Visual Studio Orcas & Coding Rage

While Coding Rage is under development I'll post my small snippets here still.

Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Beta2 is out and about, and it has a GO-LIVE LICENSE!! Now we only need shared hosting providers that support .net 3.5 Start your DOWNLOADS!

Was Windows Vista a dud?

I just finished reading an article in Australian IT magazine covering statements made by Gianfranco Lanci who is currently the head of Acer.

The article can be summed up with this one liner: "The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista," proclaims Lanci. While I am not the head of a multi billion dollar organization I am part of the software/pc industry and I can say I am not disappointed by Vista. Given the choice of a Vista pc or a XP pc I would easily choose the Vista pc. I upgraded my primary home personal computer to the 64 bit of Windows Vista quite awhile ago using my MSDN account version. While I have been challenged to locate native 64 bit software (native 64 bit FireFox anyone?) I have been more than pleased with both performance and stability. I can definitely not say the same for a little known release of Windows called ME or Neptune which never was.

The interesting thing with Vista is there is plenty of neat things in there, but they are buried under candy coated interfaces so folks don't talk much about them. So why would a personal computer manufacturer be yelling to the world that Vista was a failure? I can only surmise that the global community wasn't inspired enough to buy new Acer pc's just to try it out when they can purchase it for their existing pc. I think the underlying unspoken comment is that PC sales didn't skyrocket and rather than blame their own lack of innovation Acer is blaming Windows Vista for not selling their hardware. What I see, but apparently Australian journalists don't see is that its not Microsoft's job to product software to sell Acer brand computers; its Acer's job to product a PC attractive enough to entice us to purchase one.

Hello Useless!

In an exercise of doing pointless things with our lives; it seems that the W3C are considering moving to HTML 5 again. Progress for the sake of progress is not a bad thing; but progress down a dead-end path is not a good thing. Never-mind that the good folks at the W3C already have a progress path for HTML that has a really cool x in front of it (XHTML). Never-mind that we already have a easy solution to making menu's and pop up windows. The sad state of affairs for anybody that has done serious weblication development is that 'current' browsers still don't conform to any of these standards. HTML 4.01 isn't even fully implemented by 'modern' browsers and it was introduced in 1999 ( that is pre-millennial folks).

Things are moving along

Somebody very special to me will often call me 'mildly ADD', whether she is right or not isn't important its the chaotic movements and wild shifts in focus that is. Sometimes it's a blessing and sometimes its a curse as it takes a massive effort to finish things that aren't extremely interesting.

Well, keeping with that momentum; I've decided to split my current blog in two (yes I know this one is new already). I have 2 large open-source projects currently in the works and I have held off on discussing them with people until I can determine their readiness for the public.
dHibernate (Hibernate for Delphi)
Commons.NET (A Commons repository for .net)

I'll discuss each of these in depth on my new development portal Coding Rage.

The death of Customer Service

Has anybody else noticed the overall death of common courtesy and with it customer service? From the simple act of not saying "thank you" to somebody that holds the door open for you, or takes the time to hold an elevator to the act of greeting a new customer.

I recently had the luxury of driving to south Phoenix to pick-up a part for one of my vehicle's after work rather frantically to get through before closing hours. When I called, I was looking for a specific part in a specific color in a specific condition. I was rather ecstatic that they not only had what I was looking for, they had it in stock. To preserve time because of where I work and where they were, I asked to have the part waiting for me.
Not only was the part not waiting they didn't even have it in stock. It wouldn't have taken the clerk more than the 15 minutes that I waited there than to have told me up front they didn't have it; and as such they would have preserved a customer. Going forward, I don't think I could trust the company simply because they don't both to confirm they have items in stock; even when asked. What was lacking hear wasn't a mistake, or a misplacement of inventory, it's simply the misplacement of customer service.

Favorite IM Client?

Are you still using IM to chat with your friends, pals, loved ones? One word: Meebo

Voice To Email

I was turned on to Jott a few weeks ago and finally go around to trying it myself today. Jott is basically a service that will email voice-recordings for you to contacts in your account. How it works is pretty simple.
1. Sign up for a free account.
2. You bind your account to a phone # and an email address.

After going through their sign-up process and performing 2 different types of authorization your ready to roll. The whole processes was pretty simple and took less than 15 minutes to get rolling which isn't bad for a free service.

Now to use it is pretty neat; as the service attempts to transcribe your voice recordings to emails for you. So far I've found the transcription to be pretty unreliable; however, it does email you each audio recording so all in all its pretty neat. While the service is bound around you emailing your own notes (or jotts if you will) you can also send them to others contacts that you setup in the online service.

Problems of the future

I recently was able to attend a .net developer meeting here in Phoenix just last week. The meeting was to here Scott Guthrie and Stefan Schackow showcase some of the newer .net technologies that will be gracing our door stops; including Silverlight. While all the new technology was great and awe-inspiring; unintentionally a singular phrase hit home with me: "Fix the problem".

One thing I have seen in my relatively short career was a whole lot of code being written and rewritten and I wonder if this was what he was getting at. At first glance, you might think that the phrase means to not start coding until you know what problem you are trying to solve; however, I am torn on this concept. I am one of those individuals that needs to experiment and tinker to properly absorb something and without coding for pleasure I am not sure I would code at one.

I think I need some perspective on this one.