VM Ready!

I've got a new VM ready to take vs 2005 beta 1 - bring it on!

Why no C# Edit and Continue?

An excellent and logical explanation as to why C# 2005 won't have the edit & continue feature: Why no C# Edit and Continue?

Nice New Studio Beta; but Where're the Service Packs for the Last Two Versions?

It's nice that MS have finally put the RAD back into Visual Studio; I haven't gotten hold of the bits yet, but I'm keenly looking forward to the nice, fast, stable, slick IDE I've been waiting for since vs.net came out back in 2000. Don't get me wrong, vs.net is OK; but let's face it, we use it by default - there's no real competition if you're developing on the MS platform. I've put up with countless crashes, weird and irritating bugs, and slow, sluggish behaviour for nearly four years. What I can't understand is why MS haven't released any service packs for vs.net - even though it desperately needs one (or several). I got used to the old pre-.net Visual Studio, where a service pack would be released periodically, even though MS were continuing development on the next release. Would it be difficult to branch the source and have a small team fixing bugs and providing a service pack now and then? I note that one is due shortly, but this is specifically to fix issues created by Win XP sp2.

But then, perhaps MS did release a patch to vs.net, but we didn't notice: the first vs.net release was visual studio version 7; vs.net 2003 ("Everett") has an internal version number of 7.1. Let's face it, the 2003 release didn't have much that was new in it, it wasn't really that much faster, but it did have some bug fixes.

Please, Microsoft, consider us poor users who adopted your .net vision, started using your IDE as soon as it was released, and are now bound to support apps created with the original vs.net versions for the foreseeable future - we can't all upgrade immediately...

Visual Studio 2005 Goes Beta!

Visual Studio 2005 Beta Home it's been a while in coming, but Visual Studio 2005 has finally gone beta (notice how they've dropped the ".net" moniker from the product name? Hmmm.). Now, I can finally install it; I've shied away from the two semi-public alpha releases, primarily because I had to use the original VS.NET while it was still at beta 1 for a commercial project(!), and it was an extremely painful experience. Looks like the beta comes with a few gotchas that might affect all those eager beavers who couldn't wait to get the alpha bits on their machines - you have to uninstall any alpha copies of "Whidbey" first, and doing so breaks VS.NET & VS.NET 2003... ouch... By the way folks, I'm not crazy enough to install the beta on my main dev machine.

Protecting Your Privacy

Some say that the internet will only thrive if advertising is allowed to flourish; ads are the primary source of income for many sites. Yet some advertisers are employing sneaky tactics and actively snooping on our browsing habits, following our clicktrails with a variety of cookies, "web bugs", and most sinister of all, spyware - software installed silently along with some innocent app that you thought you were getting for free, and which quietly sends an advertising company data about your browsing habits.

FilterGate does a good job of blocking web bugs, and also strips out ads from web pages, speeding up surfing. It also has a pop-up blocker, although I prefer the one you get with the Google Toolbar. If you install a lot of software, especially freeware or shareware, then you may well have also unwittingly installed spyware along with it. Adaware is a free utility that will detect and remove spyware and other malware from your machine. A good indicator of the presence of spyware is a system that has suddenly become sluggish and unstable, so give it a whirl: you may be surprised by what you find.

Because web bugs use cookies to track your clicktrail, you can largely prevent them by changing IE's default cookie handling behaviour; in Tools | Options | Privacy | Advanced... select to always block third party cookies and to prompt for first-party cookies. If a site requests to write a cookie to your machine, you should generally reject it, permanently, unless of course it's a site you trust and use regularly.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Went to the Chili Peppers gig yesterday, in Hyde Park; awesome! James Brown supported them, and he can still move it! We were quite near the front, and were standing near some of the actors from "The Office" tv series (the guy who plays Keith, Dawn's boyfriend, and one other whose name escapes me). Apparently, David Blaine was there also, but I only saw the back of his head and he quickly disappeared ("Shazam!").

Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy!

My current job assignment, which has seen me spend the last 9 months working in Notingham, is coming to an end! A week today I'll be working in London again. Nottingham's a nice enough place, but nothing beats your own home, and being surrounded by your own stuff and friends. No more early morning commutes up the M1!

1st Book in Psychic Programming Series(TM)

Some people have been wondering what the title of the 1st book in the Psychic Programming Series(TM) will be (see earlier post). Well, I've decided to start right at first principles, and it's to be called Writing User Stories with the Gift of Hindsight. More on this to follow.

Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer

This looks interesting. I've been forced to use Visio for years, and have hated every minute of it. Although it's improved over the last couple of years, Visio has always been a bit clunky and awkward to use, and even suffers from being far too flexible and powerful for its own good. Yet, you get Visio bundled with EA versions of Studio, so you end up using it because you have it, rather than buying another (expensive) piece of software. The main problems with using Visio for UML diagrams have been keeping code and model synchronised, battling with Visio's UML dialogs, and the fact that none of the .net framework types are available for use, so if you want to show that your class inherits from CollectionBase, for example, you wind up having to manually add CollectionBase to your diagram and manually adding the members, or else giving the class a type of object.

The new Class Designer seems to use a "pragmatic UML" notation, which is recognisable to those with UML experience, yet is geared towards .net concepts and constructs, so creating diagrams should be quicker, easier, and more intuitive than with Visio. Also, synchronisation between code and model happens automatically. I think this will encourage people to start designing / modelling their code more (users of MS techs tend to be less structured in their approach). It's possible that, in future versions, MS could include support for patterns and best practises in their designer, as they're doing with the code editor (with the FXCop integration).

The only question remains, where does Visio go now, when the main user base (devs and architects) will start to use vs.net for their diagrams?

Job Market Update

All the indications and reports are that the IT job market is well on the way to a full recovery, and that the prospects are good. My own personal index, staff turnover in my last company, is also showing a healthy rise to around 10 people since December, which is pretty impressive. Behind it all is a general increase in IT spend this year, as companies begin to invest in new projects and the adoption of new technologies. But things aren't really translating into higher wages for those remaining in jobs they've managed to hold onto during the slump over the last two years, and so IT worker morale is still low. Ths will result in more people jumping ship as demand for staff increases, and recruiters begin to increase salary offers to entice people. There are a lot of jobs out there all of a sudden, and it's set to increase; there is a relatively small pool of resource compared with 1999/2000 - a lot of people were made redundant and left IT altogether, and graduates found they couldn't even get a foot on the ladder. Also, little investment in new technologies means that there are few workers skilled in leading-edge technologies available for hire.

When Agile Development fails... Psychic Programming

Agile methodologies like Extreme Programming require a clear, honest two-way flow of communication and feedback between customers and developers; but what happens when the client won't communicate? Either because they genuinely don't know what they want, or can't share the information for a variety of nervous, genetic, or political reasons? This is where Psychic Programming comes in. By developing innate psychic abilities, such as Second Sight (scry into all those customer meetings that you weren't invited to!), Precognition (see customers change their minds or attempt to incriminate you before it happens!), and Telepathy (know what the requirements really are!), you can develop software that the customer's bosses and users really want cheaper and faster. I'm currently working on my first book in the new Psychic Programming Series(TM), training courses to follow.