over the movie.

But my wife pointed out that it's quite the opposite. It's just proof that Mac needs UAC. If Mac has UAC, it would've pointed out that "You are about to enter a dangerous situation, are you sure you want to do this?" Maybe John Hodgman (PC) could show up in a saner situation where he stays out of trouble. <grin>

http://www.lhotka.net/weblog/SpecializationTheFutureOfOurIndustry.aspx

Actually, it's dead on the mark. And in the last 5 years, it's been getting exponentially worse. Theoretically, current trends are going to make some of this better (WPF/WCF should help with a lot of the infrastructure for, well, presentation, and communications), but there will be a lot of churn while people learn those technologies and paradigms.

At the Vista Launch events (where they talked as much about .NET 3.0 as about Vista), I commented to a collegue that as an Architect, I need to know about all these technologies and capabilities, but as a programmer, I'm going crazy wanting to try them all out. And even as a generalist, can you really direct/coordinate the efforts of several people without having an in-depth understanding of the technologies being used?

What makes it worse is that IT is a field you can get into without any specialized training. (I should know...) So you've got a lot of developers without any formalized training trying to learn to develop complex apps, and then having to either build up large portions from scratch, or learn some pretty complex frameworks to get things done.

It's been over a month since I blogged about Vista Frustrations. Finally, a lot of the issues are being resolved. NVidia and Creative have released more stable and more performant drivers and Apple updated iTunes. Finally, almost six weeks after consumer launch, things are stablizing very well, and it's pretty much a consistent joy to use.

I'm having some weird problems with file I/O, and I'm still waiting for OpdiCom to update software for the Stakka. (I love my Stakka, but it's on the only Windows XP box left in my house because it doesn't work well on Vista) but other than that, it looks pretty good.