as Joel Semeniuk explains…getting the contract…

One of the guys in my user group is hoping to share a room at DevTeach. If anyone has a room and is looking to split the cost in half, just comment on this post.

With the ongoing debate between UML-types and XP-types, does anybody think, as I do, that by introducing Whitehorse which (from my limited experience with modelling – so I could be misinterpreting it) embeds modelling into Visual Studio and introducing Team System which (from my limited experience with XP since I work alone) embeds XP practices into Visual Studio, that Microsoft is now catering to both types of programmers? Which of course is the safe and smart thing to do, rather than tout one practice over the other.

So you’re in the locker room (let’s say you’re a guy and it’s the men’s locker room). There’s sweaty Steve Ballmer standing 6 feet away getting ready to take a shower. You are the only two guys in the locker room.

What do you do?

Ignore him?
Say “hey, pretty impressive lifting I saw you doing out there, dude”? (well, you might want to skip the “dude“ part…)
Ask him why the hell there are so many different image editing applications from MS?
Tell him you think it’s time you got a g*-d* raise?

Luckily a quandry I’ll never be in. But if you’re Duncan Mackenzie (or some other MS employee working out at the corporate gym), you definitely have to worry about stuff like this. Read what Duncan has to say on the topic.

via Sonu Kapoor–

“US Patent No. 6,748,582, granted and assigned on Tuesday to Microsoft, covers the use of a “task list” in a software-development environment.”

Here’s the article

Ziff Davis’ DevSource is having a great Utility Programming contest with a grand prize of a trip to VSLIve NY. The contest entries have until June 11th to be submitted.

Here is a description of the contest

Ziff Davis Internet challenges you to write a software utility that runs on a current Windows operating system. Your utility should help simplify, automate, secure, and streamline one’s PC experience.

The utility can do nearly anything you like, though we’ll give extra attention to software that does something especially useful, elegant, and innovative. We want to hear from you!

Esther Schindler, a writer who is working with DevSource, noted that so far not one of the entries was written by a female developer. Why is that? Are utilities too geeky for chicks? We just thought it was a curious thing.

Mike Gunderloy shares a pretty unpleasant tech support experience with Compaq that was enough to render him a permanent non-customer of HP and Compaq. Recently Dell pulled a good chunk of it’s outsourced tech support back into the U.S. where they could have more control over it. From Mike’s posting, it sounds like Compaq could benefit from the same move.

Dave comes up with a very interesting theory on the developers who have written the auto-check out programs for grocery stores.

I just ordered some memory from Crucial. The chips were $259 each. I selected 2, filled out my billing and shipping info and then when I looked at my shopping cart, the price of the chips was suddenly $23 less for each chip. I opened up the site in a new browser window, drilled into the same memory, and indeed, the prices had just been dropped! (I actually asked them what had happened.) Lucky me by 5 minutes!

http://geekswithblogs.net/jjulian/archive/2004/06/07/6194.aspx