There’s a Codeplex project that enables developers to use their Subversion clients with Team Foundation Server (TFS). It’s certainly an interesting project, though I don’t quite grasp the rationale. TFS is really expensive, so if a shop can afford it, they can afford Team Explorer too.
I found out about initially via TheServerSide.NET.
This piece by Martin Fowler interests me more for his contention that the best technical leaders are abandoning .NET than for what he writes about Ruby. It’s the sort of argument that seems true because anecdotal evidence seems readily available. I’d be interested to see if there’s more quantitative backing for the assertion.
Some poking around on Google did reveal at least a couple statistics:
It’s been almost a year since I learned about the .NET Action Pack. Since then, the project has changed names (to SubSonic) and switched to using Google Code as a repository (though they still use CodePlex for other things). The team appears to have enhanced it significantly, including the addition of a command-line utility and support for non-web applications.
Since we’re short-staffed at work, we definitely need to jump on anything that will generate code for us.
Apparently this is where Visual Studio 2005 stores connection strings when you add strongly-typed datasets in an application. Even though I had an app.config file and I’d changed it to point to a new database, I was still getting SqlExceptions when I ran my unit tests. I just didn’t know the old value was still stored in Settings.settings and needed to be updated.
This Sunday’s Opus comic strip captures the hype perfectly.
I did get to play with one for a few minutes at an Apple store in Maryland yesterday. It handles its primary job (being a phone) very well. The sound quality was good. The interface really is as clever as the advertising suggests. A quick finger swipe moved whatever you needed in the right direction.
Typing with the iPhone turned out to work better with your index finger than with your thumbs. Whatever logic they’ve got in there for guessing what you meant when you mistype something works extremely well though.
That said, I don’t see myself coughing up the dough for an iPhone anytime soon. Functional and attractive as it is, I don’t need that much of an upgrade over the Razr (which while it has plenty of shortcomings, fits nicely in my pocket and only cost me $100). Besides, if version 1 of the iPhone is this good, imagine version 2 😉
I came across this article, via a post from Mini-Microsoft. I wouldn’t necessarily expect a software product manager to be able to write code. I would expect them to be more technology-savvy than this guy appears to be. Whether he was trying to be funny or not, this will certainly add more fuel to the fire for the legion of MBA-haters that already exist.
While I’m not a Microsoft employee, I have my doubts that he’ll be successful in his role without a better understanding of the technology. As someone who has a computer science degree and an MBA, I’ve found that the combination gives me an advantage in explaining technology choices in business terms. The other thing working against him is his product. The vast majority of individuals and corporations that own copies of Office only use a fraction of the functionality available in the older versions of the suite. Getting any company to pay more for a newer version of something that already meets their needs sounds like an impossible task to me.
I don’t do much WinForms work. So when I was trying to find out how to get the equivalent of ASP.NET validator controls for WinForms, this article by Michael Weinhardt was a great find.
We still use Visual SourceSafe at my job for version control. I inherited the administrative duties (for one VSS database and a TFS installation) after one of my colleagues left to join a startup. We found a legitimate need for its “shadow folders” functionality not long ago, and finally implemented them this morning. I came across this page when figuring out the particulars.
I just came across this great post on overlooked .NET utility classes. I prefer to buy functionality or use open source rather than build from scratch, so it’s ideal when there’s already something in the .NET framework I can use.
This list comes courtesy of Patrick Cauldwell, an architect at Corillian Corp. I’m definitely in favor of most of their list, especially test-driven development, continuous integration, and buy vs. build. I’m not so sure about the Windows authentication point simply because it takes so much effort to get developers access to our databases at work.