Thoughtful
I think about people I have hurt and people I love - too often they have been the same. I remember what it was like to be surprised by someone’s good intentions. I feel old wounds and recent loss. And I realize that everyone else is hurting and trying to love, too.
2000 meter medley
Two colleagues held an evening tech lecture about building the largest deployed DotNet application in Europe. Overall they were surprisingly positive. The only thing they really hated was the integration with Visual SourceSafe, which was buggy and unreliable.
They showed us code. Easy too produce working solutions, but very tools-driven. What would would it be like in really inexperienced hands? Remember the old quote about MS tools as Soviet-style programming. Well, as Greg Franklin noted, sometimes that works. It may… gasp… even be the right thing to do in some circumstances.
Interesting bits from the discussion: does it work without IE Explorer? No, the customer didn’t want that. Will it be all web interfaces in the future? Maybe. Will it be all MS web interfaces in the future. Let’s hope not. Why not pass around very thin exe:s? Probably too insecure (even if everyone has the right runtime).
Since I was offline being thoughtful for a good part of the day, I missed the official release of Visual Studio .Net. But my colleagues told me they had a smooth download from MSDN until all the Americans woke up. Sometimes living in GMT+1 is nice.