I love this post from Loren Heiny

A group of High School students in Houston were split into two groups: One with Tablets and one without. The objective was to see if Tablets had any impact on the education process and academic results of the students. It did: There was resentment between the groups. Now all the students have Tablets.

Actual post and a link to the article that sparked it here.

6:56:59 PM    

I needed to get a source control system in place for the stuff I'm working on, on my own. I don't particularly like Visual Sourcesafe so I went on a hunt. Turns out Sourcegear (www.sourcegear.com), Eric Sink's company, let anyone download their cool Vault source control system. If you are a developer, working on your own, then you can use it for free. How cool is that?

It's a really good quality source control system. It integrates well with VS.NET, has a great user interface, is painless to install and configure for both server and client, and does absolutely everything I want it to do. Soon as I get some cash I'm buying a license out of principle, since all good software needs support.

 

6:52:22 PM    

I'm swamped at the moment. I have a 4 hour commute during which I'm writing my fingers off on the book (and it's still not as fast as I want it to be), my evenings are taking up with laying on the couch going "OH MY GOD I'M SOOO TIRED". My weekends are split between family, book and "the projects".

"The projects" are where the excitement is. Heather's busy doing that graphical designing thing. I'm busy writing for them (code and content). I've even roped in Ian Griggs to help out, and I've threatend James Avery too. Well, we're getting close now. The first project is the CodeShapers website - nothing special there, just a few whitepapers, info on what we (that's a royal We) do, and all the usual corporate malarky. The second project is this blog. I am seriously thinking about moving it and I've been doing some tests with DasBlog. I just need to come up with a way to redirect from Radio UserLand, and I also need to find a decent offline blogging tool so that I can write blog entries on the train and stuff. Haven't solved those issues yet.

The third issue is the special one. I've wanted to do this for years, and now I am. I really want to say exactly what it is, but I can't. I don't want to get pipped to the post with it, but it will be awesome if you are .NET developer and a fan of mobile devices. I'm just now in the process of finding a decent hosting service that isn't going to bankrupt me for the amount of streaming media files we want to store on the site. More on what this is hopefully at the end of the weekend. All going well the hosting service will be in place and I can at least upload the look and feel of the site, oh and the forums of course :)

 

In any free moment I've got, I've also got Regexinator on my mind. James really kindly  mentioned it in his Visual Studio.NET Hacks book as an example of how to write an add-in (not because it's amazingly good, but it is an add-in and he worked on it, so it makes sense really). So, I'm working out kinks on it and generally making it a bit more complete and usable. Update on that one soon as well.

OH, and DotNetScriptLib is not dead either. In fact it's grown a lot. I have to put that on the backburner though right now for obvious reasons.

 

6:49:34 PM    

I was hoping to go as a speaker this year, but all four of my talks got rejected this morning (waaaaaaahhh). I'm still going though, current customer permitting. If you've never been, and you're more than "just" a heads down coder, then I thoroughly recommend it. It's an entire week of intense training, seminars, self paced education, open discussions and the opportunity to get hands on with a vast range of hardware and software that at some point your are just going to have to get to grips with anyway. More than that though, it's a great place to network, make some new contacts, and generally have a geeky blast.

PDC's cool too, but a little too specialized for my liking (although this year should be cool with at least 3 new technology areas that I can think of gaining even greater importance than ever before).

So, if you're going, let me know - I'm considering teaming up with a couple of others and sorting out a geek dinner. If you're not going, WHY?

By the way, if you're reading this and happen to have contact with one of the real stars of the industry going to Tech Ed 2005 PLEASE let them know about the geek dinner idea - I need bait to attract people along ;)

 

 

6:40:56 PM    

I like Richard Caetano's 'Strongly Typed' blog, but I've had a great day disagreeing with our industry's experts at work today, so why stop there. Richard blogged about a story he had read on MSDN, and indicated that he felt something was wrong with Visual Studio.NET/VB.NET. You see, Richard says that the line that the "power users" have followed in terms of Microsoft dev tools adoption looks like this...

MS Access -> MS Access/VBA -> MS VB6 -> MS VS.NET/VB7

...and he feels that's too big a jump. How? Come on Richard man, think about it logically for a second. You've got a great data organisattion tool and entry level relational database with point and click design in Access. Then, you add in scripting with VBA, a great way to get your feet whet in the world of programming, taking that mass of data you've accumulated on your desktop and making it come alive. Then you discover VB6 which frees you from the Access framework and instead lets you build Real, actual, proper Windows applications, that look and feel like the real deal, but which still work with your access database. Perhaps along the way you pick up MSDE and turn that Access database into a SQL Server database. Now we're cooking - baby steps from zero to hero with a true heavy duty RDBMS at the back end and a great and powerful development language (yeah, it's not true OO but I'll fight anyone to the death that claims Visual Basic is not a good programming language - it does exactly what it says on the tin, and what more could you want.

Then, finally, you take that language and experience and transition the thinking to OO with a fantastic development framework that makes all the hard stuff in VB6 etc trivial. Sure it takes a little while to get your head around OO concepts, but it's not hard. It really isn't.

If people perceive that as a leap though, a big nasty scary obstacle to overcome then that's not a problem with Microsoft's tool surely. I can't see any intermediate step that would fit in between VB6 and .NET , and think MS took exactly the right approach the way they did things. If there's a problem there then it lies with us - the authors. Perhaps we didn't do a good enough job helping people acquire the OO mindset? Maybe we didn't do a good enough job at writing about the migration process (although I know that APress have at least 3 titles focussed at just that market).

My point? None really, just I don't think this is a big deal at all, and certainly not a problem that would appear to be stopping adoption.

6:40:47 PM    

They're naff? Nope. They don't work right? Uh uh. Marketing, or a lack of it? Nope.

My new column (oo, sounds flashy doesn't it) in International Developer magazine has what I think is the answer. It'll be on sale in Australia in a week or two, and Europe a month after that. I'll see if I can get permission to reprint the first column here and let you know. In the meantine, wander over to their site and support a new magazine devoted to us development types.

6:17:20 PM