New Team System Blog Posts - 2004-07-28

I've been a little remiss this week in blogging due to a spike in workload. Here's the latest from in and around Planet Team System:

Korby Parnell: Team Foundation vs. SourceSafe | Checking Out

Yesterday, I was sitting in a Team Foundation usability review in which somebody suggested that we should change CHECKOUT to EDIT in order to make it clear to users that in Team Foundation, to check out == to make writable and nothing more.
Is it too radical to suggest that CHECKOUT be replaced with EDIT? Nope. It's user radicalism: a disciplined dedication to the obviation of customer pain in every design decision. I'm willing to bet that Jason Barile wouldn't object to this change. Jason wasn't present for this particular meeting but he routinely aliases h checkout with h edit.

Buck Hodges: Authentication in web services with HttpWebRequest

Hatteras has three tiers: client, middle, and data. The middle tier is an ASP.NET web service on a Windows 2003 Server running IIS 6. When the client (we use C# for both it and the middle tier) connects to the middle tier, it must authenticate with IIS 6. Depending upon the IIS configuration, that may be negotiate, NTLM, Kerberos, basic, or digest authentication. Here's a page on Internet Authentication in .NET.

Matt Pietrek: Your suggestion(s) needed

It's been awhile since I wrote for MSDN magazine. Now that I work for Microsoft, the whole financial situation changes. The short story is that I don't get paid for any articles or columns I might write for them. I'm not crying about this too much, as my personal life keeps me busy enough, and I'm inclined to spend my weekends hunkered over a keyboard. If I lean something cool, I'll use this blog to present it.

Ken Brubaker: SCM: Rational comes out swinging

Information Week reports that Rational wants to go toe-to-toe against Team System's expected usability. The “Atlantic” project will:

...add visual navigation features, wizard assistants, and greater ease of use. The goal of the tools, code-named Atlantic, is to make it easier for existing Java programmers to produce code and expand the ranks of Java programmers. "There'll be a lot less toggling back and forth between tools than in older versions," says Michael Devlin, general manager of the Rational unit.

Hmm, so Atlantic is only for Java developers? What happened to the cozy Rational/MS relationship? Did it bite the dust or is Atlantic going to integrate with VS2005 as well? Anyone know?