One of the biggest challenges I’ve had in doing TDD with VSTS using the native unit testing tools is how darn slow it is to get to the Red or Green bar. I recently sent out an internal email to get some feedback on what teams like or dislike about TDD in VSTS, and instead…
Category: General
Martin Fowler on Ruby at Microsoft
A good friend of mine Jason Darling sent me over a new article by Martin Fowler about Ruby at Microsoft. He asked for my thoughts on it. Martin makes some good points, and there are some I want to point out. First, Microsoft hiring John Lam several months back may have been a signal that…
Too many dialog / option levels?
I think I found something not intended for the public to see in Outlook today. We’ve been having some issues getting prompted for passwords from Outlook, and one of my colleagues pointed out that one fix was to disable the dowloading shared folders. To get to that option you have to go to Outlook 2007…
How to tell you aren’t a newbie
The day you say “what type of idiot wrote this crap” and then find out you were the idiot, is the day you are no longer a newbie. – Kinglink (via The Daily WTF)
Consent based decision making
On another thread on the XP list, we’ve been discussing some ideas around moderation after a certain, um incident, which some people agree with and some don’t. The idea was brought up to perhaps next time have a discussion about the moderation, and come to an agreement by consent rather than consensus (for more about…
Sorting messages by Thread using Thunderbird and Outlook
Recently on the XP mailing list, we were having a discussion about readbility of the list, given the number of messages we see a day. I mentioned that I use the thread feature of Thunderbird to sort everything by threads, and had several people ask me about it. Since I also use it in Outlook,…
Used CDs in Florida
Over the past few years, I’ve had a special liking to the music of Tool. Don’t ask me why, but there it is. I had been trying to track down a used CD store here in Tampa to find an album I used to have, plus see if they had any others. But all the…
Silverlight, “Cross-Platform” and, what else, DRM
There has been much hubbub over Silverlight and it’s touting of being “Cross-platform”, especially since “Cross-platform” means Windows and OSX 10.4.8 or later. How can it be a “flash-killer” and call itself “cross-platform” if it doesn’t run everywhere Adobe’s Flash does? Now it makes sense. In the FAQ for Silverlight, it became apparent why it’s not supported…
VSTS/TFS performance
Ayende Rahien, the creator of RhinoMocks, has an interesting blog post in which he talks about the troubles he’s had with TFS, and he advises people to avoid it: Latency is a killer here, TFS has a always connected model, which means that it drives me crazy when I want to edit several files,…
Silverlight and Ruby
When I first heard about Silverlight, Microsoft’s new “Flash killer”, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. Flash has been around for a long time, and is a great way to do various cross-platform things, since it runs in the browser and (mostly) behaves the same way across platforms. How would Silverlight match…