Alex Barnett blog : VisualStudio

Outing dirty laundry

alexbarnett — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:02:00 GMT

It's Jay Bazuzi's last day at Microsoft to become a stay-at-home dad. At one point Jay was development lead for the C# editor in VS.

We've not met, and I'm sure he's a lovely chap and all that, but I did catch his parting wave on his MSDN blog, where he's provided some "tips" on software development for his ex-dev-collegues...not too pretty.

I'm not sure what value there is in hanging out your team's dirty laundry "in public", rather than including this kind of info in his internal leaving mail. Each to their own I suppose.

ADO.NET Entity Framework video- 1 year later

alexbarnett — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:04:00 GMT

Some old Data Programmability teammates of mine, Britt Johnston, Pablo Castro and Mike Pizzo (well, Mike's not that old), are interviewed by Charles Torre in this Channel 9 video to discuss their progress, challenges and customer feedback in the last year since announcing the first ADO.NET Entity Framework CTP, including some details on project Astoria and LINQ to Entities support, details on the Beta 2 and Tools CTP released earlier this week (the entity model designer is v.cool), plus the future of the Entity Framework.

P.S. Michael - in case you're reading: reconsider the shorts for the next interview :-P

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

VSLive! - New York

admin — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 21:35:00 GMT

I'm heading over to New York for VSLive! New York. If you happen to be going too and want to meet up, let me know. I'll be there with Pablo Castro of the ADO.NET team who'll be demo'ing some cool stuff for Corey Thomas' opening keynote - 'Data Explosion: The Last and Next Decade in Data Management'.