Scooby Snacks Volume #1

Alex is experimenting with posting the MSBuild weekly project status directly to his blog rather than just sending it around internally. I’ve wanted to do this, but he beat me to it. In truth, I haven’t been sending a status mail internally of late. I should probably get on that or people will think all I do is blog.

The “Core Editor” team now has a blog feed. Feel free to unload your feedback about the editor. And yes, they know that in VS 2002 and 2003 that it garbled your HTML. Trust me, in VS 2005 your code will be treated with the proper respect from the editor and you will have a lot more control over what we do and don’t do to it.

I’ve been following the running debate over the request for inclusion of unit testing tools in all versions of Visual Studio. Secret Geek even has a pic of the new splash screen that I found amusing. It’s funny. Sometimes I feel that if the decision was made to include support in all versions that people would say we were just trying to squash Nunit and weren’t playing nice. <Josh remembers disclaimers have a use> I do think that basic unit testing should be included in the box. It would be a step in the right direction towards the promotion of more trustworthy computing by encouraging more developers to adopt stronger prescriptive development models. Of course this comes from someone who thinks that we should just give away most versions of VS with windows and office.

David Coursey doesn’t seem to respond to comments posted to his blog. So much for the art of the conversation. Why even turn on comments?

Everyone seems to be clamoring for coveted gmail invites. I can’t help but think that this service is going to be a winner for google. It leverages their online strengths of quick searching, advertising, and brand. The name is appealing, pronounceable, and very sticky. And finally, the “invite only” beta strategy has given them more free advertising then any press release or commercial could have hoped to generate. It’s the Cartman “you guys can’t come to my amusement park” advertising strategy done to perfection under the guise of “it’s just a beta”.