April 2005 Entries
In one of the comments on my Community Can Be Cruel entry, Karl said:
One of the problems with custom engagement in the forms of these blogs is that it makes the customer believe he or she might be able provide input which will ultimately have an effect on decisions taken. While this may be true in some cases, it certainly isn't in others. This isn't anything wrong on your part, and I certainly don't want you to stop, it's just hard sometimes for the community to accept that decisions have been made and that our arguments via feedback are, at...
As someone very wise once said, the problem with making confident predictions about the future is that time has a way of making a liar out of you despite your best intentions. The good news in this case, in case you haven’t heard it elsewhere, is that VB 2005 will have refactoring features! Both Brad and Cory have some good discussion on this and you can check out the official announcement on MSDN. Personally, I think this is just great and kudos to the VB folks and the Developer Express folks who made this happen.
I will also observe that the...
Lisa Feigenbaum asked me to pass along the info that the VB IDE team (those responsible for the VB portion of the Visual Studio development environment, as opposed to the core compiler/language) has put up a new blog! It’s already got some interesting content there, so check it out!
Something Josh Ledgard said struck me as he was talking about an angry email he got about the introduction of the new web-based MSDN Forums:
I've heard Scoble say it a lot... if you work at Microsoft... and you blog... you had better have think [sic] skin. My own experience suggests that having an active blog at Microsoft for any length of time pretty much guarantees you your share of mails like this and it does effect [sic] you... at least it effects [sic] me. Not to get too touchy-feely, but I'm not some Borg drone that doesn't ever feel insulted....
You’d have to be living under a rock not to have noticed by now, but I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus: VB 2005 Beta 2 has shipped with a Go-Live license. Take a look, check it out, let us know what you think!
So Devsource is running another trivia contest, this one to win a Dell LCD monitor. I don’t have any questions in the contest this time, but I thought I’d mention it because of the peculiar result my comment on the previous contest has had. Since the contest, I have gotten a steady stream of comments from people around the world who obviously Googled something like “win a laptop,” found my page, didn’t bother to read it, and just put in a plea for me to please, please, please send them a free laptop. Same goes for the entry that I...
Just a quick note – it looks like I’m going to be headed to Orlando in June for TechEd 2005! At this point, I think I’m just going to be doing booth duty and other fun stuff like that, more details as they become available…
I don’t think I’ve said this before, so let me say it now: Server Intellect, the company who hosts my blog, is a great web hosting company! A while back when I decided to stop hosting my own blog, I moved everything over to them on the recommendation of a co-worker and it’s been a real pleasure ever since then. Last week there were some problems with my site (not of their doing) and they proactively noted the problems, took some steps to fix them and then dropped me a very nice note letting me know they’d taken care of it....
Way back in the mists of time (better known as January), I wrote two entries on the default instance feature we’re reintroducing in 2005. The first talked about what default instances are and the second talked about why we thought they were a good idea. I promised at the time to talk about the criticisms that have been leveled against the feature “soon,” but that “soon” has turned into “two and a half months or so.” This is partially because my work load suddenly ramped up, but it’s more because my blog entries and the accompanying comments prompted another round...
A long, long time ago I riffed a little bit on the question of “why do we have VB and C#?” The idea I was trying to struggle towards was that even though two languages may share many similar constructs and be able to express roughly the same thing, design decisions on little things can make a big difference in the experience of using the language. Now I learn from Dave Remy that this is hardly a new idea and even has a name: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There’s even a discussion about how it might or might not apply to...
Just a quick note: Jay Roxe has announced a new MSDN site dedicated to VB 6.0 content and migration. Check it out!
Bill Vaughn reports that there were hard feelings and veiled threats from some Microsoft people in response to his signing of the MVP petition. I think Michael Kaplan captures my feelings about that situation pretty well. Forget the question of whether Bill’s an MVP or not – the bottom line is that no one should ever be criticized or penalized for speaking their mind, as long as it’s done in a respectful and honest manner (as it was in the petition). Although I think that the aims of the petition are unrealistic, I can understand why someone might sign it and...