Craig Bailey on Microsoft

Brian Harry announces the release of the TFS 3008 Power Tools. Download here. There's a new MSSCCI provider too. (But not the Data Dude tools - they're coming later.)

The TFS team is on fire lately.

A nice little post from Craig Boyd covering the various Vista progress bar states and how they can be controlled in  Visual FoxPro (VFP).

Long time no see Craig, great to see your brilliance shining again on the blogosphere.

Microsoft developers (I'm told) have the option to 'go dark' at times. At least that's what Joe Schwetz indicated at a recent Sydney Deep meeting. The aim is to allow them to catch up on projects that are running behind. The process involves killing all distractions (email, blogs, phone calls, IM, etc) and focusing on priorities.

I'm sure many software companies use this technique in various guises. Here's Angus, one of our Devs, in a dark moment:

I wonder if Michael Kordahi will notice the sticker on Angus' PC, just under the book shelf...

I write this on Friday evening as I head home for two weeks holiday break. The last two weeks have been incredibly hectic. Anyone else found this year to be busiest in a long time?

Yep, I agree with Wayne that this is getting silly. Sesame Street being wound back due to all that harmful stuff they did in the 70s, 80s and 90s. No wonder this world is in such a mess :-)

But fear not, the pendulum swings both ways and in a decade or so we'll see the push back on political correctness going way too far the other way.

In case I haven't mentioned it before, my favourite word is: balance

We need balance in every areas of our lives. Life is often just a process of adjusting and re-adjusting the balance. It is, at any point in time, too far off to the left or the right, and our days are used correcting this imbalance.

Ok, enough of the philosophy, back to your regular scheduled program...

Microsoft Research has a nice idea coming with its Pex dynamic unit test creation project. It aims to automatically generate unit tests based on your current code being developed. It sounds pretty cool.

But it begs the following parody 'tip'. So, here's a great idea for developing your own massive software empire:

1. Start with the seed of an idea

2. Start writing simple code

3. Fire up Pex and start generating unit tests

4. Customise a code generation tool such as CodeSmith to take the Pex output and generate further code

5. Feed this generated code into Pex, and generate further unit tests

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until your code base is reaching a substantial size

7. You may need to tweak the generate code at each stage to ensure it is on the right path

8. Announce your new product

9. Announce IPO

uTest claims to be a community of software testing service providers. Need some QA done on your applications? Perhaps this is part of your answer. How do I know this is going to be big? Easy, they have their own uTest Debit Card.

(via TechCrunch)

Not wanting to be the only person on the planet who hasn't linked to this, here's my late link.

After some silly copyright hoo-haa last week, a revised version is up on YouTube. This time there's some bonus material - the credits (which will be read by a total of 4 people, maybe less :-).

I've been a big fan of the Virtual Hosting blog for the last 3 months or so :-)

Just about every post is bookmarked in my RSS reader for further reading and reflecting on.

If you aren't subscribed already, then head over here or subscribe here.

Today's post on Stress Busting Tips (50 of them no less!) is great reading for you developers out there fighting a huge backlog of tasks to be completed before the holiday break. Points 5, 6, 14, 41 and 47 are my picks of the most important.

Great reading.

Greg breaks the news about leaving Readify to set up the Australian arm of Solid Quality - a SQL Server consulting and training powerhouse. The news itself will be of interest to many, but I was most taken with his formula of 1 week training for every 3 weeks consulting as the ideal. I'm sure many will relate to how being separated from hands on work (eg due to constant training commitments, being stuck on old technology projects, moving up into the dreaded management realm, etc, etc) rapidly reduces our technical proficiency. We lose our 'real world' touch all too quickly.

Microsoft has announced that CRM 4.0 is now being shipped. The met their Q4 promise, but the release parties don't start until March - what's up with that? Just shows how much work goes into a release party these days I guess.

(via Mary Jo)