Unit Testing, Agile Development, Leadership & .NET - By Roy Osherove
Preach it, Roy!
I also completely agree with what you're saying about the community. Ever since Yosi left the post, there has not been a sense of community. This was combined with the slowing down of community efforts from the global Microsoft (just look at how blogging from within the giant has slowed to a halt).
The glory days are probably behind us now. Such a shame.
Roy who???
RT @JanVanRyswyck: It seems that the ALT.NET crowd were right all along? http://is.gd/cpw98
I completely agree with you about this being a very disturbing, sad issue. It's part of the reason I don't spend my $$ on large MS conferences -- the value I get out of them is tiny and nowhere near a decent payback.
One thing struck me in your post, though: your comment that Yosi's departure leaving Israel with no real community leader. That's crap -- MS should never, EVER be looked at as the source of community leadership. MS is a vendor with a serious agenda and some crappy wares (MSTest, EF)they're pushing amongst a lot of amazing things. Moreover, their practices and methodologies are, in the most case, Their agenda only occasionally matches up with my goals.
It's nice when there's an MS community /advocate/ in a particular region, but folks building a real community shouldn't rely on anything from MS except the occasional presentation with bad slides and horrible code examples.
(Actually, here in the Heartland district in the US we've got some great MS community folks who are great sources for help -- but they're not our community leaders. Folks within the community here have that covered in spades.)
Myself, I jumped off the MS bandwagon 6 months ago. I use strictly free open source for all development, database, and OS platforms.
The only MS work I do is for existing clients. After being with them since GW-BASIC through .NET 4.0 I've had enough of this rat race. Too bad I didn't jump with all the smart people years ago.