Scooby Snacks Volume #2

  • Article

Blogs, Blogs and More Blogs

  • The Microsoft.com community team now has a team blog. I’ve been working a lot with Olivier Ribet and his team of late on the newsgroup/forum replacement project I’ve references. I have a lot of respect for the “French man” and I expect good things down the line from his team and their blog.
  • Intern Season: It is intern season at Microsoft now and the welcome mails (and blog posts) are flying around. I had the opportunity to meet the MSBuild Explorers recently and can’t wait to see what they cook up. The explorers, as I understand it, are part of a slightly different program that is part pure education as well as the standard trials by fire or car washing type rituals a normal intern might endure.
  • “Whaaaaaazzzzzzzzuuuuuuuuuuup!” Marie works on my team and has started her own blog. I guess I’ll have to bribe her in order to get onto her “Cool Blog” list.
  • CheckItOut the Sourcesafe/source control integration team has a blog.
  • When you have feedback on the new help UI in Whidbey the Help/Community team blog is where you should turn.
  • The IDE team also jumped on the bandwagon and created a blog. Unfortunately you will have to send them private mail to hear some of the best “jeremyisms”. I’m hoping they share some of the more tame ones.

Other Snacks

  • I love the concept of a “ Source Code Wiki ”. It might be really cool if well integrated with the Whidbey code snippets feature. Imagine a place where you and your co-workers can easily collaborate and build small snippets.
  • Whidbey Missed the Revolution? Wes believes “The truth is much of the new changes in Whidbey will be wasted effort, because I see a revolution brewing within the next three years in the way source code is written.” He explains the coming of a code editor revolution that will represent code graphically in a more effective manor. I agree with his statement that coding will eventually become more of an architect/designer task, but that is precisely the mission of Visual Studio when you think about it. For now we still have to ship with an editor, but the Whidbey changes go far beyond that. Look at the class designer or all the Team System tools as examples. Recently I discovered all the new visualizations in the debugger and can tell you that I now cringe if I have to debug in any other environment. I’ll post a more detailed entry with my observations, but just wanted to respectfully suggest that Whidbey is indeed part of the coming “revolution”.