This very long post from Joel Spolsky speaks to me and depresses me on so many levels.

I have been a programmer for a long long time. I have been programming to DOS and Windows and for a few years, thanks to some great innovations by the Fox Software folks, to the Mac. I have always accepted that Microsoft is in the business of selling operating systems and if they own the developers, they own the world. It is one of the reasons that I have nearly jumped ship a few times. But, well, they own me –  Joel drives this point home (and how they do it) pretty clearly in this post.

He also talks about the “Raymond Chen Camp” – which represents those at Microsoft whose biggest interest is to keep Windows and dependent applications running, no matter what – no breaking changes. He quoted some great posts from Raymond Chen’s awesome blog as examples. He compares this to the MSDN camp – which he says is compartmentizing software tools too much and encouraging developers to use disjointed and complex “code chunks“. And he says they’ve won – because they have gotten away with breaking changes quite a lot lately. Not only breaking our code but breaking a lot more in our lives in order to try to keep up.

I definitely get frustrated with the changes and the effort of keeping up, but change is necessary. I believe I have quoted Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel winning theory of chaos and disorder in the universe on my blog before: “You can’t have order without change“. I accept that. I stomped and whined a whole lot  when .NET came out and I saw what it meant for my vb6 applications and skills. But I learned and I am writing better applications.

I don’t think Joel is decrying change, but breaking changes. I’m sure Paul Vick could easily explain why it was maybe close to impossible to move VB to .NET,give it the power it can have now without breaking VB6 code.

He also talks about Windows .NET apps vs Web .NET apps which was the point that one of my user gruop members took away from this post and is thinking maybe it’s time for him to go back to FoxPro if he wants to focus on Windows applications.

I have too much work to do and to much invested in all of this to step back and think about what he is saying (this week or this month or this year). Doesn’t that sound awful? Self-serving? Uncaring about the big picture?

There is much to read and absorb in this article. It’s a pretty interesting look at software regardless of if you agree with him or not – and you will probably find yourself agreeing with some, disagreeing with other parts or just realizing that you really don’t want to think about it at this level…

[just a note – yes I deleted the post. I realized my gut reaction did not express my opinions well, so I have modified it a bit and reposted. And I still am a bit uncomfortable with this because it’s a huge thing to think about and I haven’t taken the time that I think it deserves…]

I have no connection to radio weblogs whatsoever.  I know a few people who have had their blogs there.  But the whole sturm und drang this week has certainly been interesting. I just couldn’t resist pointing to this remix that Brian Dear did of Dave’s explanatory audioblog (that I have zero plans to listen to).

I am really looking forward to many aspects of the upcoming DevTeach conference in Montreal.

1) It is a great conference with great content
2) It is a small conference which makes it quite intimate. It has a wonderful community feel. People are not divided up by interest and speakers and attendees are always together.
3) Many people that I think of as friends will be there
4) Because of the spouse program, a lot of people are bringing their spouses or families to enjoy beautiful Montreal. Rich is coming with me Saturday through Monday. I will get to meet the families of my friends and I finally get to introduce Rich to so many of my friends that he has heard about for so long (and show HIM off to them!).
5) Montreal is beautiful
6) Montreal is only about a 2 hour drive from my house
7) A bunch of people from Vermont.NET are going
8) I get to share my many discoveries in the Whidbey BCL again and try to help people who don’t grok generics quite yet
9) I get to show off all many of the cool things you can do with the tablet pc sdk.
10) I gotta get out of the house once in a while, y’know?

Yup, I am definitely excited about this confernece. Thanks a million to Jean-Rene Roy for making his dream of a community oriented developer conference a reality.

SB noticed that the 70-330 and 70-340 have moved into the state of official cert tests now.

Has anyone who took the beta gotten their scores yet? I haven’t.

Philip Rieck makes a great point…

So you want morts (VB and C#) to do unit testing? Put it where they can’t miss it. Don’t stick it in Team System only.

Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System.

Agreed.

This made me laugh so I have to spread it

from a conversation between Don Box and Clemens Vasters which Don talked about in a post:

Clemens says to Don: “your job is to make my current job so miserably boring and unnecessary that I must join Microsoft to survive”

At last year’s TechEd I saw a bunch of presentations where Clemens showed how he was extending Web Services to fill in some SOA type concepts. Then at PDC I saw Indigo for the first time and immediately realized that chunks of what I was seeing were fulfilling what Clemens had found missing before and found it necessary to write himself.

xinyan says “Whidbey Beta1 is on the way!”. Now I bet he (?) just means to show that they are working on it and the post title could mean “sometime in the next year..” but it is sure to start a flurry of speculation about beta release dates…That will be fun.

If you actually look at my website rather than reading my posts through an aggregator (a rarity I imagine…) did you notice that I changed the background colors of my blog and the title font?

I did this because last night as I was creating this post  and then validating the links, I couldn’t tell whose site I was on sometimes. Most of the people referred to in that post use dasBlog and of them, a good portion of us are using the basic dasBlog Theme. So I wanted to just make mine a different color in order to distinguish it a bit. I really like the color scheme of the WinXPOlive Theme that Bob Roudebush created for .Text which I am using on the “discussions on women in i.t.” blog. So I mucked with the style sheet for the dasBlog theme until I got the right settings in there to modify this page.

I was musing today while hoeing the damned weeds that keep trying to take over my veggie garden about a neighborhood gathering that is happening soon on my road. Then that led to thinking about how we use the term “community” in the programming world. This made me wonder that if we are a .NET community, is something like the VB.NET Developer Center akin to a Neighborhood? How far could we take the analogy?