Free Whidbey!

While it's frightening to go out on a limb with a fringe statement like this (heck, even Frans goes party line on this one!), I'm willing to stand up and be counted in the Free Whidbey movement (logo to follow).

While it's difficult to find the courage to agree with everyone who thinks of Whidbey as a software project rather than an island, I fall back to simple statistics. SQL Server is an 8.0 release, so a new version number will only give us a 12.5% upgrade. Moving from VS.NET 1.1 to 2.0 will give us a whopping 81% upgrade!

Joking aside, SQL Server is a mature product. The new features will be nice, but I don't have to jump through hoops to get my work done with it as is. Whidbey, on the other hand, will make a huge difference in how I do my work.

3 Comments

  • Heh, got a good laugh out of your title, "Free Whidbey!"...I could picture a vs.net2005 product box jumping over some rocks into the ocean...

  • I'll be less of blog coward and publicly join the "Free Whidbey" movement as well as "Change that stupid name Whidbey to something cool". MS once again is proving with it's actions it has not left the dark past of keeping us captive with interLOCKING products.

  • Josh -

    Funny, I was just thinking the same thing this morning. There's nothing magical about ASP.NET - it's an ISAPI filter that handles requests for certain file types (aspx, config, etc.). I'm not saying it's not an amazing system, but it's just software that runs on the CLR. Anyone could (theoretically) make aspnet_isapi_monkey.dll and take a crack at doing everything aspnet_isapi.dll does. As I understand it, Mono's attempting this for Linux.

    Interesting, but I sure don't have the time or smarts to pull this off. Let me know when you get it working! ;-)

    - Jon

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