Archives
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Comments
Someone just told me that comments are not working (I tried it, sure seemed that way to me). So I guess no one can call me an idiot today then. :)
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Weird Visual Studio Problems
I am having some weird problems with Visual Studio lately.
Here you are working on a window all happy and smiling. You go away from the designer for a second (to build, work on code, whatever) and when you come back things are missing. Big things like that grid you spent and hour on.
And when I say missing, I only mean from the designer. The code for the objects still seems to be there and it is still listed in the properties box object list. And about 50% of the time you can close Visual Studio and reopen with everything back in place (that is assuming you didn’t compile or otherwise save mucked up version).
Right now it happens about 15-20 times per day but sometimes it is much worse. And it doesn’t just happen to me, it happens everywhere. So I must be wasting at least two hours a day just waiting for Visual Studio to open and close. Yuk.
Anyway, it just happened and I felt the need to vent. Thanks for listening.
And if you have the fix for this, please send it!
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Some Things Never Change
It has taken hundreds of millions of dollars and several billions man-hours to get to Longhorn. And what do I use it for?
Like I said, some things never change.
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Peter Coffee
Mr. Peter Coffee over at eWeek opined that developers should start writing software that knows what updates to some other company’s software might possible break our application at some point in the future. \
I think Mr. Coffee has seen too many IBM commercials. He does know that there is no magic pixie dust right?
Anyway, maybe I need to go see a woman about obtaining a crystal ball…..
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Longhorn Presentation
I had the pleasure of attending a presentation on Longhorn at the Boston .NET User Group last night. I’m sure most of us left with more new questions than answers, but that is to be expected; it is a ways off after all. All-in-all it was worth sitting though, if just to get a glimpse of XAML, Avalon, and WinFS in action (WinFS flat out blew me away).
There was one theme that dominated the questions however, “What parts of ‘Longhorn’ will be available to the old O/S group (XP and 2003)”. We already know that some things like Indigo will be made available (or at least some part of it), but what of the other technologies? No one seemed to have an answer for this one. With this question in mind I started searching for some sort of XP/2003/Longhorn Roadmap, but there doesn’t seem to be such a beast available. Maybe someone like Chris Sells or Robert Scoble would know about such things?
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Scoble on "Group Blogs"
Scoble seems to have a negative view of group blogs (“sucks” was the adjective he used). I understand some of his points, but I disagree with him on the bigger picture.
I’m a developer in a small company in the tiny Boston suburb of Hudson. For the last 8 years I’ve developed commercial shrink-wrap products in a miniscule vertical (independent automotive repair shops). I’ve never written a book, I have nothing from MIT on my office wall, and I could count the number of close friends in the software industry on my hands. And yet my blog is read by thousands each month (maybe more).
Without the collective power of .NET Blogs behind me I would have little chance of gaining such a voice in the community. I certainly wouldn’t have a chance of my comments on Scoble’s post read by the man himself. And while I do risk the signal-to-noise ration drowning me out, I have a greater chance of being heard simply because I share a podium with some rather impressive individuals.
I do agree that communal blogs lend themselves to comparisons with newsgroups, but I disagree that this is a bad thing. Newsgroups have so much noise that I often wonder if there is any signal in there at all. Newsgroups are often dominated by rude, obnoxious, and strangely porn obsessed megalomaniacs while the communal blogs are moderated by the site owner and the individual blogers. And where I once searched newsgroups to find code solutions, I now start with .NET Weblogs. So yes, they are like newsgroups in many ways. But I don’t see it as a bad thing; I see it more like evolution of the medium.
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Empower ISV Program
Frank Arrigo mentioned the Microsoft Empower Program today. My company just recently applied (and just moments ago was accepted) to the Empower ISV Program.
It is a great place for startups and established ISVs to get partnered with Microsoft. From a startup’s perspective, it is very inexpensive and gives you a lot of tools that would otherwise occupy a good chunk of your budget (5 MSDN licenses are quite expensive). And for an established ISV (like us) it gives offers a painless path to a Microsoft partnership with no certification or testing requirements up front.
With Empower, we were able to partner with Microsoft during while migrating off our existing development environment rather than having to wait for our staff to pass certification tests or complete and test our .NET product line up front.