Archives
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Visual Studio 2008: November of THIS Year?
It was formally announced by Microsoft today that Visual Studio 2008 will be released at the end of this month. The only thing I'm going to say at this point is that it seems WAY too soon to me. I'll make blog posts after the release and we'll see if my gut feeling was right or wrong (and I have absolutely no problem being wrong).
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More Content
Given that I'm blogging much more on my new blog, I thought I'd write a "reminder" post on here to make sure that those who want to read my non-dev entries can. http://russology.com/
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Multiple Sitemap Index Files in Robots.txt
I have been searching around using Google but I can't find an answer to this question.
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Internet Explorer's Reign of Mediocrity
I saw this on digg.com today and I have to admit that I am one of the (apparently THOUSANDS) of people who are tired of having to tweak their standards-based code just so that IE 6 and 7 (MIcrosoft's browsers which do NOT adhere to web standards) can display their web pages the way the developer or designer originally intended. With IE's reduced market share due to the success of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, combined with Microsoft's several-year development cycle to release IE 7 - a browser that doesn't even bring IE up to date with the competition - I think people are really just starting to say, "You know what? Screw you." What do YOU think? http://digg.com/programming/Digg_this_if_you_re_tired_of_IE_costing_you_money_no_ads_involved Please comment! Opinions are welcome.
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Windows Forced Restarts
Recently I came in to work to find that my computer had restarted some time during the night. I thought there was a power outage, but that wasn't the case. Apparently an automatic update was installed, which forced a restart of the computer.
How can Microsoft allow this? How can they simply restart the computer no matter what the user might have open or what long-running jobs happen to be executing? There was no warning whatsoever.
If you ask me, this kind of crap is absolutely unacceptable. I asked around and others agree - they said they've lost work because Microsoft forced their computer to reboot. My opinion is that Microsoft needs to release a hotfix that prevents this from happening. I don't mind restarting Windows (when I have to use Windows), but it should happen when it's convenient for ME, not for Microsoft.
There are people who will tell me that there are frequent security updates to Windows that, if not activated by restarting, put the whole network at risk. Well that's fine. Just disable the network and don't let me reconnect to it until I've restarted. But shutting down the whole computer? Come on. Is this still the 90's and no one told me? -
MySpace & Me
I'm very excited to announce that Monday I joined MySpace as a Software Architect. This is a site that has 200,000,000 members and something like four billion page views a week. I can't back this up with paperwork, but I'm fairly sure this is one of (if not THE) most visited site on the entire internet. They don't have hundreds of servers, they have thousands. I'm very much looking forward to learning a lot here and offering whatever I can to the team. MySpace uses ASP.NET and SQL Server - quite the interesting case study for these technologies. We use Team Foundation Server for source code control. Each contributor uses Visual Studio 2005, and many projects follow an agile methodology called Scrum. Anyone who is a member and has ideas for new features or functionality is welcome to email me at rnemhauser (myspace.com is the domain). PLEASE do not email me with errors or problems. Tom, the first friend any new member has, receives these messages and they ARE read. I'm interested in new, out-of-the-box ideas, no matter how crazy. Check out my MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/russnem
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Backups in Today's World
Like many people in today's world I have an absolutely enormous amount of data stored on my various hard drives. Aside from my 320 GB+ of iTunes music and video, there's a significant number of photographs and well over 150 gigs of captured and rendered video. There's also the code for almost every software development project I've ever worked on. The databases for my current projects will also exist and some are so large that a local backup would be far more beneficial that trying to FTP 5 gigs of data down. All this stuff needs to be backed up, but of course DVDs are out (even the dual layer ones) because they store less than 10 gigs each. Even with two dual layer DVD burners in my Mac Pro I'd have to sit here for who knows how long putting in almost 50 blank discs every month. I'm very curious. What are most people with hundreds of gigs of stuff using to back up their data? Is tape backup still around these days? Would a 750 GB or 1 TB drive in an external FireWire 800 enclosure be my best bet? Any advice would be appreciated.
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Disconnecting WM5 Device From Exchange Server
My Windows Mobile 5 phone currently is set to synchronize with Exchange Server. When I set it up, I had to agree to a corporate security policy that put an automatic key lock on my phone every time it wasn't used for 15 minutes. I guess they think they have secrets to keep. I have to enter my password to unlock the phone. Now I want to get that email off my phone but I can't figure out how to do this. I can't key this automatic key lock off my own phone. I have nothing selected in the Exchange Server settings - not contacts, tasks, email, etc. I've even changed the URL to the email server, but nothing seems to work. Can anyone help me out on this?
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Xeon Price Cuts: Should I Wait?
According to the following article, Intel is scheduled to reduce prices on its Xeon processors on July 22nd. I was going to buy a Mac Pro in mid July to replace the PowerMac G5 that I just sold, but do you think I should wait a month or so and see if Apple will cut prices on their Mac Pros? Does anyone have an idea of how long it takes Apple to react to price cuts? http://digitimes.com/mobos/a20070521PD201.html
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My New Blog
Over the past year or so my blog posts have spanned subjects much more diverse than just Microsoft technologies and developing in a Microsoft world. To that end, I have created a more general-purpose blog that I hope my current subscribers will check out.
http://www.russology.comThis is obviously still a great place for my posts about Microsoft technologies, so please be sure to keep this feed too! -
My New Blackjack
I recently purchased the Samsung Blackjack when the joystick on my Cingular 2125 phone died and I'm pretty happy with it. The screen is pretty nice, as is the QWERTY keyboard. The numbers (i.e. dialing a phone number) take a little getting used to. It's extremely hard to dial by touch. But all in all the phone is much zippier (read: faster) than the 2125 and due to the fact that it's much thinner than the 2125 the Blackjack actually feels smaller in my pocket.
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Shaking Things Up: Scrum, Agile, and TDD
In mid September I started working as a vendor for Microsoft. The majority of my time involves coding. Prior to September I had only a vague idea of what scrum and test-driven development were. Scrum aside, I just couldn't understand why anyone would want to spend time writing all these tests and THEN code their application. My philosophy was, "Let me get some code together that needs to be tested. THEN I'll write the tests." Of course, as you've probably already guessed, the tests were seldom written.