Archive for October, 2007

BritSpeak #4: One might think that

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

This is another one of those subtext things. "I don't know why anyone would bother with managed code. My developers are just as productive in VB6 as anyone else! In fact I'm thinking of starting up some old school C projects just to buck the trend. " "One might think that" Actually it's "One might think ...

The sucker’s choice

Friday, October 26th, 2007

I've been attending a crucial conversations class at Microsoft. One of the things were were talking about was the sucker's choice. A conversation based about seemingly bad two choices; A or B. For example I can either meet the deadline or ship a quality release but achieving both seems impossible. ...

Gotchas: MSTest test projects don’t load on VS Pro

Friday, October 26th, 2007

As is always the way. In the process of writing my last post I found something else that has caught me out in the past. Now it's important to note that this is by design. VS Pro 2005 does not support testing projects. The really good news is that it will ...

Static analysis of MSIs as part of a CI build

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

A couple of weeks back Alan Ridlehoover and I gave a talk about continuous integration (CI) for the engineering excellence group here at Microsoft. We had a pretty good turnout and a lot of good questions at the end. One of the things that occured to me during the talk was ...

Giving something back

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

I've been lucky enough to do a lot of travelling over the past twenty years; roaming across six continents and climbing mountains on five. Mountaineering often took me to remote areas. The sort of places where the things I usually take for granted just don't exist; a warm bed, clean water, enough food ...